Excerpt from The Cambridge History of India, Vol. 5 of 6: British India, 1497-1858 The spelling of proper names is generally that of the Imperial Gazetteer; all diacritical marks have been omitted. The reader will find that in this and the following volume the scale of treatment has had to be materially reduced. The period covered by them is much shorter, but it is also incomparably fuller, and the allocation of space has offered many difficult problems. In the circumstances it seemed to me desirable to economise as much as possible in the space given to political history in order to provide room for an outline of the development of the administrative system, a subject on which easily accessible information is scanty and in adequate. I have thus been able to make room not only for the chapters dealing with this topic in the present volume but for a longer series of chapters in the next. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.