The Victorians and the British Empire: a brief guide and timeline

“The loss of America in the 18th century, following the American War of Independence, had been an immense blow to Britain’s confidence,” says Sarah Richardson, professor of history at the University of Warwick, “and at Victoria’s accession, the British Empire was in a state of flux. But by the end of the 19th century, Britain’s existing empire had expanded beyond recognition, and colonisation had become a moral mission to share and spread British values across the globe.”

Powered by the Industrial Revolution, which had put itself at the forefront of global manufacturing, Britain was eager both to develop new markets for its goods and to secure easy access to raw materials from elsewhere in the world. The expansion of Britain’s industries, and the hugely positive effect on its economy, was dependent on the expansion of its empire. The result was a complex tangle of trade, politics and governance, with the traffic – both of goods and people – going in either direction. Britain needed raw materials and cheap labour; in return, it offered its colonies technical advances (such as the railway) and societal improvements, such as medicine and education. The latter, though, often came with the imposition of a certain way of life – and occasionally a certain level of brutality.

Expanding in the manner in which it did during the 19th century, the British Empire was significantly aided by the comparative weakness of other imperial European powers. Having defeated France in the Napoleonic Wars (1803–15), Britain found itself unrivalled when it came to both military and economic power. For the next 100 years, it encountered very little military conflict between the great powers; the century between 1815 and 1914 became known as the Pax Britannica – Latin for ‘British Peace’.

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A Tudor dream realised?

The notion of a British Empire was not a 19th-century one. It had its origins in the early days of the Tudors when, at the end of the 15th century, Henry VII commissioned explorers to seek out the most efficient way of reaching India by sea. One such explorer, the Italian John Cabot, inadvertently landed in North America in 1497, possibly coming ashore at Newfoundland, Labrador or Cape Breton Island.

By the time Henry VII’s granddaughter, Elizabeth I, reached the throne, English foreign policy was largely based on defence rather than expansion. Nonetheless, in 1584 Walter Ralegh was granted a royal charter to establish a settlement in North America, sending a group of settlers to Roanoke in Virginia the following year to set up a colony. It was the first attempt at the English colonisation of what would later become the United States.

In 1600, Elizabeth granted a royal charter to the East India Company, with the express purpose of trading extensively in the Indian Ocean region and beyond, an area where both the Portuguese and the Dutch already had well-established trade networks. The East India Company became extraordinarily successful, expanding rapidly to the point where it was controlling half of the world’s trade.

The East India Company was no mere commercial body, though; it blurred the distinction between trade and politics. By the turn of the 19th century – and aided by its own private army, whose number was twice that of the British Army – it effectively ruled, through the installation of puppet leaders, a very large proportion of India. The company also played a huge part in opening China up to trade, thanks to its cultivation of opium in Bengal, and its subsequent export to the port of Canton, which led to the two Opium Wars between Britain and China. The upshot of the First Opium War was the ceding of Hong Kong in 1842, a territory that would become a keystone of the British Empire for many subsequent decades.

Speaking in the House of Commons in 1833, the MP Thomas Babington Macaulay observed that the East India Company’s apparent raison d’être – trade – had become “auxiliary to its sovereignty”. However, it was living on borrowed time. After the Indian Rebellion, which began in 1857, the company was abolished, with the subcontinent coming under the direct control of the crown – known as the British Raj.

The East India Company was no mere commercial body: it blurred the distinction between trade and politics

“When Victoria came to the throne, Britain’s most important colony was India. Victoria herself became Empress of India in 1877 and she viewed the country as the jewel in her crown”, says Richardson. “And it is really in India that you can see the foundations being laid for what’s often known as a ‘moral imperative’ for an empire – the idea that Britain had a moral obligation to bring its values of democracy and industry and free trade and all of those sorts of things to other countries. The idea of ‘civilising’ the people they ruled was very important to the Victorians.”

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Expanding boundaries

Britain’s stronghold in south Asia, both commercially and politically, was further strengthened with the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, the body of water that offered a dramatically speedier passage to India. In 1882, Britain took control of the canal from the French, a move that precipitated an expansion of the empire’s boundaries. Starting in the early 1880s, the so-called ‘Scramble for Africa’ saw the imperial tentacles stretch deep into that continent.

Having already colonised large parts of West Africa – including modern-day Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Ghana and the Gambia – earlier in the century, Britain effectively took control of Egypt, the country that the canal ran through. From there, expansion spread in a southerly direction, through Sudan, Kenya, Uganda and down into southern Africa. By 1902 and the end of the Second Boer War, the map of Britain’s African colonies and protectorates traced a huge swathe across the continent, from Port Said in the north to the Cape of Good Hope on the southern tip.

Africa was rich in raw materials and natural resources, such as gold and diamonds. In return, it offered a substantial market for British produced goods – as did the rest of the empire, of course.

Colonies were often far from acquiescent when it came to coming under the rule of the British crown

The empire’s expansion wasn’t taken as a given; colonies were often far from acquiescent when it came to coming under the rule of the British crown. Uprisings were a recurring motif of the Victorian imperial age, whether it was the Indian Rebellion that ultimately did for the East India Company, or the First Taranaki War in New Zealand (1860-61), or Jamaica’s Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865.

Edging towards an end

Certain colonies that had been staples of empire for many decades, and which were comparatively peaceful places, were rewarded with ‘dominion’ status, making them semi-independent. Canada was the first of these, in 1867, with Australia following suit in 1901. However, and certainly in the early case of Canada, this new status was decidedly limited. London retained the right to overrule decisions made across the legislative, executive and judicial branches of government.

After its peak during the Victorian era, the empire began to recede during the 20th century, with the British economy significantly crippled by the cost of two world wars. Many of the colonies, protectorates and dominions embarked on a programme of national self-determination. In 1957, ten years after independence had been gained by India, Ghana, too, removed itself from colonial control, followed by the rest of Britain’s African colonies. Across the Atlantic, throughout the 1960s, '70s and '80s, the various islands that made up the British West Indies also extricated themselves from direct rule by London.

• The decline and fall of the British empire: 11 key moments

From its height during Queen Victoria’s long reign, when a quarter of the world’s landmass was under the Crown, the British Empire had entered its twilight.

This article was first published in the October 2020 edition of History Revealed