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 Great Britain and her Empire 541 hills and destroy the villages of the defenseless peasants in the plain of the Ganges. They succeeded in founding a kingdom called Nepal, but they could not defend their realms against the English, who defeated them and forced them to cede to England a vast region extending up into the Himalayas to the borders of Tibet. Later the Gurkhas fought England's battles in the World War. 976. Annexation in Burma (i826-i885). While the British were busy with the Mahrattas and Gurkhas the Burmese were pressing into the Bengal districts from the east. Their ambitions were, however, checked by the British (1824-1826), and they were compelled to cede to the victors a considerable strip of territory along the east coast of the Bay of Bengal. Having thus made their first definite advance beyond the confines of India proper, the British, after twenty-five years of peace with the Burmese, en- gaged in a second war against them in 1852 and made themselves masters of the Irrawaddy valley and a long, narrow strip of coast below Rangoon, and, finally, conquered the whole country in an- other Burmese war in 1884-1885. 977. Conquest of the Sindh and Punjab Regions. On the northwestern frontier, in the valley of the Indus, where the soldiers of Alexander the Great had halted on their eastward march, there was a fertile region known as the Sindh, ruled over by an Ameer. On the ground that the Ameer's government was inefficient and corrupt the British invaded his territory in 1843 and added his domain to their Indian empire, thus winning a strong western frontier. This enterprise was scarcely concluded when a war broke out with the Sikhs in the northwest, which resulted in the addition of the great Punjab region farther up the valley of the Indus, northeast of Sindh, and the exten- sion of the boundary of the Anglo-Indian empire to the borders of Afghanistan. 978. The Sepoy Rebellion (i857). England's conquests natu- rally caused great bitterness among the native princes who lost their thrones, and among the Mohammedans, who hated the Christians. In 1857 a terrible revolt of the Indian troops, known as sepoys, serving under British officers, took place. The sepoys