On a hazy November afternoon in Rangoon, 1862, a shrouded corpse was escorted by a small group of British soldiers to an anonymous grave in a prison enclosure. As the British Commissioner in charge insisted, “No vestige will remain to distinguish where the last of the Great Moghuls rests.”

Bahadur Shah Zafar II, the last Mughal Emperor, was a mystic, an accomplished poet and a skilled calligrapher. But while his Mughal ancestors had controlled most of India, the aged Zafar was king in name only. Deprived of real political power by the East India Company, he nevertheless succeeded in creating a court of great brilliance, and presided over one of the great cultural renaissances of Indian history.

Then, in 1857, Zafar gave his blessing to a rebellion among the Company’s own Indian troops, thereby transforming an army mutiny into the largest uprising any empire had to face in the entire course of the nineteenth century. The Siege of Delhi was the Raj’s Stalingrad: one of the most horrific events in the history of Empire, in which thousands on both sides died. And when the British took the city—securing their hold on the subcontinent for the next ninety years—tens of thousands more Indians were executed, including all but two of Zafar’s sixteen sons. By the end of the four-month siege, Delhi was reduced to a battered, empty ruin, and Zafar was sentenced to exile in Burma. There he died, the last Mughal ruler in a line that stretched back to the sixteenth century.

Award-winning historian and travel writer William Dalrymple shapes his powerful retelling of this fateful course of events from groundbreaking material: previously unexamined Urdu and Persian manuscripts that include Indian eyewitness accounts and records of the Delhi courts, police and administration during the siege. The Last Mughal is a revelatory work—the first to present the Indian perspective on the fall of Delhi—and has as its heart both the dazzling capital personified by Zafar and the stories of the individuals tragically caught up in one of the bloodiest upheavals in history.

“Brilliant . . . A magnificent, multi-dimensional work which shames the simplistic efforts of previous writers . . . With both empathy and sympathy the author portrays the last years of a decadent empire.”

David Gilmour, The Spectator

“Dalrymple is an outstandingly gifted travel writer and historian who excels himself in his latest work . . . One of its many merits is that it calls upon hitherto unpublished Urdu and Persian material in Indian archives, to tell the story from an Indian as well as a British perspective . . . Dalrymple vividly describes how, after the British regained Delhi, they pillaged and murdered not only those who had played no part in the Mutiny, but even those who had actively assisted the victors . . . This is a lament for a lost civilisation.”

Max Hastings, The Sunday Times

“The story of the Indian Mutiny has been told many times in many ways. Few have managed to evoke as well as William Dalrymple what life was like on both sides of the divide. Dalrymple’s narrative is artfully divided between descriptions of the besieged court ensconced at the Red Fort and the harried forces of the British gathered on the ridge. Thanks to an understanding of India gained during a 20-year familiarity with Delhi, and an indefatigable pursuit of primary sources, Dalrymple has produced a finely balanced account of the greatest armed challenge faced by any European power during the 19th century, and of the bloodthirsty revenge the British exacted on those who dared to rise up against them.”

Jo Johnson, Financial Times

“[The Last Mughal] shows the way history should be written: not as a catalogue of dry-as-dust kings, battles and treaties but to bring the past to the present, put life back in characters long dead and gone and make the reader feel he is living among them, sharing their joys, sorrows and apprehensions . . . Dalrymple’s book rouses deep emotions. It will bring tears to the eyes of every Dilliwala, among whom I count myself.

Khushwant Singh, Outlook India

“What Edward Gibbon was to ancient Rome, William Dalrymple will be to the magnificent Mughals.”

David Robinson, The Scotsman

“Dalrymple argues convincingly for the contribution of colonialism to the rise of religious radicalism in India. A skilfully written, impeccably researched history.”

Rachel Aspden, The Observer

“This fine book . . . [was] made possible by some dazzling detective work in Indian archives. It has become a commonplace for historians of the Mutiny to bemoan the lack of sources on the rebel side with the result that the most scrupulous accounts of 1857 betray a British bias. Dalrymple, though, has tracked down swathes of unseen manuscripts that make possible the first proper retelling of the Indian side of the great rebellion. As a vivid portrayal of Delhi under siege, the book is unmatched; as an account of life in the invested city it is revolutionary. And as an elegy for the last of the Great Mughals–banished to far-off Rangoon and buried in an unmarked grave–it is deeply humane.”

Mike Dash, The Sunday Telegraph

“Diligently researched and densely informative . . . Dalrymple’s recreation of the city of Delhi under siege forms the monumental backdrop to the tragic figure of the Last Mughal . . . [and] gives us a fuller picture of the devastation of Delhi than has ever before been presented in English. Dalrymple’s work laments the loss of an elegant tradition, a celebration of what was lost, the tone changing from epic to elegy and back.”

Aamer Hussein, The Independent

“[Dalrymple] builds an urban narrative [of Delhi] as evocative as Richard Cobb’s depiction of Revolutionary Paris . . . There is so much to admire in this book–the depth of historical research, the finely evocative writing, the extraordinary rapport with the cultural world of late Mughal India. It is also in many ways a remarkably humane and egalitarian history . . . This is a splendid work of empathetic scholarship. As the 150th anniversary of the uprising dawns there will be many attempts to revisit these bloody, chaotic, cataclysmic events; but few reinterpretations of 1857 will be as bold, as insightful, or as challenging as this.”

David Arnold, Times Literary Supplement

“[A] towering achievement . . . Dalrymple brilliantly evokes the tense equilibrium on the eve of the Indian Mutiny and, with pace and panache, leads to the explosion.”

Michael Binyon, The Times

“A fast-paced account of the brutal sacking of Delhi by British troops after the 1857 Indian Mutiny and the final flickers of the last Mughal court.”

Peter Foster, Telegraph

“It seems almost unfair for a book with such a fine sense of plot, physicality, and even humor to contain primary research as well . . . [This is] serious scholarship, still blessed by Dalrymple’s gift for finding eye-catching transitions, strong characters, and a knack for turning tracts of historical documentation into a roaring good story . . . He brings to light invaluable material . . . Anyone reading The Last Mughal today, especially readers with no prior interest in the Mughals or the Mutiny, will find much to ponder in relation to America’s ongoing adventures in the same neighborhood . . . [An] excellent history.”

Alex Travelli, New York Sun

“The book makes clear the dangers of colonial powers’ inattentiveness to the dissatisfactions of those they rule, and the human costs of answering one atrocity with another.”

The New Yorker

“What marks out William Dalrymple out among other contemporary historians of India is his relish for the subject. His love of the country permeates every page of this new book . . . Drawing on 20,000 unused papers languishing in the Indian National Archives, Dalrymple has unparalleled access to eyewitness accounts, notes scribbled by spies, and petitions to the King. His research has been prodigious, his enthusiasm is infectious and he is an incomparable guide. Dalrymple writes with great verve, clarity and style.”

Sebastian Shakespeare, The Literary Review

Award-winning historian and travel writer Dalrymple is the first to present an Indian perspective on the fall of Delhi--and has as its heart both the dazzling capital personified by Zafar and the stories of the individuals tragically caught up in one of the bloodiest upheavals in history.

In this evocative study of the fall of the Mughal Empire and the beginning of the Raj, award-winning historian William Dalrymple uses previously undiscovered sources to investigate a pivotal moment in history.

The last Mughal emperor, Zafar, came to the throne when the political power of the Mughals was already in steep decline. Nonetheless, Zafar—a mystic, poet, and calligrapher of great accomplishment—created a court of unparalleled brilliance, and gave rise to perhaps the greatest literary renaissance in modern Indian history. All the while, the British were progressively taking over the Emperor's power. When, in May 1857, Zafar was declared the leader of an uprising against the British, he was powerless to resist though he strongly suspected that the action was doomed. Four months later, the British took Delhi, the capital, with catastrophic results. With an unsurpassed understanding of British and Indian history, Dalrymple crafts a provocative, revelatory account of one the bloodiest upheavals in history.

From the Trade Paperback edition.

William Dalrymple is the author of five acclaimed works of history and travel, including City of Djinns, which won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award and the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award; the best-selling From the Holy Mountain; and White Mughals, which won Britain’s most prestigious history prize, the Wolfson. He divides his time between New Delhi and London, and is a contributor to The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker and The Guardian.