Muhammad Shah's reign coincided with the single most catastrophic event in Mughal fiscal history: Nader Shah's 1739 sack of Delhi, which stripped the imperial treasury of an estimated 700 million rupees in cash, jewels, and the Peacock Throne itself. Copper dam coinage, already the workhorse of street-level commerce, continued to flow from provincial mints like Elichpur largely because the empire had no choice — central authority had collapsed too far to halt it.
Elichpur, in the Berar region of the Deccan, operated under increasingly nominal Mughal oversight by this period, with the Nizam of Hyderabad's influence encroaching steadily from the south.
Muhammad Shah's reign coincided with the single most catastrophic event in Mughal fiscal history: Nader Shah's 1739 sack of Delhi, which stripped the imperial treasury of an estimated 700 million rupees in cash, jewels, and the Peacock Throne itself. Copper dam coinage, already the workhorse of street-level commerce, continued to flow from provincial mints like Elichpur largely because the empire had no choice — central authority had collapsed too far to halt it.
Elichpur, in the Berar region of the Deccan, operated under increasingly nominal Mughal oversight by this period, with the Nizam of Hyderabad's influence encroaching steadily from the south.