WHEN BRITON FOUGHT GURKHANo-one who has an interest in British military history is ignorant of the role of the Gurkhas. Their loyalty and courage is as legendary as the affection with which they are regarded by the British military and civilians alike. It was not always so. At the beginning of the 19th century, as the British empire inexorably expanded its inflfl uence to embrace the Indian Sub-Continent, the Nepalese empire itself covered huge areas of Northern India - stretching at times from the borders of the Sikh kingdom in the west to the foothills of the Himalayas where they meet the...

WHEN BRITON FOUGHT GURKHA No-one who has an interest in British military history is ignorant of the role of the Gurkhas. Their loyalty and courage is as legendary as the affection with which they are regarded by the British military and civilians alike. It was not always so. At the beginning of the 19th century, as the British empire inexorably expanded its inflfl uence to embrace the Indian Sub-Continent, the Nepalese empire itself covered huge areas of Northern India - stretching at times from the borders of the Sikh kingdom in the west to the foothills of the Himalayas where they meet the...

Henry Thoby Prinsep (1792 1878), a colonial administrator who reached the highest rank in the East India Company and its successor, the Council of India, published this Code of Practice in 1866: the third edition of 1869, reissued here, was necessitated by new legislation in that year. (Prinsep's earlier work, Origin of the Sikh Power in the Punjab, is also reissued in this series.) In the preface to this work, written as a guide for local magistrates and administrators, Prinsep states his intent to present, in a convenient form, all the rules of procedure in the criminal courts of British...