The British Raj Was Far Larger Than Most People Realize

Not just India

(By J. Bartholomew, Edinburgh Geographical Institute — Imperial Gazetteer of India, Volume XXVI, Atlas, published under the authority of His Majesty’s Secretary of State for India in Council, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1909, personal copy of Fowler&fowler (talk) 21:37, 8 April 2023 (UTC), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=130502789)

The British Empire infamously controlled the Indian subcontinent for over a century. The British Raj was called the “crown jewel” of the British Empire. Today, most people equate British India with the nation of India. But the British Raj was far larger than anyone remembers. The British controlled a massive swath of territory that encompassed modern India along with a handful of other nations.

The British Raj was 1,928,060 square miles. If it existed today, it would be the seventh largest country in the world, slotting in between Australia and Argentina. That makes it even crazier that it was controlled by the United Kingdom, a nation of just 94,354 square miles. At its peak, the British Raj was larger than the entire European Union combined.

The British Empire managed to secure the territory through various devious and ruthless actions mainly perpetrated by the East India company. The British first started subjugating the territory beginning in 1757. The occupation was supposed to be “temporary” but it managed to last far longer than anyone had imagined. By the time the Raj ended in 1947, the subcontinent had been under foreign control for 190 years — almost twice as long as the United States has existed as an independent nation at that point.