AN INDIAN RUPEE OF QUEEN VICTORIA'S REIGN. / CHAPTER XVII COMPLETION OF DOMINION 1823-1858 UP to this epoch the scene of all the East India Company's wars had been within India; and for the last fifty years from the withdrawal of the French in 1763 to the end of the Pindari war in 1818 the antagonists of the British had been the native Indian powers. As the expansion of England's dominion car- ried her so much nearer to foreign Asiatic countries, her rapid approach to the geographical limits of India proper discovered fresh complications for her, and she was now on the brink of collision with new races. The first non-Indian power that provoked her to actual hos- tility had been the Gurkha chief ship; but as Nepal lies on the southern slopes of the Himalayas, its population belongs, by blood and religion, for the most part to Hinduism. The second non-Indian state that chal- lenged the British from beyond the Indian frontier was the kingdom of a people differing entirely from Indian races, the Burmese. 385
