Why did the East India Company never conquer Nepal?
Between 1837 and 1846 the Honourable East India Company and the Kingdom of Nepal stood repeatedly on the brink of war. It was a decade of intrigue in Kathmandu and anxious calculation in Calcutta - of factions at the Nepalese court, of a watchful British Resident, and of a frontier neither side could quite leave alone - and it ended only with the bloodletting of the Kot Massacre of 1846 and the rise of Jung Bahadur Rana.
Why was the conquest never launched? Drawing on unpublished records - among them an 1839 plan for the kingdom's conquest that has gone unremarked - Crisis on the Northern Frontier argues that the Company did not spare Nepal so much as fail to take it. At the mountains, British expansion met a limit it could not cross: a premonition, a decade early, of the catastrophe of 1857.
Meticulously researched and clearly told, this is a study of empire at the edge of its strength - essential reading for anyone drawn to the East India Company, the history of Nepal and the Himalaya, and the limits of British power in nineteenth-century South Asia.
