Victorian

Alaric Jacob introduces the soldiers and administrators who prepared the way for nineteenth-century Empire.

W.J. Reader describes a scandalous episode that arose out of the transfer of authority in India from the East India Company to the Crown.

Eighteenth-century men of taste had begun to build themselves mock-medieval houses. Tudor Edwards writes how their descendants carried on the vogue by constructing a series of impressive castles.

Dufferin urged upon an unresponsive government in London moderate proposals for representative reform in India. In fact, writes Briton Martin Jnr., reform was carried out twenty years later; too late, in the light of history.

Briton Martin Jnr. describes how Lord Dufferin set out for India, intending his rule to be a period of conservative calm, but found himself involved in the anxieties of “The Burmese Adventure”.

During the years that led up to the Anglo-American Treaty of 1842, writes Henry I. Kurtz, both countries played a dangerous game of “brinksmanship” along the Canadian border.

Ernest A. Gray analyses the Navy’s role on land and sea in the Crimean Campaign.

Unpopular in the country at large, neglected by successive governments, the Victorian army was slowly brought up to date, writes Brian Bond, despite military obscurantism and strenuous bureaucratic opposition.

The history of insurance reflects the rapid development of commercial and industrial Britain. Nicholas Lane describes how its pioneers broke down the monopolies that had existed since the days of the South Sea Bubble.

The result of the Seven Weeks’ War in 1866 subordinated the Austrian Empire to Prussian ambitions. Brian Bond describes the last lightning victory in the Napoleonic manner, until Hitler’s blitzkrieg of 1940.