The Victorian Era

British Empire in the Victorian Era

Article · History & Overview · The Victorian Era, 1837–1901

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The British Empire in the Victorian era was the largest empire in history. At its peak in 1921 it covered about 35.5 million square kilometres, embraced roughly a quarter of the world’s land surface, and contained around 412 million people, between a fifth and a quarter of humanity. India, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, large parts of Africa, much of the Caribbean, parts of South-East Asia, and a string of trading posts, naval bases, and small colonies around the world were all part of what was sometimes called the empire on which the sun never set. The empire shaped the politics, the culture, the economy, and the self-image of the Victorians, and it left an inheritance that still shapes the present.

The history of the Victorian empire is examined in the Reign of Queen Victoria page in relation to the queen, and in Victorian Political History in relation to British politics. The economic context is examined in The Victorian Economy and Industrialization. The broader historical setting is set out in The Victorian Era: A Complete Historical Overview.

The Early Victorian Empire

The British Empire in 1837 was already very large, but it was not yet the global empire of the late Victorian period. The empire of the 1830s consisted of the older settler colonies of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand; the older tropical colonies of the Caribbean and West Africa; the trading posts of the East India Company in India and South-East Asia; and a string of small colonies and naval bases around the world. The empire was administered in a haphazard fashion, with the colonies being run by a combination of the Colonial Office in London, the East India Company, the local governors, and the local legislatures.

The early Victorian period saw the first major expansion of the empire. The annexation of Natal in 1843, the conquest of Sind in 1843, the annexation of the Punjab after the two Sikh Wars of 1845 to 1846 and 1848 to 1849, the annexation of Lower Burma in 1852, and the establishment of the colony of Otago in New Zealand in 1848 and of Canterbury in 1850 all extended British power. The discovery of gold in California in 1848 and in Australia in 1851 led to gold rushes that transformed the new colonies. The most important development of the early Victorian period, however, was the Indian Rebellion of 1857, which led to the dissolution of the East India Company and the establishment of the British Raj in 1858.

The Indian Rebellion of 1857 and the British Raj

The Indian Rebellion of 1857, long called the “Indian Mutiny” or the “Sepoy Mutiny” in British usage, was the most serious challenge to British rule in India in the nineteenth century. It began with the Indian soldiers of the East India Company’s army, the sepoys, who had been issued with new cartridges that were rumoured to be greased with the fat of cows and pigs, an offence to both Hindu and Muslim soldiers. The rebellion spread across large parts of northern and central India, and it was accompanied by a civilian uprising. It was eventually suppressed, but it was accompanied by atrocities on both sides, including the massacre of British civilians at Cawnpore and the indiscriminate killing of Indian civilians by British forces.

The rebellion led to the dissolution of the East India Company and the establishment of direct British rule of India under the Crown. The Government of India Act of 1858 transferred the powers of the East India Company to the Crown, and a new office, that of Secretary of State for India, was created in the British cabinet. Queen Victoria issued a proclamation to the people of India in November 1858 that became the founding document of the British Raj. The proclamation promised equality of treatment regardless of race, religion, or caste, and it laid the foundations of the system of indirect rule through the existing princely states and the new British provinces. A Viceroy, directly answerable to London, governed India from Calcutta and, after 1911, from Delhi. The system of rule established in 1858 would last until 1947.

The Scramble for Africa

The most dramatic expansion of the British Empire in the late Victorian period was the Scramble for Africa, the rapid partition of the African continent among the European powers in the 1880s and 1890s. The Berlin Conference of 1884 to 1885, convened by Bismarck and attended by fourteen European powers, established the rules for the recognition of new African colonies and effectively licensed the partition. The British claim to large parts of Africa was established by a series of treaties with local rulers, by military conquest, and by the personal ambitions of explorers and administrators. The most important figure in the British claim was Cecil Rhodes, the founder of the British South Africa Company, who established the colony of Rhodesia in the 1890s and left his name to Northern and Southern Rhodesia. Other important figures included Sir George Goldie, who organised the Royal Niger Company and established the British claim to Nigeria, and Frederick Lugard, who extended the British presence in East Africa and later became the first Governor-General of a united Nigeria.

Major British acquisitions in Africa in this period included Egypt, occupied in 1882 to secure the Suez Canal and formally declared a British protectorate in 1914; Lagos, annexed in 1861 and absorbed into the colony of Nigeria in 1914; the territories of the Imperial British East Africa Company, chartered in 1888 and taken over as the East Africa Protectorate in 1895; the Uganda Protectorate, established in 1894; Rhodesia, named after Cecil Rhodes; and the Cape Colony and Natal, the two South African colonies that were the scene of the First Boer War of 1880 to 1881 and the Second Boer War of 1899 to 1902. Other British possessions taken or consolidated in the period included the Gold Coast (Ghana), Sierra Leone, the Gambia, British Somaliland, Bechuanaland (Botswana), Basutoland (Lesotho), and the territory that became Nyasaland (Malawi). The Scramble for Africa led to a number of major conflicts: the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879, the First Boer War of 1880 to 1881, the Mahdist War in the Sudan of 1881 to 1899, the Second Boer War of 1899 to 1902, and the various campaigns in West Africa. The most serious was the Second Boer War, in which the British army suffered embarrassing defeats at the hands of Boer commandos, and which was eventually won only by the application of overwhelming force, including the use of concentration camps for Boer civilians in which more than 26,000 Afrikaner civilians, mostly women and children, died.

The Imperial Economy

The British Empire was an economic system as well as a political system. The empire provided raw materials: cotton from India and Egypt, rubber from Malaya and West Africa, tin from Malaya, gold and diamonds from South Africa, tea from India and Ceylon, jute from Bengal, and many other commodities. The empire provided markets for British manufactured goods, including textiles, iron and steel goods, and machinery. The empire provided opportunities for British investment, with capital being exported to Canada, Australia, India, South Africa, and the rest of the settler world. The City of London became the financial centre of the empire, and the pound sterling became the principal international currency. By 1914, British overseas investment amounted to perhaps £4 billion, more than the rest of the world put together, and a very large share of it was invested within the empire.

The imperial economy had a profound effect on the economies of the colonies. The deindustrialisation of India, which had been a major producer of textiles in the eighteenth century, was one of the consequences of British rule. The development of the plantation economies of the Caribbean, the mining economies of South Africa, and the settler economies of Canada and Australia was another. The economic history of the empire is examined in The Victorian Economy and Industrialization.

Imperial Culture and the Idea of Empire

The Victorian Empire was a cultural system as well as a political and economic one. The idea of empire was central to the Victorian self-image, and the empire was celebrated in literature, in art, in music, in education, and in popular culture. Rudyard Kipling, the poet of empire, coined the phrase the white man’s burden in his 1899 poem of the same name, and his stories and verses were read across the English-speaking world. The illustrated papers of the period, including the Illustrated London News, the Graphic, and the Strand Magazine, carried pictures of the empire to a mass audience. The great exhibitions of the period, including the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the various colonial exhibitions of the late Victorian period, were celebrations of the imperial idea. The “civilising mission”, the claim that British rule brought law, Christianity, and modern infrastructure to subject peoples, was the official ideology of the late empire, and it was taught in the new English public schools and preached from the pulpits of the established churches.

The imperial culture was not, however, uniform. There were many Victorians who opposed the empire on moral grounds, and the critical tradition was a substantial one. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, the diplomat and poet, attacked Lord Salisbury’s “forward” policy in Egypt and the Sudan in a series of polemics from the 1880s onwards. The Indian National Congress, founded in 1885 by Allan Octavian Hume, became the principal forum of Indian political demands for reform. The Jamaican planter and pan-Africanist Robert Campbell campaigned against racism in the 1890s. The atrocities of the Second Boer War, exposed by reporters such as Emily Hobhouse, brought millions of Britons into the anti-imperialist camp. The history of this critical tradition is examined in Victorian Literature, Theatre, and the Written Word.

The Other Territories of the Empire

The empire of 1901 was a global patchwork that stretched far beyond Africa. The Indian subcontinent, the so-called jewel in the crown, included modern India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Burma, and was governed by a Viceroy. Canada, federated in 1867, was a self-governing Dominion with its own Prime Minister and Parliament. Australia, federated in 1901 on the very day of Victoria’s funeral, was a second Dominion. New Zealand became a Dominion in 1907. In the Mediterranean, Cyprus had been administered by Britain since 1878; Egypt was effectively a British dependency from 1882. In the Far East, the Straits Settlements, including Singapore, Malacca, and Penang, and the Federated Malay States were governed from Singapore; Hong Kong, ceded to Britain in 1842 after the First Opium War, was expanded by the lease of the New Territories in 1898; and Ceylon (Sri Lanka) was a Crown Colony. In the Caribbean, Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados, and a score of smaller islands remained British possessions. Together these territories, with the African colonies, formed the largest empire the world had ever seen.

The Legacy of the Empire

The British Empire in the Victorian era left a long and complex legacy. The political boundaries of the modern world, including the boundaries of the modern states of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Burma, Malaysia, Singapore, Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone, the Gambia, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Malawi, South Africa, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, were largely drawn in the Victorian period. The legal systems, the educational systems, the languages, the religions, and the political institutions of these countries all bear the marks of the British imperial past. The Commonwealth of Nations, the successor organisation to the British Empire, is the most visible contemporary institution of the imperial legacy.

The legacy of empire is contested. The supporters of empire point to the spread of the English language, the spread of common law, the spread of parliamentary institutions, the development of the railway, the development of the telegraph, and the integration of the world economy. The critics of empire point to the slave trade, the famines, the economic exploitation, the racial hierarchies, the cultural destruction, and the political violence. The history of the empire is examined in The Reign of Queen Victoria and in Victorian Political History.