The Reign Of Queen Victoria's Tied Up With The Empire

Throughout the long reign of Queen Victoria, which began in 1837 and ended with her death in 1901, Britain changed from a rural, agricultural country to an urban, industrialised one. This involved massive dislocation and radically altered the nature of society. The Victorian achievements were immense, with ‘England being a pioneer: its economy and technology, its social and living standards, its political organisations, its way of thinking about man, nature and religion, and its role as the core of a global empire’(Tombs, p584). The Victorian period was one of rapid development and change, far swifter than in previous centuries. Britain could rightly be proud as being the first industrialised nation, and ‘The workshop of the world’. This essay
Britain had already lost her American Empire but was accumulating additional territory across the globe in competition against other European nations. In the first decade of Victoria’s reign, it had acquired Hong Kong (1843), Gambia (1843), Labuan(1846) in Indonesia, and the Orange River (1848) in South Africa (Wilson, p63). Britain can therefore be justifiably proud in implementing English values, education systems and the English language in Africa, Asia and the America’s, as well as introducing Western Civilisation to the entire world. Britain’s colonial power meant that Queen Victoria ruled over forty percent of the global population, and by the end of her reign the imperialists could boast that the sun never set upon the British Empire. ‘Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee of 1897 demonstrated the pride that Britain felt in the empire at what might appear the zenith of its power’ (Wasson, p178). Patriot Britons had witnessed a huge array of ships at Portsmouth, reminding the world that Britain continued to rule the waves as she had done since the Battle of Trafalgar (Fraser,