ABSTRACT
The Indian subcontinent is known in history for a number of vast empires that managed to unite most of its territory and population under a single regime. The earliest of these was the Mauryan Empire, followed by the Gupta Empire, the Delhi Sultanate, the Timurid Empire and the British Empire. By the 1680s the Timurid Empire was in decline, and in the 1720s it broke up into warring states nominally loyal to the emperor in Delhi. The British Empire that succeeded the Mughals took at least a century to take shape and eventually provided most of South Asia with a centralized and effective government made up of autonomous institutions. There is a distinct possibility that the Indus Valley civilization was a continental bureaucratic empire. The continental bureaucratic empires of Ancient India manifested an ideocratic and arbitrary culture of power.
