386 COMPLETION OF DOMINION

It is a remarkable coincidence that during the first fifty years occupied by the rise of England's dominion in India, other rulerships were being founded simultane- ously, by a not dissimilar process, around her. In the course of that period (1757 - 1805) the tribes of Afghan- istan had been collected into subjection to one kingdom under the dynasty of Ahmad Shah; the petty Hindu and Mohammedan chiefships of the Panjab had been welded into a military despotism by the strong hand of Ran jit Singh; and the rajas on the lower highlands of the Himalayas had submitted to the domination of Nepal. Lastly, about the time when Clive was subdu- ing Bengal, a Burmese military leader had established by conquest a rulership which had its capital in the plains traversed by the Irawadi River and its prin- cipal affluents, from the upper waters of those rivers down to the sea. The kingdom of Burma, founded in 1757 by Alom- pra's subjugation of Pegu, now included not only the open tracts about the Irawadi and the Salwin, extend- ing from the hills out of which these rivers issue to the low-lying seacoast at their mouths, and stretching far southward down the eastern shores of the Bay of Ben- gal. It was absorbing all the mountainous region pver- hanging the eastern land frontier of India; and the Burmese armies were pressing westward across the watershed of those mountains through the upland coun- try about the Brahmaputra toward the great alluvial plains of eastern Bengal. There had, consequently, been frequent disputes on that border between the