Page:History of India Vol 8.djvu/281

Rh dominion in Upper India, until the Sikhs crossed the Sutlaj long afterwards in 1845.

WARREN HASTINGS, GOVERNOR-GENERAL OF BENGAL.

When Warren Hastings assumed the government of Bengal in 1772, the different Maratha chiefs were just beginning to found separate rulerships without abandoning their confederacy under the Peshwa. And from 1774, during the whole of his Governor-Generalship, the state and course of the East India Company's foreign affairs were governed principally by the varying relations of the English with these chiefs. Hastings found that a Maratha army had made its annual irruption into the districts northwest of Bengal, where the emperor Shah Alam, who had been living at Allahabad on the revenues assigned him by Clive in 1765, solicited and obtained their assistance toward recovering his