I ran across Waldemar Hansens’s The Peacock Throne: The Drama of Mogul India in the Palo Alto library, and decided to re-read it. The majority of the book is about the later years of Shah Jahan’s reign. I think that’s the right emphasis, because it was the failure of the tolerant Dara Shikoh to succeed Shah Jahan that led to the destruction of the Moguls. It’s amazing how quickly Aurangzeb was able to bankrupt and destroy the richest empire in the world. There’s a lesson there for everyone who believes in the “too big to fail” theory of world politics.