The Mughal Empire and its Successors

The Mughal Empire united the individual states of India between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries under one sovereign power.  It was, necessarily given the diverse nature of Indian society, an empire in which cultures and religions blended rather than asserted dominance. As such, the Mughal court became a flourishing center of art and culture, based on a combination of Indian and Perso-Islamic traditions, until its dissolution into civil war in the nineteenth century.