"British Empire in India" and "Indian Empire" redirect here.

For other uses, see India

(disambiguation). For other Indian empires, see History of India.

This article is about the rule of India by the British Crown from 1858 to 1947. For the rule of
the East India Company from 1757 to 1858, see Company rule in India.

The British Raj (/rɑːdʒ/; from rāj, literally, "rule" in Sanskrit and Hindustani)[2] was the
rule by the British Crown on the Indian subcontinent from 1858 to 1947.[3][4][5][6] The
rule is also called Crown rule in India,[7] or direct rule in India.[8] The region under
British control was commonly called India in contemporaneous usage, and included
areas directly administered by the United Kingdom, which were collectively
called British India, and those ruled by indigenous rulers, but under British tutelage
or paramountcy, and called the princely states. The whole was also more formally
called the Indian Empire.[9][10] As India, it was a founding member of the League of
Nations, a participating nation in the Summer Olympics in 1900, 1920, 1928, 1932,
and 1936, and a founding member of the United Nations in San Francisco in 1945.[11]
This system of governance was instituted on 28 June 1858, when, after the Indian
Rebellion of 1857, the rule of the British East India Company was transferred to the
Crown in the person of Queen Victoria[12] (who, in 1876, was proclaimed Empress of
India). It lasted until 1947, when it was partitioned into two
sovereign dominion states: the Dominion of India (later the Republic of India) and
the Dominion of Pakistan (later the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, the eastern part of
which, still later, became the People's Republic of Bangladesh). At the inception of
the Raj in 1858, Lower Burma was already a part of British India; Upper Burma was
added in 1886, and the resulting union, Burma (Myanmar), was administered as an
autonomous province until 1937, when it became a separate British colony, gaining
its own independence in 1948