Page:History of India Vol 8.djvu/18

x treatise is not only to give a concise account of the rise of British dominion in India, but also to explain it by tracing rapidly the causes and convergent influences that brought about so remarkable a conclusion.

It is a matter of general remark that Anglo-Indian history, when related at length, is tedious and confusing. This is partly due to unfamiliarity with outlandish names and places, but chiefly to its essential character. The history, like the annals of almost all Oriental states, is mainly concerned, up to very recent times, with military operations, which in India seldom rise above the level of desultory fighting, and with that class of politics that consists largely of revolts, conspiracies, dynastic contests, and the ordinary incidents of a struggle for existence among rival despots.

In Asia there is no scope for examining the growth of institutions or the development of civil polity or the forming of nations; the famous men are all either able tyrants (in the Greek sense) or successful men of war; the type of civilization is uniform and stationary; the spirit of nationality, where it exists, is in its most elementary stage; the people of the great kingdoms known to history are an immense mixed multitude, broken up into tribal or religious groups, and united under one leadership by force or accident. At the present moment every great country in Asia is governed by an alien race or foreign dynasty that has come in by conquest; there is no general identity of language or of religion between the rulers and the mass of their subjects; they accordingly accept changes of govern-