The Princes of the Mughal Empire, 1504–1719

"This is about Mughal princes. Rather than discuss emperors, what Faruqui does is to shift the focus to their sons. More specifically, he studies the contestations over succession, with a view to discovering what happened when an emperor died, and why. It really comes down to a study of princely networking, of how the successful princes were able to establish political allies and outmanoeuvre their cohorts. The Mughals had inherited a combination of Islamic law and Mongol law, neither of which had a principle of primogeniture, where the oldest son automatically inherits everything. The Mongols had the idea that every male member of the ruling house had an equal shot at becoming emperor. There was also an idea of territorial division. So the Mongol Empire was divided among the sons of Chinggis Khan , and further subdivided over time, the idea being that sons have a degree of territorial independence from the centre. Babur brought these inherited ideas with him when he established the Mughal Empire in North India. Consequently, for about half a century the princes were given semi-independent territories to govern, following Mongol precedent. But in 1585, Emperor Akbar made some important changes. First, the number of contenders for the throne was reduced from anybody in the extended ruling family to only the legitimate sons of the emperor. Second, princes were no longer given semi-independent territories to govern. Rather, they were shuffled around the empire and given temporary revenue assignments like any other noble, except on a much larger scale, which enabled them to maintain enormous households. But they were purposely deprived of fixed territorial regions to govern where they could concentrate all their energies and put down deep political roots that might pose a threat to the central government. A number of important consequences followed from these changes. First, the abolition of those semi-independent territories meant that contestations for the throne were now an all-or-nothing affair, since the empire was considered indivisible. Second, this winner-takes-all struggle forced the princes to compete with their brothers for the support of people from all over the empire, not just within one region. This, in turn, turned them into politicians of a sort. They had to articulate a platform of how they would rule, should they win the succession. Most of all, it forced them to engage in a very deliberate process of political networking, actively seeking the support of new groups. We see this with each successive ruler. The system thus guaranteed that the prince who was best networked, and who displayed the most administrative and military ability, would win the throne. The losing princes, on the other hand, were either blinded, killed or exiled. It was a brutal sort of Darwinian struggle of the fittest. Significantly, once the dust had settled and a new winner had emerged, supporters of the losing groups were not annihilated, but were quickly reintegrated into the political order. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The process of Mughal succession is often seen in negative terms—as characterized by violent civil wars that caused untold social and economic disruption. Faruqui turns that around, arguing that what succession conflicts really did was to replenish the empire’s political composition with new groups, as the winning prince brought large numbers of his own supporters into the system. He contrasts this with the Ottoman or the Safavid systems that ruled contemporaneously over Turkey and Iran, respectively. In those states, the princes were not allowed to run around the empire and gather support for an impending succession struggle. Rather, they were confined to the palace, as a result of which they had zero experience in engaging with the larger political-administrative system or with constituent political players. They were not even used as governors. By studying the princes, then, Faruqui allows us to reconceptualize the nature of the Mughals’ political system in a more positive way than was previously the case."