Those last two paragraphs really interested me. It seems this India will be a bigger player in the East Indies...
I take it that Akbar II's nobles will be just as thoroughly replaced by royal functionaries as the French nobility under Louis XIV, but they'll become mercenaries and pirates in the East Indies rather than accepting court sinecures?
Not mercenaries and pirates per se; there'll be plenty of those.... but investors.
The nobility in India is tightly wound, but if a noble were to establish a power base somewhere else, they get back some of the freedom they had before.
I could see a place for their wealth in the European colonial states of East Africa, and in the kingdoms of Southeast Asia.
Cheers,
Ganesha