Excerpts: The Rise of Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb Alamgir

"#history #mughal #aurangzeb #india
In this short excerpt from our video: Mughals, Merchants, Marauders and Henry Every's Pirate Heist of the Century, we take a look at Emperor Aurangzeb, the third son of Shah Jahan, builder of the Taj Mahal. Aurangzeb, though not first in line to the throne, was not only a talented commander in the field, but also a charismatic and shrewd player behind the scenes. At the age of just fifteen, he single handedly took on a war elephant who had gone berserk in the royal parade ground, earning himself some serious cred for his bravery. He also held numerous governorships throughout the empire, pacifying rebellions and improving agricultural output, and was seen by courtiers as a serious contender for the throne. As the brothers now scrambled to gather supporters, Aurangzeb soon emerged as the key player, and within just 12 months he had bribed and beheaded his way to the throne. Unlike his predecessors, Aurangzeb was an old school, hard-line Sunni Muslim, and rampaged his way across India in a campaign of Islamisation not seen for over a century. He re-affirmed Sharia law, re-introduced the jizya (or infidel tax) applied to all non-Muslim subjects that his father had previously abolished, and he frequently toppled schools and temples of Hindus all across the empire in an iconoclasmic campaign not seen since the days of Mahmud of Ghazni – an Afghan Warlord who also, shall we say, discomfited a lot of Hindus with the edge of the sword.
The result was a tyrannical authoritarian regime with a centralised power structure and enormous tax revenue. Estimates suggest that the Indian economy under his reign was the single largest in the entire world, supplanting even the Qing dynasty of China and contributing 25% of the entire global GDP; an income at least ten times that of France, making Aurangzeb the single richest man in the world at the time by far. "