The Indian States under the British Crown
William Seymour describes how independence for India in 1947 put an end to the long and close association of the Indian princes with British power.
Through the history of India from earliest times there runs a golden thread—the pageantry and panache of the Indian princes. A long line of warrior chiefs had ruled in Rajputana for many years before Babur won his decisive victory at Panipat in 1526 and founded the Mogul Empire.
The warriors’ descendants, with those of the Maratha peshwas and certain adventurers who had set themselves up as independent rulers, owing only nominal allegiance to the Great Mogul, formed the principalities that the East India Company had to deal with when in the middle of the eighteenth century it began to assume the responsibilities of a political power.
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