Справка.
British Raj.
Information.
The British Raj (British India) was the British rule in the Indian subcontinent between 1858 and 1947. The term can also refer to the period of dominion. The region under British control, commonly called India in contemporary usage, included areas directly administered by the United Kingdom (contemporaneously, "British India") as well as the princely states ruled by individual rulers under the paramountcy of the British Crown. The region was less commonly also called the Indian Empire. 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. There were officially 565 princely states in India at the time of independence in 1947, but the great majority had contracted with the Viceroy of India to provide public services and tax collection. Only 21 major ones had actual state governments, and among them only four were large (Hyderabad, Mysore, Baroda and Jammu and Kashmir). They acceded to one or other of the two new independent nations between 1947 and 1949. The accession process was largely peaceful except in the case of Jammu & Kashmir (whose king decided to accede to India, but only after an invasion by Pakistan based tribal militia) and Hyderabad. All the princes were eventually pensioned off. Some two hundred of the states had an area of less than 25 square kilometres (10 square miles). Several of the states acceded to Pakistan between 1947 and 1948, becoming the princely states of Pakistan. A few of these retained their autonomy until the 1970s. The system of governance was instituted in 1858, when the rule of the British East India Company was transferred to the Crown in the person of Queen Victoria (and who, in 1876, was proclaimed Empress of India), and lasted until 1947, when the British Indian Empire was partitioned into two sovereign dominion states, the Union of India (later the Republic of India) and the Dominion of Pakistan (later the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, the eastern half 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, was administered as a province until 1937, when it became a separate British colony, gaining its own independence in 1948.
See also:
Stamps of India
