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 CHAPTER IX

Internal Re-organisation

Lord Dalhousie clearly discerned that these vast additions of territory implied momentous changes in the system of holding and ruling India. Until his time British India was, as I have mentioned, an isolated country, shut off from all powerful neighbours by intervening States, and commanded for strategical purposes from the sea-board. The magnificent harbour of Bombay dominated the Western Presidency, that of Karáchi formed the key to Sind. Madras had its long open littoral, with numerous roadsteads, and the great naval station at Trincomalee near its Southern extremity, on the Ceylonese coast. In Bengal the noble port of Calcutta, with the connected river-systems of the Ganges, Indus, and Brahmaputra, afforded water-ways inland to the furthest frontier of the British dominions in Northern India.

The conquest of the Punjab beyond the Gangetic system, the annexation of Oudh on the limit of that system, the lapse of the great Nágpur territories midway between the Eastern and Western