Page:History of India Vol 8.djvu/436

386 It is a remarkable coincidence that during the first fifty years occupied by the rise of England's dominion in India, other rulerships were being founded simultaneously, by a not dissimilar process, around her. In the course of that period (1757-1805) the tribes of Afghanistan had been collected into subjection to one kingdom under the dynasty of Ahmad Shah; the petty Hindu and Mohammedan chiefships of the Panjab had been welded into a military despotism by the strong hand of Ranjit Singh; and the rajas on the lower highlands of the Himalayas had submitted to the domination of Nepal. Lastly, about the time when Clive was subduing Bengal, a Burmese military leader had established by conquest a rulership which had its capital in the plains traversed by the Irawadi River and its principal affluents, from the upper waters of those rivers down to the sea.

The kingdom of Burma, founded in 1757 by Alompra's subjugation of Pegu, now included not only the open tracts about the Irawadi and the Salwin, extending from the hills out of which these rivers issue to the low-lying seacoast at their mouths, and stretching far southward down the eastern shores of the Bay of Bengal. It was absorbing all the mountainous region overhanging the eastern land frontier of India; and the Burmese armies were pressing westward across the watershed of those mountains through the upland country about the Brahmaputra toward the great alluvial plains of eastern Bengal. There had, consequently, been frequent disputes on that border between the