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 CHAPTER VIII FIEST ENGLISH SETTLEMENTS ON THE BENGAL COAST 1633 - 1658 IN Northwestern India the English had adapted them- selves to the settled order of the Moghul Empire and won an honourable position as a coast-police and the patrol of the pilgrim ocean highway. In South- eastern India they had secured their settlements by grants from the inland kings, and by forts, amid the perpetual struggle between those kings and their half- subdued coast rajas. In Bengal they were to be con- fronted by a different set of political conditions. The great satrapy of the Lower Ganges, including Bengal Proper and Orissa, was in itself so affluent, and lay so far from the Imperial Court, as to render it almost a separate sovereignty. Only by long wars, and after repeated revolts, had it been completely an- nexed to the Moghul Empire. When the Afghan kings, of Bengal went down before the Emperor Akbar in 1576, they found a refuge in the adjoining province of Orissa. The slow subjugation of this dynasty, amid its hill-fastnesses and network of rivers, I have narrated in a work on the history of Orissa and its condition under British rule. The Moghul governors who succeeded the Afghan