The History of India from the Close of the Seventeenth Century to the Present Time

Alfred Lyall’s history of India from the late 17th century into the 19th century, when India was still a colonial possession controlled by the British. Of course, Lyall was writing from a British perspective, so he wrote favorably about the history of the colonial effort. As he puts it in the preface, “The principal object of this book has been to sketch in outline the Rise of the British Dominion in India, and to relate the circumstances that led to the gradual extension of our territorial possessions up to 1858, when the Crown superseded the East India Company in the direct government of the country. It has also been thought expedient to give, toward the end of the volume, a short dissertation upon the nature and operation of the system of protectorates, by which the independent native states within India have been preserved under the superior control of the imperial government, and the foreign states or outlying tracts adjacent to the British frontiers have been brought under our political influence. But since the main purpose of the work is to present a connected view of the historical events and transactions, in Europe and in Asia, that combined to promote the foundation and to expedite the spread of the Dominion, the later stages of its expansion have been traversed in this narrative more rapidly than the earlier stages, which have perhaps attracted less general attention, and are not so commonly understood. Moreover, several remarkable incidents (as, for example, the famous trial of Nuncomar) have been omitted or barely mentioned, because they seemed to have little bearing upon the larger political issues with which this book is concerned, and also because a detailed account of them can be found in any history of British India.”