Sublime

At the death of Mehmet the Conqueror in 1481, the whole Balkan peninsula south of Belgrade and the Danube estuary was under Ottoman rule. The ‘gunpowder age’ seemed to be signalling a violent new phase of Islamic expansion.

The Peshwa – a Persian term for Prime Minister that the Bahmani Sultans had introduced in the fourteenth century – controlled Maharashtra and was head of the Confederacy, keeping up an active correspondence with all his regional governors. Bhonsle was in charge of Orissa, Gaekwad controlled Gujarat, Holkar dominated in central India and Scindia was

Before he set off to Hyderabad, Shore had briefed William Kirkpatrick to stick to the existing Triple Alliance, signed four years earlier in 1790, which bound the Marathas,

Now ‘Citizen Tippoo’ was discovered by British interceptions to be in communication with Napoleon Bonaparte, whom he formally invited to visit India to liberate the country and expel the British. He had even sent ambassadors to Paris along with a draft treaty in which he proposed an alliance to drive the British out of India.73

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What was never discussed was whether the Company was legally empowered to try Zafar at all. For though the government took the position that Zafar received a pension from the Company, and was therefore the Company’s pensioner and thus subject, the actual legal position was considerably more ambiguous. While the Company’s 1599 charter to trade in th

the young St Patrick, son and grandson of British Christian priests (one of them also a town official), before his fateful abduction by Irish slave raiders at the age of about sixteen. Patrick’s is the sole unambiguously British narrative voice from the whole of the fifth century.

battle. For this reason he and Aristu Jah were very anxious to forge an alliance with the English through William, and to enlist the armies of the Company on their side. Aristu Jah was the most Anglophile of the Nizam’s advisers, and alone in the durbar realised the real and growing military strength of the Company. His ideas, however, were not wid

functionary