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There followed eight years of marking time while the Napoleonic empire rose and fell in Europe. The company stood its ground in the north from the Ganges to the Sutlej but withdrew from Rajasthan and the center. Lord Minto preferred embassies to armies and limited his conquests to the seizure of Mauritius and Dutch satellite's island of Java. The situation in India was aggravated by the growth of marauding robber bands called Pindaris. They were recruited from disbanded armies and displaced villagers. The chaos which they wrought in central India and their raids on British India became a pretext for British intervention. Independent India, as then constituted, was filling the cup of anarchy in readiness for the company. Apart from Maharaja Ranjit Singh in the Punjab, who was blocked from the rest of India by Sindh and Rajasthan deserts and the British on the Sutlej, it contained no personality of power and no element of political hope. In 1815 Napoleon was finally defeated. In 1813 company was given a new charter which increased London's power over the company. The final phase fell to the Marquess of Hastings, manager of Warren Hastings's impeachment. He first waged a frontier war with the Gurkhas (1815-16) from which both sides emerged with a mutual respect which has continued to this day. He then drew up a master plan for the extermination of the Pindaris in their central Indian lairs with the cooperation of the Maratha chiefs on pain of war. The Marathas were too spirited to submit and too divided to unite. The result was a straggling, disorganized war with inevitable disaster to their cause. Schindia submitted in time to save his state at the price of his loss of control of Rajasthan. The Peshwa in Poona, the Bhonsle in Nagpur, and Holkar's forces took arms at different times and were thus defeated without much difficulty. The Pindaris were hunted hither and thither until their bands broke up and their leaders scattered. By mid 1818 all was over. The chief political casualty was the Peshwa's territories which were annexed to Bombay, the Peshwa himself being pensioned off near Kanpur. The big political result was the establishment of British system, having lost their own sun in the person of the Peshwa, the surviving Maratha states entered the orbit of the British system. The Rajput states, as always, were kept in good humor by the British
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