ABSTRACT
It is hard for the historian to see the States as the independent administrations that their propagandists to-day claim they were when Lord Hastings decided their external status. Their political status was never in doubt. By title and admission, the leading Prince, the Nizam, was a representative of the Mogul Emperor, as the founder of his dynasty had been in fact when his career began. In 1819, then, there were only two independent States—Nepal, which is outside the Indian political system, and the Punjab. If the Princes' political status was plain, and such as to make any claim to 'sovereign rights' in the full sense untenable, if based on an appeal to history, their actual condition of abject misery and weakness was still obvious. The King of Delhi was what Warren Hastings had termed his predecessor, nearly half a century earlier, an empty pageant.
