Foundation
Ahmad Khan, of the Sadozai clan of the Abdali Pashtuns, served as a commander in the army of Nadir Shah of Iran. When Nadir was assassinated in June 1747, Ahmad Khan led his Afghan contingent home to Kandahar, where an assembly of tribal chiefs chose him as king. He took the title Durr-i Durran, "pearl of pearls", and the Abdali tribes became known as the Durrani. He had with him part of Nadir's treasure, including, by most accounts, the Koh-i-Noor.
The Indian campaigns
Ahmad Shah invaded India repeatedly, usually counted as eight or nine times between 1748 and 1767. He took Lahore and Multan, annexed Kashmir in 1752, and made the Mughal emperor cede the Punjab. In 1757 he sacked Delhi, and his troops carried out massacres at Mathura and Vrindavan.
The Marathas, who had extended their power to the Punjab, challenged him, and in January 1761 he destroyed their army at the third battle of Panipat, one of the largest battles of the century. The Maratha losses in battle and in the flight that followed were enormous. Ahmad Shah did not stay to rule Delhi; his army, unpaid and wanting to go home, forced his return.
His most persistent opponents were the Sikhs of the Punjab. In February 1762 his army inflicted a heavy defeat on the Sikhs, remembered as the Vadda Ghallughara, the great holocaust, and in the same year he blew up the Harmandir Sahib at Amritsar. The Sikh misls nevertheless recovered, and by the time of his death in 1772 they controlled most of the Punjab.
Decline
Ahmad Shah's son Timur Shah moved the capital to Kabul in 1776. Under his sons the empire was torn by civil war. Zaman Shah invaded the Punjab several times in the 1790s, alarming the British, and during one campaign appointed a young Sikh chief, Ranjit Singh, governor of Lahore. Ranjit Singh made himself independent, taking Lahore in 1799 and, from the Durranis, Multan in 1818, Kashmir in 1819 and Peshawar in 1834.
In Afghanistan the Sadozai line lost power in the 1820s to the Barakzai brothers, one of whom, Dost Mohammad Khan, made himself ruler at Kabul. The deposed Shah Shuja was restored by a British army in 1839, at the start of the First Anglo-Afghan War, and killed in 1842 after the British retreat. Afghan historiography treats Ahmad Shah as the founder of the modern Afghan state and calls him Ahmad Shah Baba.
Further reading
- Gordon, Stewart. The Marathas 1600-1818. Cambridge University Press, 1993
- Singh, Khushwant. A History of the Sikhs. Oxford University Press, 2004
- Richards, John F. The Mughal Empire. Cambridge University Press, 1993
See also
- Battles of Panipat — The three Battles of Panipat, fought in 1526, 1556, and 1761 on the same plain north of Delhi, were successive decisive engagements that respectively founded the Mughal Empire, secured it under Akbar, and ended Maratha ambitions of dominance in North India.
- Maratha Empire — The Maratha Empire was a Hindu warrior state that rose in the Deccan under Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj in the mid-17th century and, as a loose confederacy of allied houses, became the dominant power across most of the Indian subcontinent before its final defeat by the British in 1818.
- Sikh Empire — The Sikh Empire ruled the Punjab and the northwest from Lahore between 1799 and 1849, the last major Indian state to fall to the British and the only one to take Peshawar from the Afghans.
- Ranjit Singh — Ranjit Singh was the founder and ruler of the Sikh Empire, who unified the Punjab from the misls, took Lahore in 1799, and held the north-west against both Afghan power and British expansion until his death in 1839.
- Mughal Empire — The Mughal Empire was a Persianate Muslim dynasty of Timurid and Chagatai descent that ruled most of the Indian subcontinent from Babur's victory at the First Battle of Panipat in 1526 until the deposition of Bahadur Shah II following the 1857 rebellion, reaching its territorial and cultural peak under Akbar, Shah Jahan, and Aurangzeb.
- Punjab — Punjab, the "Land of Five Rivers" straddling the India-Pakistan border in the northwestern subcontinent, has been a corridor of invasion, empire, and religious innovation from the Indus Valley Civilization through the founding of Sikhism to the 1947 Partition.
- Kashmir — Kashmir is a Himalayan valley in the northwestern subcontinent whose early history encompasses successive Buddhist and Hindu dynasties, the distinct philosophical tradition of Kashmir Shaivism, and a 14th-century transition to Muslim rule under the Shah Mir dynasty.
This entry was last revised on 12 November 2026.