In the 1770s, the Punjab was sixty-eight pieces of a wild and prosperous land inhabited by a brutal and querulous people making a living by plunder even as invasion after invasion from the north-west frontier trampled it. Ranjit Singh stemmed these Afghan raids by capturing all the passes on the Hindu Kush and wresting from Kabul the fairest of its provinces. His matchless and modern army comprised 100,000 disciplined and well-armed men and 300 canons that stood between expansionist Britain and imperial Russia.