QUEEN VICTORIA 1819-1901
During Queen Victoria’s 63-year reign, the British Empire grew and changed irrevocably at home and abroad.
Cities like Manchester and Birmingham evolved through industrialisation and the creation of revolutionary railways lines, which allowed for the transportation of goods around the country in the same day.
The railways were funded not just by archetypical Victorian capitalists who had made their profits from buying commodities in the new Far East colonies and then making them back home, but also by a new lower-middle class that had indirectly benefited from the profits of empire and had become valuable shareholders in a modernised economy.
The monarchy was now firmly on the path towards constitutionalism, so Queen Victoria was more of a symbol of empire than a major player like her Stuart predecessors. A state in Australia bears her name and Victoria’s capital is named after her first prime minister, Viscount Melbourne. There is also a Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, and Victoria was the name of the capital of colonial Hong Kong, leased by Britain from China until 1997.
Under Victoria, the economic and de facto political control that Britain had imposed on India under Elizabeth I through the East India Company came under threat. In 1857, Indian soldiers began to revolt, perturbed by the continued imposition of British values at the expense of their own local customs and frustrated that they were not receiving any of the social or economic benefits of empire.
Rumours had begun to circulate that newly introduced rifles required Indian soldiers to bite into the cartridges, allegedly greased with animal fat from sacred animals, abhorrent to both Muslims and Hindus. The Indian soldiers marched on Delhi with the support of the Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar II and revolt soon spread across the Ganges to Agra, Cawnpore and Lucknow.
Most historians generally agree that the British slaughtered 100,000 soldiers but the Indian historian Amaresh Misra argues that the death toll could be as high as 10 million if the number of civilians killed in the ten years following the revolt, as the British attempted to reassert their control, are taken into account.
In the aftermath of the munity, India was formally incorporated into the ever-expanding British Empire as a colony and Queen Victoria was made empress of India in 1876. She took a great interest in the newest country to be welcomed into the fold and, with the encouragement of her Indian servant and confidante Abdul Karim, she even learned to write in Hindustani.