* The advances of medicine could save the lives of millions only thanks to the public measures of leaders like Palmerston, combined with international cooperation. In 1851, the first international health organization had been founded when twelve European nations each sent a diplomat and a doctor to the International Sanitary Conference in Paris to agree quarantine measures against cholera. In 1907 the conference metamorphosed into the
* Albert was a reforming visionary filled with ideas to improve palace and public. He was one of the creators of the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations in the Crystal Palace in 1851 – its exhibits included the Koh-i-Noor diamond just procured by the annexation of the Sikh Punjab – which was visited by six million people. It was filled with the technological wonders of progress but also with those of destruction. A Prussian ironmaster named Alfred Krupp displayed a Krupp cannon and a 43,000-pound ingot of steel, a technical wonder. (The eccentric did not sell any cannon and Prussia remained a minor power still crippled by the recent revolutions. There seemed little use for his colossal guns.) Albert used the Exhibition’s profits to build his next project, Albertopolis, still London’s quarter of museums. Yet he was often stymied by courtiers, politicians and even his own wife. ‘I’m very happy and contented,’ he said, ‘but the difficulty in filling my place with the proper dignity is that I am only the husband, not the master in the house.’
* Alexander II, genial, lascivious and urbane, saw himself as a European cosmopolitan like his uncle Alexander I rather than as a despotic nationalist like his dread father. Russia’s first defeat since 1812 convinced him that his country needed reform. In 1861, he liberated twenty-three million serfs whose lot was similar to slavery; he created local self-government bodies and jury trials, raising hopes of deeper reforms. Yet he was every inch a Russian autocrat, completing his father’s war against the Chechen jihadis and purging the Circassians, both in the Caucasus. Then in 1863 the Poles launched a rebellion; to European outrage (though he was backed by Prussia) Alexander crushed them; 22,000 Poles were hanged or deported, and he ordered Russification policies, banning the use of Polish, Ukrainian and Lithuanian languages in schools and offices. As in 1830, Russian society, even liberals, backed the suppression of Poland and of Little Russia (one of the three Russian governates that comprise today’s Ukraine), an attitude that the dissident writer Alexander Herzen called ‘patriotic syphilis’. Yet Alexander also promoted the use of the Finnish language and offered Finland its own constitution. He redirected Russian expansion into central Asia, where he ruled through Islamic institutions and notables. Frustrated in Europe, he dreamed of an attack on British India.
* In 1858, Albert negotiated the marriage of their eldest child, pretty, fair Vicky, aged seventeen, to the impressive Prince Frederick (Fritz) of Prussia, five years her senior: ‘the 2nd most eventful day in my life’, wrote Victoria. ‘I felt almost as if it were I that was being married again, only much more nervous.’ Vicky was soon pregnant, enduring an almost fatal breech birth, in which the breathing of the baby, born with a withered left arm, was obstructed. The child was named Wilhelm, the future Kaiser of Germany.
* In Madras, retired EIC official Christopher Biden, beach magistrate, author of a manual on naval discipline and relative of a twenty-first-century US president, ‘fell by the hands of a band of fanatics’.
* Buried in Lucknow, his epitaph read: ‘Here lies all that could die of William Stephen Raikes Hodson.’
* All empires are based on fear: the killing enabled Britain to dominate India with relatively few officials for around seventy years. A frosty British sense of racial superiority now reigned over the British Raj: marriage and indeed mixing between British and Indians diminished; British girls sailed for India to find husbands. British civil servants and officers governed, excluding Indians from the senior positions, with a new sense of seigneurial responsibility. Railways and telegraphs were useful for suppressing any future rebellions but also provided the infrastructure of India as a single political unit, raising rural incomes by as much as 16 per cent. By 1900, Indian railways were the world’s third largest network. Schools, universities and a British-style judiciary started to train an Indian middle class.
