Crown rule replaced Company rule after the 1857 rebellion
The British Raj was Crown government on the Indian subcontinent from 1858 to 1947, begun when East India Company authority passed to Queen Victoria after the 1857 rebellion—she became Empress of India in 1876—and ended in partition into India and Pakistan.
Raj comes from a Hindustani word for reign or rule, and the British Raj was the period from 1858 to 1947 when the British Crown governed the Indian subcontinent directly. It began on 28 June 1858, after the Indian Rebellion of 1857, when authority passed from the East India Company to Queen Victoria, who was proclaimed Empress of India in 1876. The territory mixed British India, run directly, with princely states whose own rulers accepted British paramountcy. As India it was a founding member of both the League of Nations and the United Nations, and it sent teams to five Summer Olympics between 1900 and 1936.
At its height the Raj covered nearly all of present-day India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Myanmar, minus small European enclaves such as Portuguese Goa and French Pondicherry, and its landscape ran from the Himalayas and the Indo-Gangetic Plain to the Thar Desert. Aden and Lower Burma belonged to it between 1858 and 1937, Upper Burma was added in 1886, and British Somaliland and the Straits Settlements were attached for short spells. Burma became a separate colony in 1937 and independent in 1948. Ceylon, Nepal, Bhutan and the Maldives stayed outside it.
The rebellion changed British thinking. Before 1857, officials under Lord Dalhousie had rushed to remake Indian institutions on a British model. Afterwards they drew three lessons. They reorganised the army, disbanding units from the regions at the core of the revolt. They rewarded the princes and great landlords who had stayed loyal, the breakwaters in a storm in Lord Canning's phrase, by guaranteeing their lands, and halted land reform for 90 years. And they abandoned social reform of the kind that had banned sati, with Victoria's proclamation disclaiming any wish to impose British convictions on her subjects.
Economically, railways, roads, canals, bridges and telegraph lines, many begun under Dalhousie, spread rapidly, carrying cotton from the interior to ports such as Bombay for export to England and bringing British manufactured goods back. Crown rule ended in 1947 with partition into two dominions, India and Pakistan; in 1971 East Pakistan declared independence as Bangladesh.
Source: British Raj
