On 29 March 1849 the Punjab was annexed to British India. Duleep Singh Ji, ten, signed. The terms took the state, the Koh-i-Noor and the treasury, granted a pension, and required the boy to live wherever the government directed.
A Board of Administration was set up under the Lawrence brothers, John and Henry, with Charles Mansel. It disarmed the population, took in about 120,000 weapons, abolished the Sikh state's revenue farming, cut the land tax, built roads and canals and set up a police.
The administrative style became known as the Punjab School and was consciously personal and paternalist, with district officers holding wide powers. It was exported to the frontier and admired throughout the empire.
The same administration recruited the disbanded Khalsa soldiery into its own army. By 1857 Punjab supplied a large share of the force that retook Delhi, and by 1914 the province of about a twentieth of India's population supplied around half its army.
Punjab went from independent kingdom to the empire's chief military labour reserve in one generation. That is the fact underneath everything that happens here for the next hundred years.
Henry Lawrence wanted the state kept under a Sikh ruler with British control over it and lost that argument to his brother John and to Dalhousie. The two of them ran the Board together for four years disagreeing about nearly everything, until Henry was moved to Rajputana in 1853.
The stone went to London by ship, was shown at the Great Exhibition in 1851, was thought disappointing, and was recut from 186 carats to 105 and set in a crown. It has since been asked for by India, Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan, and it is in the Tower.
It was not the last major annexation, since Awadh was annexed in 1856, but it produced the province that everything after 1849 on this site takes place in.