The British Raj

The British Raj, 1858 to 1947, refers to the period of direct British Crown rule over the Indian subcontinent, established after the British government dissolved the East India Company's administration and assumed direct control in the wake of the 1857 Indian Rebellion, and lasting until Indian independence and partition in August 1947. Under the Raj, Britain built an extensive railway and telegraph network across the subcontinent, established English-language higher education and a professional civil service, and extracted enormous agricultural and industrial wealth for the imperial economy, while famines under British administration, including the Bengal famine of 1943, killed millions. Growing Indian nationalist opposition, organized principally through the Indian National Congress founded in 1885 and later led by figures including Mohandas Gandhi, whose campaigns of nonviolent civil disobedience from the 1920s onward mobilized mass popular support, steadily eroded the moral and political basis of British rule across the era's final decades. The Raj ended in 1947 with independence and the simultaneous, violent partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan.