British Empire
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘British Empire’
The British encountered no stouter resistance in India than Mysore’s gifted commmander Hyder Ali and his son, Tipu.
The Princely State of Mysore was for many years one of the most prosperous and pro-British kingdoms of the Raj, but in the late eighteenth century it was briefly dominated by two of Britain’s most bitter and successful opponents, Hyder Ali (?1722-1782) and his son Tipu (1750-1799).
The Princely State of Mysore (today in Karnataka) was hailed as an example of good governance to all the world.
The Indian Kingdom of Mysore is associated with two remarkable figures, Tipu Sultan (1750-1799), ‘the Tiger of Mysore’, and Maharaja Krishnaraja Wodeyar IV (1884-1940). Tipu fought the British and anyone else for nearly twenty years of unrelenting bloodshed; Krishnaraja made Mysore a world leader in industrial, artistic and social advancement.
Samuel Smiles reminds us that until we brought the railways to India, we had little to boast about as an imperial power.
Samuel Smiles’s biography of George and Robert Stephenson opens with a heartfelt appreciation of the social and economic progress brought by the railways. He describes how this peculiarly British invention had by the 1870s already reached most European countries and beyond, and of course he could not fail to mention the railways of India.
The opening of the Bombay to Thane line was the real beginning of British India.
Just twenty-three years after the Liverpool and Manchester Railway hosted the world’s first regular steam-hauled passenger service, British entrepreneurs began running the first trains in India. The ‘Illustrated London News’ described it as an event more important than all Britain’s battles on Indian soil.
A young Indian student from Cambridge was selected for England’s cricket team after public pressure.
In 1934, India inaugurated the Ranji Trophy, a first-class cricket tournament in honour of K.S. Ranjitsinhji (1872-1933), an Indian prince of the British Raj who played cricket for several years at the very highest level for England, a country he loved dearly and which loved him in return.
South African settlers of Dutch descent could not escape the march of the British Empire.
In 1881 and again in 1899, Britain was drawn into a conflict with settlers of Dutch descent in the South African Republic, also known as Transvaal, as her Empire continued to grow apace under the twin forces of colonial emigration and international trade - much to the chagrin of her colonial rival, Germany.