India Proper or the Empire of the Great Mogol

Circa 1720–1729

Copper engraving on paper

Print size: 10 x 7.25 in (25.5 x 18.5 cm)
Sheet size: 15.25 x 8.25 in (38.5 x 21 cm)

Moll’s precise and boldly engraved English map of “India Proper” — a defining representation of the Mughal Empire for British readers in the early 18th century

Herman Moll’s India Proper or the Empire of the Great Mogol reflects the clarity, practical orientation, and bold typographic design that made him one of Britain’s foremost cartographers in the early eighteenth century. The map presents the Mughal Empire with a precision unusual among many continental contemporaries: coastlines are crisp, lettering confident, and the hierarchy of urban centres carefully calibrated for English readership.

While indebted to the Baffin–Roe and Dutch atlas traditions, Moll regularises proportions, sharpens political boundaries, and incorporates up-to-date British commercial knowledge. Ports of strategic interest—Surat, Bombay, Calicut, and Masulipatnam—appear alongside the imperial capitals of Agra and Delhi, forming a geography intended as much for mercantile navigation as for intellectual comprehension.

A particularly evocative feature is Moll’s marking of the Grand Trunk Road linking Agra, Delhi, and Lahore, shown with its celebrated border of trees—an infrastructural emblem of Mughal administration and long-distance movement across North India. Such details situate the map not merely as a territorial outline but as a lived imperial landscape of roads, capitals, and trade corridors.

The plate was issued within an atlas published by Thomas Bowles and John Bowles, prominent London map and print sellers whose publications helped disseminate Moll’s vision of “India Proper” to a wide British audience. Widely exported and frequently folded into travel books and atlases, Moll’s maps helped cement a distinctively English cartographic understanding of the Mughal world on the eve of large-scale British survey and colonial expansion.

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