452 Part VI: European Empires in Asia
and in 1877 Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India. Her representative in
India was the Viceroy, who began to invent imperial rituals that were extraordi-
nary amalgams of Mughal, British, and brand-new extravaganzas. The lesson
of 1857 had been, in part, that the Indian elite—heads of princely states of all
sizes and called by an assortment of titles (raja, maharaja, nawab, rana, etc.)—
had to be drawn into bonds of loyalty and mutual self-interest to Britain. What
couldn’t be done before with the Company might better be done with the
Crown. Relations with Indian princes were improved by ending the doctrine of
lapse, honoring all treaties made with them, and incorporating them in a new
“symbolic-cultural constitution” of titles, honors, “imperial assemblages” and
darbars. The result was not to lessen but strengthen British control by interfer-
ing less with religious custom, binding the Indian elite more closely in ties of
mutual interest, and continuing policies of economic interdependence.China: Opium Wars and the Treaty Century
For a thousand years India exported religious ideas and learned masters to
China; then for half a dozen centuries there was little to send from India to aThe 1857 Rebellion (known as the Indian Mutiny in older texts) swept across much of north
India. Soon after its beginning in the British garrison in Meerut, the insurgents took Delhi,
where they coerced the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah II, to accept leadership of the move-
ment. The elderly emperor understood the impossibility of the situation but had no real choice.
After the British retook the city in 1858, the last Mughal emperor was put on trial and exiled to
Rangoon (Yangon), Burma, where he died in 1862.