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Abstract

This chapter examines the entrance of the Mughal army onto the North Indian plains and the successful military expansion that built the subcontinent’s largest precolonial empire. This success was due to both the early Mughals’ adoption of firearms and their coordination of mounted archers. The ruler Akbar instituted a system that would provide men for the Mughal army without draining the resources of the Mughal state, but this changed the army’s composition so that it came to reflect more the India the Mughals ruled. The army grew in size, added elephants and a large court that moved with it, adopted increasingly larger artillery, and on the whole, slowed down. Over time, corruption and economic change impoverished the Mughal court and the aristocracy alike, and the army became increasingly a shadow of the powerful force it had once been. In the eighteenth century, Mughal armies would experience decisive defeats at the hands of other Indian armies and against the English East India Company.