In 1860 which british official

It soon became clear that the negotiating party had been ambushed en route to Tongzhou by a large number of Chinese cavalry, and on 18 September , allied forces under Montauban and Grant defeated 30, Chinese troops under Sengge Rinchen in a pitched battle at Zhangjiawan, east of Tongzhou.

On 19 September , following a failed allied attempt to secure the release of the remaining prisoners taken during the ambush, preparations were begun for the decisive final battle. At 5am on 21 September , eight to ten thousand allied troops advanced on the bridge.

The battle became famous for the doomed cavalry charges performed by the Mongolian cavalry in the face of concentrated allied infantry and artillery fire, and the Chinese losses killed or wounded were estimated at between 20, and 25, The allied losses, as described in the official report on the campaign released in , came to 1, wounded or killed.

Emperor Xianfeng fled Peking, leaving his brother, Prince Kong, in charge of peace negotiations. The allies received reinforcements and the advance on the Chinese capital was restrained and careful. On 5 October , they bivouacked about five kilometres from the city walls. On 6 October , learning that a detachment of Chinese cavalry had withdrawn to the Summer Palace, the allied troops advanced on the position.

The night of 6 October , the pillage spilled over and became more violent as Chinese looters stole into the grounds and made off with some of the takings.

Negotiations with Prince Kong had begun on 22 September , and on 9 October , the diplomatic prisoners were released to the allies. On 10 October , with winter fast approaching, the allies gave Kong an ultimatum. After tense last-ditch negotiations, the gate was opened and allied troops occupied the area. On 17 October , Kong was given the deadline of 23 October to sign the Convention of Peking; failure to do so would result in the imperial palace being bombarded.

In response to the torture and in some cases, death of a number of British, French and Indian captives who had been seized during the peace negotiations, on 18 October Lord Elgin, the British High Commissioner to China, ordered the destruction of the Summer Palace.

It took three days to burn down. On 20 October, Kong fearing further reprisals, agreed to pay indemnities totalling 4 million francs to the prisoners and their families and on 22 October accepted the remaining articles of the convention.

These were for the most part the same as those of the Treaty of Tien-tsin from , although the indemnity sum had risen to 8 million francs.

The ratification and signing ceremonies took place on 24 and 25 October. Peking remained unoccupied by allied troops, who bivouacked outside the city walls. On 26 and 28 October , the bodies of the allied prisoners tortured and executed by the Chinese were buried. On 1 November , the French troops left Peking for their winter quarters in Tien-tsin, arriving there on 6 November.

The first English troops arrived on 12 November. Discontent, on the other hand, came not just from policies of racial discrimination at the hands of the British in India, but also from specific government actions like the use of Indian troops in imperial campaigns e.

The event contributed to the establishment of the Indian National Congress, the single most influential organization of the Indian independence movement. During its first twenty years, Congress primarily debated British policy toward India. However, its debates created a new outlook that held Great Britain responsible for draining India of its wealth. Britain did this, the nationalists claimed, by unfair trade, restraint on indigenous Indian industry, and using Indian taxes to pay the high salaries of the British civil servants in India.

By , although the Congress had emerged as an all-India political organization, its achievement was undermined by its singular failure to attract Muslims, who felt that their representation in government service was inadequate.

In response, the All India Muslim League was founded in Like most of the Congress at the time, Jinnah did not favor outright self-rule, considering British influences on education, law, culture, and industry as beneficial to India.

To secure the interests of the Muslim diaspora in British India, the League eventually played a decisive role during the s in the Indian self-rule movement and developed into the driving nationalist force that led to the creation of Pakistan in the Indian subcontinent. The nationalistic sentiments among Congress members led the movement to be represented in the bodies of government and the legislation and administration of India.

Congressmen saw themselves as loyalists, but wanted an active role in governing their own country, albeit as part of the Empire. However, the early part of the 20th century saw a more radical approach towards political self-rule swaraj propagated by increasingly influential Mahatma Gandhi. Swaraj put stress on governance not by a hierarchical government, but by individuals and community building. The focus was on political decentralization.

Demonstration against the British rule in India, c. Under the presidency of Jawaharlal Nehru at his historic Lahore session in December , the Indian National Congress adopted a resolution calling for complete self-rule and end of British rule.

Some activists preached armed revolution to achieve self-rule. Poets and writers used literature, poetry, and speech as toolS for political awareness. Feminists promoted the emancipation of Indian women and their participation in national politics. Others championed the cause of the disadvantaged sections of Indian society within the larger self-rule movement.

The work of these movements led ultimately to the Indian Independence Act , which ended the suzerainty in India and the creation of Pakistan. India remained a Dominion of the Crown until , when the Constitution of India came into force, establishing the Republic of India.

Pakistan was a dominion until , when it adopted its first republican constitution. In the aftermath of World War II, European colonies, controlling more than one billion people throughout the world, still ruled most of the Middle East, southeast Asia, Africa, and until the Indian subcontinent.

Independence movements applying a number of different strategies, both militant and based on the civil disobedience model, emerged across the African continent and in regions of Asia that remained under the European control. As a result of colonialism and imperialism, a majority of Africa lost sovereignty and control of precious natural resources. By the s, the colonial powers had cultivated, sometimes inadvertently, a small elite of leaders educated in Western universities and advocated the idea of self-determination.

In the northeast the continued independence of the Empire of Ethiopia remained a beacon of hope to pro-independence activists. However, with the anti-colonial wars of the s barely over, modern forms of African nationalism gained strength in the early 20th-century with the emergence of Pan-Africanism.

This worldwide intellectual movement aims to encourage and strengthen bonds of solidarity between all people of African descent. Modern Pan-Africanism began around the start of the 20th century. The red, black, and green Pan-African flag designed by the Universal Negro Improvement Association in Variations of the flag have been used in various countries and territories in Africa and the Americas to represent Pan-Africanist ideologies.

Several Pan-African organizations and movements have often employed the emblematic red, black, and green tri-color scheme in variety of contexts. Additionally, the flags of a number of nations in Africa and of Pan-African groups use green, yellow, and red.

It was not a treaty and was not submitted to the British Parliament or the Senate of the United States for ratification, but became a very influential document. Among the principal points of the Charter were post-war territorial adjustments to be decided in accord with the wishes of the peoples concerned and the statement that all people had a right to self-determination.

While Churchill rejected its universal applicability when it came to the self-determination of subject nations, after World War II, the U. In Asia, the image of European pre-eminence was shattered by the wartime Japanese occupations of large portions of British, French, and Dutch territories in the Pacific. The destabilization of European rule led to the rapid growth of nationalist movements—especially in Indonesia, Malaya, Burma, and French Indochina.

In the Philippines, the U. However, the Philippines remained under pressure to adopt a political and economic system similar to their old imperial master.

A year after India gained its independence, the exhausted British granted independence to Burma and Ceylon. In the Middle East, Britain granted independence to Jordan in and two years later ended its mandate of Palestine. Following the end of the war, nationalists in Indonesia demanded complete independence from the Netherlands.

A brutal conflict ensued and in , through United Nations mediation, the Dutch East Indies achieved independence, becoming the new nation of Indonesia. France granted the State of Vietnam based in Saigon independence in whilst Laos and Cambodia received independence in In Africa, the struggle culminated in , known today as the Year of Africa, when the number of independent countries rose from nine with population 95 million to 26 population million , gaining their independence from Belgium, France, and the United Kingdom.

The Year of Africa altered the symbolic status of Africans worldwide by forcing the world to recognize the existence of African nations on the international arena. It marked the beginning of a new, more Afrocentric era in African studies and it was a major boost for African Americans, who were engaged in a civil rights strife within their own country.

The struggle of independence in Africa, however, did not end but was fueled by the events of as many colonies continued to fight for their independence throughout the s and s. Privacy Policy. Skip to main content.

European Imperialism in East Asia. Search for:. British India. Permission was granted to several ships, but in a group of merchants known as the Adventurers succeeded at gaining a Royal Charter under the name Governor and Company of Merchants of London trading with the East Indies. For 15 years, the charter awarded the newly formed company a monopoly on trade with all countries east of the Cape of Good Hope and west of the Straits of Magellan.

The Company decided to gain a territorial foothold in mainland India with official sanction from both Britain and the Mughal Empire. The requested diplomatic mission launched by James I in arranged for a commercial treaty that would give the Company exclusive rights to reside and establish factories in Surat and other areas.

While Portuguese and Spanish influences in the region were soon eliminated, competition against the Dutch resulted in the Anglo-Dutch Wars of the 17th and 18th centuries. These decisions would eventually turn the EIC from a trading company into de facto an administrative agent with wide powers granted by the British government.

The two companies wrestled with each other for some time but it quickly became evident that in practice, the original company faced scarcely any measurable competition. With the backing of its own private army, it was able to assert its interests in new regions in India without further obstacles from other colonial powers.

In the hundred years from the Battle of Plassey in to the Indian Rebellion of , the EIC began to function more as an administrator and less as a trading concern. The EIC was officially dissolved in and the rebellion also led the British to reorganize the army, the financial system, and the administration in India. Its provisions called for the liquidation of the British East India Company, which had been ruling British India under the auspices of Parliament, and the transference of its functions to the British Crown.

East India Company : An English and later British joint-stock company formed to pursue trade with the East Indies but actually trading mainly with the Indian subcontinent and Qing China. It also ruled the beginnings of the British Empire in India. It led to the dissolution of the East India Company in India was thereafter directly governed by the Crown as the new British Raj.

Key Takeaways Key Points The control of rich Bengal gained in the aftermath of the Battle of Plassey brought India into the public spotlight in Britain, and Parliament established regulations to manage the affairs of the East India Company. After the Indian Rebellion of , the British government took control of the Company. All power was transferred from the EIC to the British Crown, which began to administer most of India as a number of provinces.

What followed became known as the British Raj: the rule of the British Crown in the Indian subcontinent between and If the Government of India needed to enact new laws, it followed the decisions of a Legislative Council, half of which consisted of British officials with voting power and half comprised Indians and domiciled Britons in India who served only in an advisory capacity.

Their courts existed under the authority of the respective rulers. The British controlled the external affairs of the princely states absolutely. Its provisions called for the liquidation of the British East India Company, which had been ruling British India under the auspices of Parliament and the transference of its functions to the British Crown.

It ended up trading mainly with the Indian subcontinent and Qing China. Charter Act of : An act that intended to provide for an extension of the royal charter granted to the East India Company. It extended the charter by 20 years, redesignated the Governor-General of Bengal as the Governor-General of India, and deprived the Governors of Bombay and Madras of their legislative powers.

The Governor-General and his executive council were given exclusive legislative powers for the whole of British India. The act ended the activities of the British East India Company as a commercial body and it became a purely administrative body. Key Takeaways Key Points The mission civilisatric e, a French term that translates literally into English as civilising mission , is a rationale for intervention or colonization, purporting to contribute to the spread of civilization and used mostly in relation to the colonization and Westernization of indigenous peoples in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Colonial authorities fervently debated the question of the best policy. The orientalists believed that education should happen in Indian languages while the utilitarians also called anglicists strongly believed that traditional India had nothing to teach regarding modern skills and the best education would happen in English.

Under Macaulay, thousands of elementary and secondary schools were opened, typically with all-male student bodies. Universities in Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras were established in The government opened universities and colleges of higher education by All these benefits, however, went to the Indian elites and middle classes, who were expected to serve as loyal supporters of the British rule in India. The British assumed Indians had to be ruled by heavy hand, with democratic opportunities postponed indefinitely.

Key Terms Whig history : An approach to historiography that presents the past as an inevitable progression towards ever greater liberty and enlightenment, culminating in modern forms of liberal democracy and constitutional monarchy. In general, historians representing this approach emphasize the rise of constitutional government, personal freedoms, and scientific progress.

The term is often applied generally and pejoratively to histories that present the past as the inexorable march of progress towards enlightenment. Learning Objectives Analyze the reasons for the Great Uprising of Key Takeaways Key Points The Indian Rebellion of resulted from an accumulation of factors over time rather than any single event.

In the military, sepoys had a number of grievances, including losing their perquisites as landed gentry and the anticipation of increased land-revenue payments that the annexation of Oudh might bring about; being convinced that the Company was masterminding mass conversions of Hindus and Muslims to Christianity; changes in the terms of professional service; and the issue of promotions based on seniority.

To load the rifle, sepoys had to bite the cartridge open to release the powder, but the grease used on these cartridges was rumored to include tallow derived from beef, offensive to Hindus, and pork, offensive to Muslims.

While the Company was quick to reverse the effects of the policy to quell the unrest, this convinced many sepoys that the rumors were true and their fears were justified. The nobility felt it interfered with a traditional system of inheritance through the Doctrine of Lapse.

Rural landlords lost half their landed estates to peasant farmers as a result of the land reforms in the wake of annexation of Oudh. Some historians have suggested that heavy land-revenue assessment in some areas resulted in many landowning families losing their land or going into great debt.

The alleged killings of women and children by the rebels left many British soldiers seeking revenge. Most of the British press and British public, outraged by the stories of alleged rape and the killings of civilians and wounded British soldiers, did not advocate clemency of any kind. By the Government of India Act , the company was formally dissolved and its ruling powers over India were transferred to the British Crown. The rebellion also transformed both the native and European armies of British India.

It later referred to all native soldiers in the service of the European powers in India. Sepoy execution by blowing from a cannon. The Economy in British India The economy of British India was largely designed to protect and expand interests of the British economy, but the British collaborated closely with the Indian elites who, unlike the masses of ordinary Indians, benefited from the many economic changes.

Historians have pointed to two causes: relatively low labor costs that discouraged investment in new labor-saving technologies and British control of trade and exports of cheap Manchester cotton.

Entrepreneur Jamsetji Tata became the symbol of local industrial success, establishing a company that remains an influential global brand today. India's huge population made it an attractive market for British industry. India also exported huge quantities of goods to Britain, especially tea, which was drunk or exported on from Britain to other countries. Then there were the human resources. The Indian army was probably Britain's single greatest resource.

It was the backbone of the power of the British empire. In , for example, the British viceroy governor of India, Lord Curzon, said 'As long as we rule India, we are the greatest power in the world. If we lose it we shall straightway drop to a third rate power'.

Did India gain or lose from British rule? Some recent research suggests that British rule did little for India in economic terms. Britain gained hugely from ruling India, but most of the wealth created was not invested back into the country. For example, from to about , economic growth in India was very slow - much slower than in Britain or America. India actually started importing food under British rule, because Indians were growing 'cash crops' like cotton and tea to be sent to Britain.

It is extremely important not to forget the terrible famines that devastated India. These were partly the result of weather, but partly caused by British policies. Food shortages came about because Indians were growing cash crops. When famine struck in and the British system of government was completely overwhelmed and could not organise a big enough relief effort. As well as these massive famines, there were many other smaller, more localised famines. This was much less than the French, Dutch and Germans took from their lands.

They brought in an irrigation programme, which increased the amount of land available for farming by 8 times. Battles over the ethical and practical issues involved lasted for the remainder of Victoria's reign.

Some authorities were reluctant to pay, even after infant vaccination was made compulsory in Further tightening of the regulations in and saw a number of anti-vaccination campaigns. In , parents were allowed a certificate of exemption for their children on grounds of conscience.

The Whig government under Viscount Melbourne faced increasing financial and public order difficulties, and Sir Robert Peel forced a general election after defeating the Whigs on a no-confidence motion in the House of Commons.

The Conservatives won a Commons majority of more than This was the first election in modern times when one political party with a parliamentary majority was defeated by another which gained a workable majority of its own. Income tax was levied for the first time during peace by Sir Robert Peel's Conservative government at a rate of 7d three pence in the pound.

The tax was not extended to famine-torn Ireland until Direct taxation was unpopular in Victorian Britain. Many 19th-century finance ministers toyed with the idea of abolishing income tax, but it proved too convenient and too lucrative to lose. More than ministers of the Church of Scotland walked out of the church's general assembly in Edinburgh to form the new Free Church of Scotland. Sometimes known as 'the disruption', the split concerned the relationship between church and state in Scotland.

Those leaving the church, led by the evangelical Thomas Chalmers, believed that a religious organisation should have a clearly religious head and should reject lay patronage. The potato blight struck again the following year.

What began as a natural catastrophe was exacerbated by the actions and inactions of the British government. It is estimated that about a million people died during the four-year famine, and that between and another million emigrated, most to Britain and North America. Sir Robert Peel's famous reforming Conservative government came to an end shortly after legislation to repeal the Corn Laws was passed. This measure removed protective duties which had helped to keep the price of bread high.

He championed it despite opposition from most of his own party, and the motion was carried by Whig votes. Peel never took office again and was remembered as the prime minister who gave the working classes cheaper bread.

Birkenhead, on the opposite bank of the Mersey Estuary from Liverpool, was the venue for the world's first man-made park, complete with lakes, hillocks and meadows. Many such parks followed as Victorians sought to provide open spaces in or near the centre of urban areas. John Mitchel came to prominence during the Irish potato famine.

In March he founded a journal, 'United Irishman', which called for Irish independence and gave practical tips on how to attack British troops. Charged under the Treason Felony Act, he was sentenced to 14 years transportation. This episode helped set Irish resistance to British occupation on a more violent path. Following pressure from the administrator Edwin Chadwick and the findings of the Health of Towns Commission, parliament passed legislation to improve urban conditions and reduce death rates.

Local boards of health were established in places where the population's death rate exceeded 23 per 1, The act was seen as an unwelcome intrusion by central government and proved very unpopular. The central Board of Health was wound up in The Pre-Raphaelites were a group of English artists who rejected what they considered as the effete symbolism and lack of reality of paintings dating from the 16th-century European Renaissance.

They aimed to revert to what they saw as the directness and sincerity of medieval painting. They were championed by the art critic and writer John Ruskin. The Tubular Bridge provided a rail link from the mainland of north Wales, near Bangor, across to Anglesey and on to Holyhead for ferries to Ireland. Its designer, Robert Stephenson, constructed two main spans with rectangular iron tubes feet long.

The bridge itself was 1, feet overall and novel in construction, since the box sections were constructed on shore and then floated into the straits to be lifted into place.

In addition to the population census of England and Wales, a census was taken of places of worship. Awareness of this numerical superiority greatly encouraged the demand for the disestablishment of the Church of England in Wales. Partly due to the opposition of the Conservative party and the House of Lords, this did not take place until This event was the brainchild of Victoria's husband, Prince Albert, and was designed to provide a showcase for the world's most advanced inventions, manufactures and works of art.

It was housed in the massive acre Crystal Palace, designed by Joseph Paxton. The event attracted almost six million visitors during the five summer months it was open. Many ordinary people travelled to London for the first time on cheap-rate excursion trains.

Notable battles included those at Sebastopol, Balaclava which saw the infamous Charge of the Light Brigade and Inkerman. Russia was forced to sue for peace, and the war was ended by the Treaty of Paris in March British troops casualties were as much from poor equipment and medical care as from fighting the Russians.

Following a series of insensitive British demands, members of the Bengal army mutinied in Meerut and marched towards Delhi, which they took two days later. It was re-taken in September. Lucknow was twice besieged before being finally relieved in November.