why did queen victoria took over east india company?

Question

history of sub-continent

Answer 1

After the Indian Mutiny in 1857, the government of India was transferred from the East India Company to the Crown and in 1877, Victoria became Empress of India. Her empire also included Canada, Australia, India, New Zealand, and large parts of Africa. During this period, Britain was largely uninvolved in European affairs, apart from involvement in the Crimean War (1853 - 1856).


The East India Company, prospering under a feudal royal charter, was gradually relinquishing its political powers to the Crown; nevertheless, it was still landlord and tax collector, and paid the bills for the British-officered army that maintained a semblance of order. Overseeing the directors of the Company by the 1850s was a Cabinet minister in London; and the Governor General, ostensibly its appointee, was in fact designated by the Government.

Beneath the unrelenting sun, Indians toiled for a few farthings a day, under Company and civil-servant employees for whom India was largely the safety-valve for British excess population at home, from younger sons to superfluous daughters. Sepoys -- Indian infantrymen serving under British officers in regiments supported by Company funds -- represented five-sixths of the quarter-million troops in India. The rest were in Queen's regiments, British in origin but in effect hired out to serve an Indian tour of duty.


Early in 1857, a rumor raced among sepoy troops that their new rifles, lighter-weight Enfields, required greased cartridges, for which the manufacturer had used beef fat or -- even worse -- pork fat. Contact with either meant defilement for Moslems as well as Hindus -- even their rejection from the marital bed. The concern about pollution with unclean grease was real; to save a few pennies, some British weapons manufacturers had substituted for the prescribed mutton fat (acceptable to Indians of whatever caste or faith, but not to vegetarians) bullock's or hog's fat.

When, that April, some troops began to reject the defiled cartridges, 85 sepoys at an encampment near Calcutta were court-martialed for insubordination. Their sentences were 10 years' hard labor, in chains, on road building crews. In the heat and dust of India, it was in effect a death sentence, and when the men were publicly fettered to warn off further dissidents, mutiny was certain. Once it flared, first as an attempt to free the prisoners, the violence spread across India.

One of the first deaths (which came, incidentally, from cholera) was General Anson. Epidemics and massacres would take more lives on both sides than conventional skirmishes. All the belated news from India seemed bad, and Victoria vented her fury on the prime minister. "The Queen must say," she wrote to Palmerston on August 25, 1857, "that the Government incur[s] a fearful responsibility toward their country. . . ." To her uncle Leopold she reported, "There is not a family hardly who is not in sorrow and anxiety about their children, and in all [social] ranks-India being the place where everyone was anxious to place a son!!" No better line could have been written to explain the importance of India in the Victorian era. With the raising of the last significant siege in December 1857, the Queen wrote to Lady Canning, wife of the Governor-General, "Thank God! Lucknow is saved!" Charlotte Canning, one of the Queen's former Ladies of the Bedchamber, had been commanded to send her full reports every six weeks. Reporting on everything but her husband's infidelities, Lady Canning's letters and drawing were, Victoria told her, the most useful information from India, as administrative messages were guarded and self-protective. After Lucknow, the mutiny began to dissipate, although as late as 1859 thousands of rebels still held out on the borders of Nepal. By then it had long been clear, even to the most laissez faire politicians in distant London, that the East India Company was obsolete. Legislation to take royal control of India through a viceroy received Victoria's signature on August 2, 1858, the Queen writing to Canning (who became viceroy, with an earldom) that direct Government responsibility for "that enormous Empire which is so bright a jewel of her Crown" was "a source of great satisfaction and pride."


With the Prince of Wales's royal progress through India in 1875-76, and Victoria's new title as Empress of India, engineered at the same time by Disraeli, the subcontinent became the key imperial colony, a position ratified, also, in 1875 by the prime minister's arrangement to purchase, for the Government, shares in the Suez Canal owned by the bankrupt Khedive of Egypt. It gave Britain a controlling interest in that crucial passage to India, opened in 1869. The British obsession with India, which was romantic as well as political and economic, would last until independence, and the tumultuous partition into Islamic Pakistan and mostly Hindu India, after World War II in 1947.

The Queen-Empress never visited India herself, but would bring the vast country to her in many symbolic ways, importing Indian manservants, having an Indian secretary teach her sufficient Hindi to enable her to write diary entries in the language, having an Indian dish on most of her dinner menus, wearing and displaying jewels from India, such as the famous Kohi-noor diamond from the Punjab, and adding a large "Durbar Room" to Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, replete with art and artifacts from the country, so that she could step into her own India.

Answer 2

The East India Company which was permitted by the Govt to do business in India overstretched it domain of business to political and military interference with the local kings and nawabs of the country leading to a blazing trail of exploitation of the people in the rural India. This eventually led to a mutiny on a grand scale under the aging Mughal Emperor which earned the East India Company a very bad name worldwide compelling the Queen to take over the control of government in India into her hands.

Answer 3

Queen Victoria was a constitutional monarch and didn't 'take over' anything. She had no power to act in such a way. It was the Government of Great Britain and Ireland which took over the Company and added India to the Empire, giving the title of Empress of India to Victoria.

Answer 4

It is just like saying a person is 'discharging the functions of a Manager' and his being designated as 'Manager'. In 1877, she was officially designated as Empress of India. Being Queen of England does not automatically make her the Empress, until the title is conferred.