A Retrospective View and Consideration of India Affairs

This 1783 account of the First Anglo-Maratha war of 1775–1782 is an early English source for Indian history.

This 1783 account of the First Anglo-Maratha war of 1775–1782 is an important source of information on India before the Raj. The East India Company was expanding its influence, military and economic, over the Indian states, and became involved in a succession dispute over the Maratha Empire.This anonymous work was published at the end of the First Anglo-Maratha war (1775–1782) to provide an English audience with a better understanding of the recent conflict. The author (who may have been a Major John Scott, and is likely to have been connected to the East India Company) is at times quite critical of the Company and some of the decisions which were made in relation to the conduct of the war. He suggests that India-based employees were not always giving the whole picture to the directors in England. He argues that war could have been avoided (blaming Warren Hastings, the governor-general of Bengal, for its outbreak),and that Britain had done badly out of negotiations for peace. The book is an early source of information about the Indian states which were soon to become incorporated into British India, and on Anglo-Indian relations.