Fall of the Mughal Empire v3.c33.1

v3.c33.1

This volume carries the story of the Delhi monarchy from the entrance of Shah Alam II into his capital in 1772, through seventeen years of his rule, to the bloody tragedy of 1788 which turned the Mughal monarch into a mere shadow and transferred his government to a perpetual vicar, till another and still bloodier tragedy came seventy years later which struck out the very name of his dynasty from the pages of Time. Among the phantoms of the past that crowd the stage of this volume, the dominating figure is that of Mahadji Sindhia, as Ahmad Shah Abdali’s was in the volume before it. The final assertion of Mahadji’s supremacy over all the members of the Empire took place two years beyond the close of the present volume, but the importance of that political development and the vast and diversified mass of materials available for its study have prevented me from continuing the story to that point.