Mughals made Dhaka Bengal’s capital in 1610
Dhaka is Bangladesh’s capital and largest city, a gamma+ global hub of politics and culture. Settlement reaches the first millennium; the early modern city rose in the seventeenth as a Mughal provincial capital and trade centre. In 1610 it headed the province of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa spanning today’s Bangladesh and eastern India.
Formerly spelled Dacca, the city sits on the Ganges Delta between the Buriganga, Turag, Dhaleshwari and Shitalakshya rivers, and with an estimated 36.6 million people it is the world’s second most populous city and probably its densest built-up area. The name may come from the dhak tree, the goddess Dhakeshwari, a dhak drum said to have been beaten at the 1610 inauguration of the capital, or Dhakka, a watchtower guarding nearby Bikrampur and Sonargaon, the region’s earlier strongholds.
Islam Khan I, the first Mughal governor to live here, renamed it Jahangirnagar after the emperor. Shah Jahan stayed a week in 1624, four years before taking the throne. Under Shaista Khan the city stretched 19 by 13 kilometres with nearly a million inhabitants, and its muslin was so famous that the cloth was sold as Daka as far off as Central Asia; Bengal supplied 40 percent of Dutch imports from Asia. Prince Azam Shah began Lalbagh Fort in 1678, but work stopped after Shaista Khan’s daughter Pari Bibi died, and her tomb stands at its unfinished centre.
After the Battle of Buxar, the Treaty of Allahabad of 1765 made the East India Company Bengal’s tax collector, and in 1793 the city passed fully to the company as the deputy governor lost his powers. British raids and conflict sharply cut the population before imperial trade revived it. It became capital of Eastern Bengal and Assam after 1905, and of East Pakistan in 1947, when partition drained away the Hindu majority that had dominated its economy.
Today Dhaka produces about 35 percent of Bangladesh’s economy, and its stock exchange lists over 750 companies.
Source: Dhaka
