Abstract
The British Empire in the period up to the mid nineteenth century was largely the creation of an old regime, the workings of which was based on traditional institutions. The very term ‘Empire’ was still, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, linked to the more local concerns of the British Isles though, after the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, the British were beginning to see themselves more as rulers of an empire that spanned the globe.1 After the Great Reform Bill of 1832 and the associated constitutional revolution, the institutions which ruled at home and abroad were gradually modernized but they still bore the mark of the accumulation of ages. Imperial policy was gradually achieving greater coordination through a centralized Colonial Office which was only granted the dignity of having its own minister, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, in 1854. India, the jewel in the imperial crown, was still ruled by a chartered company, the East India Company, with a measure (albeit ever more constrained) of independence, until its rule was overthrown and resumed by the Crown in 1858 following the Indian Rebellion of 1857.
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Notes
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Gascoigne, J. (2011). Science and the British Empire from its Beginnings to 1850. In: Bennett, B.M., Hodge, J.M. (eds) Science and Empire. Britain and the World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230320826_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230320826_3
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