Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IL STATE OF INDIA IN 1800. As a basis for the story of progress, the situation of India in 1800, the dawn of the century, must be reviewed. At that moment the Mahratta Empire was the dominant power. It had been founded a century and a half previously by the Mahrattas, mountaineer Hindus of the Western Ghaut range under their national hero Sivaji. It had completed the overthrow of the Mogul Empire, which was from inherent feebleness falling to pieces. It had cooped up the heir of the Great Mogul as a puppet in the imperial palace at Delhi, with a shrunken authority over the city and its neighbourhood. It was unable to prevent two Moslem kingdoms springing out of the ruins of the Mogul dynasty, one in Oudh, a noble province at the base of the Himalayas, the other on the plateau of the Deccan in the heart of the Continent under the Nizam of Hyberabad. It had been stricken and injured by two Moslem inroads from beyond India, the one Persian, the other Afghan. It had never been anything better than a loose confederation of powerful Mahratta chiefs of low castes,under a head styled the Peshwa, who was a Brahmin. Still there was nothing like an imperial authority prevailing in India except the Mahratta. In this limited sense it has been historically eaid that the Mahratta Empire succeeded the Mogul, to be in its turn succeeded by the British. In the year 1800, the Mahratta confederacy had come to be represented by the sovereign chiefs, Sindhia (originally a slipper- bearer), Holkar (a goatherd), the Gaekwar (a cowherd); all in western and south-western India; by the Bhonsla of Nagpore, and the Peishwa (Brahmin), both on the Indian Continent. These were confronting the young giant of British power. An upstart Moslem power had arisen amid the Mysore hills in the south-west...