Series V- India from 1600 till 1800(End of Mughals)

On 31 December 1600 Queen Elizabeth I of England granted a royal charter to the British East India Company to carry out trade with the East. Ships first arrived in India in 1608, docking at Surat in modern-day Gujarat. Four years later, British traders defeated the Portuguese at the Battle of Swally, gaining the favour of the Mughal emperor Jahangir in the process. In 1615, King James I sent Sir Thomas Roe as his ambassador to Jahangir's court, and a commercial treaty was concluded in which the Mughals allowed the Company to build trading posts in India in return for goods from Europe. The Company traded in such commodities as cotton, silk, saltpetre, indigo, and tea.

The Maratha Empire (Marathi: मराठा साम्राज्य Marāṭhā Sāmrājya; also transliterated Mahratta) and in its later years also known as the Maratha Confederacy, was a Hindu state of India, founded by Chhatrapati Shivaji, which existed from 1674 to 1818. At its peak, the Maratha Empire ruled a territory of 250 million acres, or one-third of South Asia.

After a lifetime of exploits and guerrilla warfare with the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, in 1674 Shivaji carved out an independent Maratha zone around Pune from the Bijapur Sultanate. Shivaji died in 1680, leaving a Maratha kingdom of great extent but strategically and vulnerably located. The Mughal invasion started around 1682 and lasted till 1707. Shahu, a grandson of Shivaji ruled the kingdom until 1749.
The Maratha losses at the Third Battle of Panipat in 1761 halted the expansion of the empire and reduced the power of Peshwa.
The British first established a territorial foothold in the Indian subcontinent when Company-funded soldiers commanded by Robert Clive defeated the Bengali Nawab Siraj Ud Daulah at the Battle of Plassey in 1757. Bengal became a British protectorate directly under the rule of the East India Company.

The empire then became a loose confederacy, with political power resting in a 'pentarchy' of five Maratha dynasties: the Peshwas of Pune, the Sindhias (originally "Shinde"s of Malwa and Gwalior), the Holkars of Indore, the Bhonsles of Nagpur, and the Gaekwads of Baroda. Maratha affairs of the late 18th and early 19th centuries were dominated by internal rivalry between the Sindhia and Holkar, and by the three Anglo-Maratha wars with the British East India Company.