AH 1221 - 1253 / AD 1806 - 1837

Muhammad Akbar II, also known as Akbar Shah II was the penultimate ruler of the Mughal Empire. He was the second son of Shah Alam II and the father of Bahadur Shah II, who would eventually succeed him and become the last Mughal emperor. Akbar had little de facto power due to the increasing British influence in India through the East India Company.

He sent Ram Mohan Roy as an ambassador to Britain and gave him the title of Raja. During his regime, in 1835, the East India Company discontinued calling itself subject of the Mughal Emperor and issuing coins in his name. The Persian lines in the company's coins to this effect were deleted. Akbar II is credited with starting the Hindu–Muslim unity festival Phool Walon Ki Sair.

When the Rohilla leader Ghulam Qadir captured Delhi in 1788, the young Prince Mirza Akbar was forced to nautch dance along with other Mughal princes and princesses. He witnessed how the members of the imperial Mughal family were humiliated, as well as starved. When Shah Jahan IV fled, Mirza Akbar was titular Emperor with the title of Akbar Shah II, and was to remain acting emperor even after the reinstatement of his father Shah Alam II, till January 1789.

Emperor Akbar II presided over an empire titularly large but in effect limited to the Red Fort in Delhi alone. The cultural life of Delhi as a whole flourished during his reign. However, his attitude towards East India Company officials, especially Lord Hastings, to whom he refused to grant an audience on terms other than those of subject and sovereign, although honourable to him, increasingly frustrated the British, who regarded him as merely their pensioner.

The British therefore reduced his titular authority to 'King of Delhi' in 1835 and the East India Company ceased to act as the mere lieutenants of the Mughal Empire as they did from 1803 to 1835. Simultaneously they replaced Persian text with English text on the company's coins, which no longer carried the emperor's name. The British encouraged the Nawab of Oudh and the Nizam of Hyderabad to take royal titles in order to further diminish the Emperor's status and influence. Out of deference, the Nizam did not, but the Nawab of Awadh did so.

Akbar II died in September 1837 and was succeeded by his son Siraj ud-Din Muhammad Bahadur Shah Zafar, who would go on to be the last Mughal Emperor, marking the end of over three centuries of Mughal rule in India, which left a mark on the subcontinent that continues to this day.