The championship leader started second alongside his pole-sitting team-mate, but a better getaway on the long run down to the opening bend allowed him to sidle up the inside as they swept into turn two alongside one another.
With both drivers holding their ground on entry, it was Hamilton who would nose ahead on the exit, easing Rosberg out wide onto the kerb to snatch the lead, while Sebastian Vettel and Valtteri Bottas also took advantage of his lurid moment to get ahead in second and third.
From here, Hamilton swiftly set about establishing his advantage over the competition, extending his lead to more than two seconds from Vettel after just two laps and multiplying it from there.
By contrast, Rosberg was faced with a busy afternoon of attempting to make up ground as he became bottled up behind Valtteri Bottas early on, a situation he attempted to correct by pitting early in an effort to get the undercut.
However, while the strategy didn’t work as Bottas got back out ahead, Rosberg pounced immediately with a strong move into the chicane on lap 17. From here, Rosberg set about closing the gap on countryman Vettel and after getting onto his tail as the second wave of pit-stops approached, successfully skipped ahead with the undercut.
It wasn’t enough for him to do anything about Hamilton further up the road though, the Englishman leading his Mercedes counterpart by 10secs coming into the final stint before extending that to 19secs to the chequered flag.
Hamilton’s eighth win of the season – one that moves him level with Ayrton Senna on the all-time winners’ list -, the result goes a long way to making up for his Singapore DNF and comprehensively re-establishes Mercedes’ grip on the championship after its Marina Bay blip. More significantly, it means Hamilton’s advantage in the overall standings over Rosberg has swelled to 48 points with five races remaining.
Despite putting pressure on Rosberg in the closing stages, Vettel nonetheless had to settle for third position for his 10th podium of the season, well ahead of Kimi Raikkonen, who endured a lonely afternoon, save for a late flourish that allowed him to leapfrog countryman Bottas for fourth place.
Beyond the top five, the fight for the remaining points was dictated by an untidy start amongst the mid-fielders after Daniel Ricciardo and Felipe Massa knocked wheels off the startline to give each punctures, before Nico Hulkenberg’s aggressive opening corner pass on Carlos Sainz forced him into Sergio Perez, the Mexican forced to run off the circuit as a result.
As such, it was Hulkenberg who emerged as the big winner for melee – despite his contribution to it -, the German rising from 13th to eighth on the opening lap before passing both Lotus’ ahead of him during the first round of pit-stops to pick up a sixth place he would take to the end.
After tough weekends in Monza and Singapore, Lotus survived the dramatic first lap unscathed to finish seventh and eighth, Romain Grosjean and Pastor Maldonado evenly matched throughout to claim only the team’s second double top ten result of the season.
Starting 18th following his post-qualifying penalty, Max Verstappen made the most of the issues ahead to put in a storming drive up the order, passing Toro Rosso team-mate Sainz late on to pick up more points for ninth, while the Spaniard – who didn’t help his cause when he needed a front-wing change for striking the pit-lane entry bollard – took the final digit in tenth.
Elsewhere, Perez, Ricciardo and Massa couldn’t quite recover ground from their enforced first lap stops to replace wings and tyres, ending up 12th, 15th and 17th, while Daniil Kvyat could only progress to 13th in his Red Bull, which was rebuilt overnight following his qualifying crash.
Meanwhile, Will Stevens was lucky to avoid a more serious accident when a lurid half-spin out of 130R almost saw him collected by close-following Manor team-mate Alex Rossi. Nonetheless, both would emerge unscathed to make the finish 18th and 19th, Rossi ahead of Stevens.