Page:History of India Vol 8.djvu/472

420 English settlement at Calcutta, upon the Ganges estuary, led to the conquest of Bengal; as the occupation of Karachi near the Indus was followed by the taking of Sind; and as the British position at Cairo necessitates a frontier in Upper Egypt, so the planting of a new British capital at Rangoon, near the mouth of the Irawadi, was a first step toward a march up the river to Mandalay.

THE PORT AND HARBOUR OF KARACHI.

Having conquered two provinces on two diametrically opposite frontiers of the empire, Lord Dalhousie turned his attention to the interior. When the power of the Maratha Peshwas was extinguished in 1818, the titular Maratha king, Sivaji's descendant, had been released from his state prison, and the principality of Satara had been conferred on him by Lord Hastings. In 1848, on the death of his successor without heirs, Lord Dalhousie refused to sanction the adoption of an heir. He laid down the principle that the British government is bound in duty as well as in policy to take