Dr. .loSIIH HIRLIN of Philadelphia An American in Punjab and Afghanistan) 1827-1839 By JEAN-MARIE
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Josiah Harlan Photograph/rom the book Central Asia. Personal Narrative of General Josiah Harlan (1823-1841).
relations between the United States and India are yet ~~l)be fully assessed, particularly in their triangular connections with France in the aftermath of the Treaty of Versailles (1783). The result of this treaty was the exit from the British Empire of a new world power in North America. But in this same period, in Asia, almost every Indian state quickly passed under British hegemony between 1792 and 1818. With the lone exceptions of Punjab and Sindh, the map of the subcontinent was increasingly "turning red," the color of British territories. The capitulation of Lord Cornwallis to Washington and Rochambeau at Yorktown on October 19, 1781, and the 1783 Treaty of Versailles which gave birth to the United States of America left a lasting impression on the minds of British officers in charge of India. After Yorktown, Lord Cornwallis went to India, where he was appointed governor-general thrice-and commander-in-chieftwice. He died in India in 1805. His obvious task was to prevent India from following the path of America. In 1795, when Lord Wellesley was sailing to India to assume his governorship, he wrote about French and American agents at work with Scindhia in Northern India in order to malign the East India Company. In September 1803 Delhi was captured by the British after the battle of Patparganj. The victor, Lord Lake, commander-in-chief of the British armies in India, was a former officer of Cornwallis in North Carolina, and the officer he appointed as the first British Resident in Delhi was Colonel Ochterlony, who later became famous in the Anglo-Nepalese War and is still remembered today by the mighty column erected in his honor on the maidan adjacent to Esplanade in downtown Calcutta. Ochterlony settled in Delhi in what remained of Dara Shikoh's residence (the "library") and was said to take a "walk" every evening with his 13 wives, riding as many elephants. But this was not the only reason for him being an extraordinary English officer: he belonged to a loyalist family of Boston which migrated to Canada after the Tea-Party. He then joined the English army in India, and was Resident at Delhi from 1803 to 1807. His mission was to make sure that under no circumstances would India go the way America did in 1776-1783, with or without French help.
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osiah Harlan was born in Newlin, Chester County, Pennsylvania, in 1799, the year Maharaja Ranjit Singh captured Lahore and founded the Sikh kingdom of Punjab. His eldest brother, Richard, was a physician, and young Josiah seems to have dabbled in medicine and surgery before he sailed on a merchant ship to Canton. Returning to America, he sailed out again-to Calcutta where the Bengal army, being short of surgeons during the Burmese War, enrolled him in July 1824. He served in Rangoon