The later Mughals: Jahangir, Shah Jahan, and Aurangzeb

Akbar's son Jahangir, who reigned from 1605 to 1627, kept his father's empire but changed its court. His wife Nur Jahan became a powerful figure in politics, issuing orders and coins in her name, and Jahangir's memoirs, the Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri, record his interest in painting, nature, and justice. Trade with the English and Dutch East India Companies grew in this period, and the English ambassador Thomas Roe visited the court in 1615 seeking trading privileges.

Shah Jahan, who reigned from 1628 to 1658, is remembered for building. The Taj Mahal at Agra, commissioned in 1632 as a tomb for his wife Mumtaz Mahal, the Red Fort at Delhi, and the Jama Masjid are the great monuments of his reign, and his new capital Shahjahanabad, modern Old Delhi, was founded in 1638. Building on this scale required heavy taxation, and the reign also saw famine in the Deccan in the early 1630s and costly campaigns to recover Kandahar and to expand into the Deccan.

Aurangzeb, who reigned from 1658 to 1707 after defeating his brothers in a war of succession and imprisoning his father, reversed Akbar's policy of sulh-i-kul. He reimposed the jizya in 1679, ended court music and some court ceremonies, and spent the last decades of his reign campaigning in the Deccan against the Marathas and the sultanates of Bijapur and Golconda, which he annexed in the 1680s. These wars drained the treasury and tied down the army, while Maratha resistance under leaders after Shivaji continued.

When Aurangzeb died in 1707, the empire was larger than ever on the map but weaker in fact. His successors, beginning with Bahadur Shah I, could not control the great nobles, the Marathas, or the new regional powers, and within decades the empire's effective authority shrank to Delhi and its surroundings. The later Mughals thus show how an empire can grow territorially while losing the political and financial strength that holds it together.