The Mughal successor states were the regional polities that emerged in the Indian subcontinent during the first half of the 18th century as the administrative and military authority of the Mughal Empire disintegrated after the 1707 death of Aurangzeb. Conventionally dated from Aurangzeb's death to the consolidation of British paramountcy by the middle of the 19th century, the term denotes the semi-autonomous provincial governments that converted their subahs into hereditary holdings while continuing, at least in form, to acknowledge the emperor at Delhi: the Nawabs of Bengal, the Nawabs of Awadh, the Nizams of Hyderabad, and the Nawabs of Arcot. Broader scholarly usage extends the category to contemporaneous polities that rose from Mughal fragmentation without recognising its authority, including the Maratha Empire, the Sikh misls and empire, the Jats of Bharatpur, the Durrani governors of the Punjab, and the Kingdom of Mysore under Haidar Ali and Tipu Sultan.
The states emerged from converging pressures. The crisis of the Mughal jagirdari system, in which the pool of revenue-bearing assignments proved unable to sustain the empire's swelling body of office-holders, eroded the patronage arrangements that had tied provincial governors to the imperial centre. Expansion of the Marathas into northern India diverted Mughal resources, and the Persian invasion of 1739 under Nader Shah, culminating in the sack of Delhi and the seizure of the imperial treasury, broke the prestige of Mughal arms. Provincial governors, responding to these pressures, converted their subahs into hereditary holdings: Murshid Quli Khan in Bengal from 1717, Saadat Ali Khan I in Awadh from 1722, and Nizam-ul-Mulk, Asaf Jah I in the Deccan from 1724. Historians have described this process in terms of both structural decline, associated with the Aligarh school of Irfan Habib, Satish Chandra, and M. Athar Ali, and regional opportunity, elaborated by Muzaffar Alam, C. A. Bayly, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam; most recent treatments accept both framings as complementary.
The core Mughal successor states were Bengal under the Nawabs of Bengal (from Murshid Quli Khan, 1717), Awadh under the Nawabs of Awadh (from Saadat Khan, 1722), Hyderabad under the Nizams (from Asaf Jah I, 1724), and the Carnatic under the Nawabs of Arcot (from 1710). Smaller Nawabi polities, including Rohilkhand under the Rohilla Afghans, Farrukhabad under the Bangash Nawabs, Bhopal under a Yusufzai dynasty, and Rampur formed on the ruins of Rohilkhand after the Rohilla War of 1774, are typically included in the same category. Scholars including Bayly, Alam, and André Wink extend the concept to polities that emerged from the fragmentation of Mughal sovereignty without acknowledging it: the Maratha Confederacy, whose expansion under Baji Rao I and Madhavrao reshaped the Deccan Plateau and northern India; the Sikh misls and, after 1799, the Sikh Empire of Ranjit Singh; the Jats of Bharatpur under Suraj Mal; the Durrani governors installed in the Punjab after the invasions of Ahmad Shah Durrani; and the Kingdom of Mysore under Haidar Ali and his son Tipu Sultan. A minority argument treats the East India Company itself, after its acquisition of the diwani of Bengal in 1765, as the terminal Mughal successor.
The successor states occupy a central place in the "eighteenth-century debate" in South Asian historiography, in which earlier accounts of systemic Mughal decline, articulated by Jadunath Sarkar and developed by the Aligarh school, have been contested by revisionist arguments emphasising regional dynamism, commercial continuity, and the persistence of Mughal administrative forms in provincial settings. Karen Leonard's "Great Firm theory" located the empire's fiscal collapse in the withdrawal of indigenous banking houses from imperial financing, and subsequent work by Dirk Kolff, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, and David Washbrook has situated the successor states within wider changes in the Indian political economy, military labour market, and long-distance trade. The states also provided the political stage for British territorial expansion: East India Company victories at Plassey (1757) and Buxar (1764) brought Bengal under Company control, the Subsidiary Alliance system inaugurated by Lord Wellesley from 1798 absorbed Hyderabad, Awadh, and the Maratha principalities, and direct annexations, including those under the Doctrine of Lapse and the 1856 annexation of Awadh, closed the era for most states. Only Hyderabad, as a princely state, survived to the Indian accession of 1948.
Background: the Mughal collapse
Political and fiscal crisis
By the final decades of the reign of Aurangzeb (died 1707), the administrative architecture of the Mughal Empire had come under sustained strain from his protracted wars in the Deccan, which kept the imperial army in the field for nearly three decades and drained the treasury while consolidating only limited territorial gains against the Marathas and the Deccan sultanates. Expansion of the ruling nobility (the umarā) outpaced the supply of productive jagirs (revenue assignments supporting military ranks), producing what later historians called the "jagirdari crisis": a structural mismatch between the number of officers entitled to income-bearing assignments and the capacity of existing territories to sustain them, with falling jama (assessed revenue) and rising be-jagiri ("without assignment") waiting-lists pressing against the empire's fiscal base.
Satish Chandra traced the resulting factional conflict within the nobility, as Irani and Turani blocs contested influence at the court of Aurangzeb's successors Bahadur Shah I (1707–1712), Jahandar Shah (1712–1713), and Farrukhsiyar (1713–1719). The execution of Farrukhsiyar by the Sayyid brothers in 1719 and the intrigues surrounding the accession of Muhammad Shah (1719–1748) marked what John F. Richards described as the definitive loss of effective central control, with mansabdars increasingly unable to collect their assignments and imperial orders routinely ignored in the provinces.
Nadir Shah's invasion and the 1739 sack of Delhi
The fragility of the post-Aurangzeb order was demonstrated dramatically by the invasion of 1738–1739 led by the Afsharid ruler of Iran, Nader Shah. After sacking Kabul and Lahore, the Persian army annihilated the Mughal force at the Battle of Karnal on 24 February 1739, capturing Emperor Muhammad Shah and proceeding to occupy Delhi. A riot in the city prompted a three-day massacre in which contemporary estimates placed the dead in the tens of thousands, and the ensuing sack saw the Persian army carry away the imperial treasury, including the Peacock Throne and the Koh-i-Noor diamond, along with indemnities calculated by Sarkar at some seventy crore rupees. Muzaffar Alam has argued that the invasion did not cause the empire's fragmentation so much as expose a collapse already well advanced, but its demonstrative effect was decisive: the inability of the imperial army to defend the capital ended any plausible claim that the Mughal state retained a monopoly of legitimate force across its former territories.
Further incursions by Ahmad Shah Durrani between 1748 and 1761, culminating in the Third Battle of Panipat in January 1761 at which the Durrani army shattered the Maratha forces that had by then assumed much of the imperial role in north India, reinforced the pattern of successive external blows against an enfeebled centre.
Regional autonomy under nominal sovereignty
Amid these pressures, provincial governors and administrators converted their offices into hereditary positions while continuing to render formal obeisance to the Mughal emperor. Murshid Quli Khan, diwan of Bengal, consolidated control over its revenues from 1700 and was functionally independent by 1717, when Farrukhsiyar formally conferred on him the subahdari of Bengal; his son-in-law Shuja-ud-Din Muhammad Khan and subsequent successors transmitted the office within the family. In Awadh, Saadat Khan, appointed subahdar in 1722, and his successors Safdar Jang and Shuja-ud-Daula passed the office within the family while retaining Mughal titles and continuing to remit tribute. Nizam-ul-Mulk, Asaf Jah I, a senior Mughal noble who had served as wazir in the 1720s, abandoned the imperial court in 1724 after defeating his rival Mubariz Khan at the Battle of Shakar Kheda and established an independent power in the Deccan that continued as the state of Hyderabad until 1948.
In each case, the formal assertion of continued loyalty to the Mughal emperor, reflected in coinage, the reading of the khutba in the emperor's name, and the continued use of Mughal titles, coexisted with the de facto transfer of revenue collection, appointment of officers, and military decision-making to the provincial capital.
Emergence and characteristics
Nominal acknowledgment of the emperor
The successor states almost uniformly continued to acknowledge the Mughal emperor as a source of legitimation even as the substance of power passed to provincial rulers. Coinage was struck in the emperor's name; the khutba in Friday congregational prayers invoked him; diplomatic correspondence was framed in the idiom of Mughal service; and formal farmans of investiture, however perfunctory, continued to be issued from Delhi. As C. A. Bayly observed, this persistence of the Mughal frame of reference reflected the emperor's residual symbolic utility: provincial rulers competed for mansab ranks and imperial honours that strengthened their standing among local élites, and the Mughal court, even after 1739, retained enough prestige to confer rather than merely record legitimacy. The fiction was exposed only occasionally, as when Clive returned the diwani of Bengal to the emperor Shah Alam II in the 1765 Treaty of Allahabad and then collected it through Company hands, an act that marked the emperor's final conversion into a nominal sovereign whose writ ran only in and around Delhi.
Continuity of Mughal institutions
Successor states inherited and adapted the administrative apparatus of the empire. The mansabdari hierarchy, the chief Mughal device for grading military-administrative officers, continued in modified form at most provincial courts, with the largest successor states issuing their own ranks and titles. The jagir system of revenue assignment persisted, although the balance between ba-jagir (assigned) and khalisa (directly administered) lands shifted in favour of the latter as rulers sought more reliable income streams. The zabt method of revenue assessment, part of the Mughal fiscal system, formalised under Akbar and his finance minister Raja Todar Mal, remained the default framework in the Gangetic provinces, though the dahsala ten-year averaged-yield calculations were replaced in many regions by annual negotiation between revenue-farmers and the state.
In Bengal, Murshid Quli Khan undertook a substantial overhaul of the revenue system beginning in 1717, replacing many smaller Hindu zamindars with larger, more consolidated holdings whose revenue obligations were backed by the credit of the Jagat Seth banking house; Peter J. Marshall has argued that this reorganisation produced one of the most stable revenue administrations in eighteenth-century India, generating surpluses that subsequently underwrote British Bengal's expansion. In Hyderabad, Nizam-ul-Mulk preserved intact the Mughal pattern of parganas and sarkars while superimposing a more personal structure of jagirs granted to his immediate followers.
New revenue arrangements