Page:The Nizam.djvu/13

 PREFACE.

The Quarterly Review of July 1858 made the European world familiar with the fact that is "the greatest Mahommedan power in India." Yet any information of this power is not only fragmentary, but is scattered through works many of which are questionable for accuracy in various respects, if not utterly unreliable from the prejudiced channel of communication. Mount Stuart Elphinstone's India, and Grant Duff's History of the Mahrattas, are about the most liberal, certainly the very best authorities; but these largely repeat, or represent accurately, what had previously been published, with, of course, not a little additional information.

I submit this work only as a compilation. Of the three continuous accounts that I have seen of, the first, by Sir Henry Eussell, has appeared, in portions, in different publications, and principally in Hamilton's Gazetteer; the second is a precis, prepared for some case before the Government of India, in the Bengal Secretariat, which was almost bodily reproduced, in Calcutta, by Rushton's Gazetteer, in 1841 ; and the third is a resumé, got up by the late Colonel Duncan A. Malcolm, while Assistant-