FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES TO THE PRESENT DAY FOR THE USE OF STUDENTS AND COLLEGES BY HG KEENE CIE HON MA OXON Author of "The Fall of the Mughal Empire: in India" &c ""The Turks VOL I LONDON WH ALLEN & CO LIMITED Publishers to the India Office 13 WATERLOO PLACE SW 1893 יד PREFACE. It is in no spirit of disparagement towards the works of predecessors that the following pages are offered to the reader. Many of those works are, in their several ways, of much value. Nevertheless, all are open to some objection: are too bulky; have grown obsolete owing to the discovery of new matter; or are insufficient for the purposes of the student. It is with a full sense of the difficulties of their task that the present work has been undertaken. The writer has endeavoured to give, without prolixity, a statement of the relevant facts at present available, both in regard to the origin of the more important Indian races, and in regard to their progress before they came under the unifying processes of modern administration: and the tracing of that evolution forms the subject of the first chapters. In the residue will be found the brief relation of that unprecedented series of events under which a remote commercial people have begun to weld those races into a single nationality. The obstacles to success in both of these respects were perceived by Mr. Elphinstone, whose own labours have 512963 |