This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

PREFACE.


The work now presented to the public, was written in the latter half of the last century, by Mir Gholam Hussein-khan, a person of high family at the court of Dehli, and who with his father resided for many years at the court of the nabobs of Bengal, Behar, and Orissa. He styles it Siyar-ul-Mutakherin, "a Review of Modern Times."[1]

It embraces a period of about seventy years, and affords a complete insight into the events which caused the downfall of the Mahomedan power, and the elevation of the Mahrattas, and it brings us to the first steps which led to the occupation of Bengal, and eventually of all India, by the British government. No period of Indian history can be so interesting to Englishmen, as that which immediately preceded the establishment of our dominion, and

b
  1. Or, more correctly, "Manners of the Moderns."