ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the main currents of British policy during the nineteenth century. British policy became expansionist and threatened the princes with total extinction, when in an effort to impose western standards of civilization throughout India by a review of the period between 1818 and the mutiny of 1857. Mughal policy towards the states was founded upon the Rajput alliance, the framework of which had been devised by the Emperor Akbar, the greatest of the Mughals, who ruled between 1556 and 1605. During the first half of the nineteenth century, the Mughal experience of relations with the Rajput states had little relevance for the new British rulers of India. At the turn of the century relations with the Indian States were managed by another great imperialist, Lord Curzon, who was Viceroy between 1899 and 1905. There was an essential similarity between Curzon and Lytton in that both sought to utilize the princes.
