Queen Victoria: Proclamation concerning India

The purpose of Queen Victoria's Proclamation concerning India, issued in 1858, was to announce that England was assuming control of its Indian colonies, removing them from the administration of the British East India Company. A secondary purpose was to reassure the people of India that Britain intended to respect and preserve the culture of India, particularly the right of Indians to practice their traditional religions. Queen Victoria's Proclamation concerning India was actually written by Edward Stanley, the fourteenth Earl of Derby.

Victoria, the queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, placed her stamp on most of the nineteenth century in England, for after she assumed the throne in 1837, she ruled for an astonishing sixty-three years and seven months until her death in 1901. She presided over the expansion of a British Empire that spanned the globe, giving rise to the expression that “the sun never sets on the British Empire.” Chief among Britain's colonies was India, which came to be known as “the jewel in the crown” of the British Empire and continued under British administration until it achieved independence in 1947.

Queen Victoria's Proclamation concerning India represented the end point of a process of colonization of India that began in the early sixteenth century, although the British presence began in the early seventeenth century. For more than two centuries, India had been in effect a series of trading outposts under the administration of the British East India Company—at least from the perspective of the British. The Indian Subcontinent was fractured by the activities of competing local rulers, some of whom allied themselves with the British colonizers for their own gain and to preserve their own power. Greed and corruption, however, when combined with efforts to westernize India, undermined the authority of the British East India Company, leading in 1857 to an armed rebellion called the Sepoy Revolt. In response to the revolt, the British Parliament passed the Government of India Act (more formally, An Act for the Better Government of India), which transferred authority of India to the Crown. The queen's proclamation two months later announced the changes that were taking place in British-controlled India.