The Treaty of Amritsar 1809
Read the 1809 agreement through an amended draft, a diplomatic minute and conflicting printed dates, distinguishing proposals from the reasoning behind them.
Lahore diplomacy
History · A guide to the archive
Court, diplomacy and campaigns
Read selected court, diplomatic and campaign records with attention to authorship, chronology and the purpose of each account.
How to approach this subject
Choose a passage and establish who wrote it, when it was written and what the writer could observe. An invitation, a draft, a received letter, an official report and a parliamentary argument answer different questions. Compare their wording before joining them into a sequence. Keep an attributed explanation beside its author, and distinguish an announced intention from an action reported afterwards. These readings offer a route through particular witnesses while leaving their inspection limits visible. Follow the source notes when a later publication incorporates an earlier document or when printed versions disagree.
An intentional selection
Begin with these entries
Multan conquest of 1818
Follow the 1818 Multan campaign through command arrangements, river supplies, the siege and its aftermath, using two explicitly connected early narratives.
Multan and Lahore
The Lahore Darbar
Read the Lahore court through an escorted audience, visible seating hierarchies and later material studies, keeping observations and identifications distinct.
Lahore kingdom and later collections
Military reform under Ranjit Singh
Examine military change through dated inspections of manoeuvres, locally cast ordnance and command on parade, preserving each observer’s limited viewpoint.
Lahore, Peshawar and Ferozpur
The First Anglo-Sikh War
Follow the Sutlej campaign through Aliwal and Sobraon, alongside a parliamentary dispute over military thanks and approval of government policy.
Sutlej frontier and Lahore kingdom
The Treaty of Lahore 1846
Read the Lahore settlement through its separately dated March 1846 instruments, distinguishing territorial cessions, military limits and a temporary garrison.
Lahore settlement
The Second Anglo-Sikh War
Read the war through received letters, dated campaign despatches and requests for official papers, separating military surrender from later political outcomes.
Multan, Gujrat and the northern Punjab
The annexation of Punjab in 1849
Trace Punjab’s annexation in 1849 through the earlier Lahore settlement, the dated transfer of power and a later critic’s challenge to its justification.
Lahore kingdom and British colonial Punjab