When Queen Victoria ascended the throne in 1837, her empire was expanding apace. The British presence in India was thriving. The East India Company, an institution originally established in 1600 to facilitate spice trading, had succeeded in establishing power in Bengal, Bihar, Orissa and the eastern coast. It had successfully spearheaded military incursions into a number of Indian states and regularly collected land revenues from the provinces. 
Yet, India in the age of Victoria was a land of the dead and the dying. Famine and epidemic disease, sometimes separately, more often in deadly conjunction, cut great swathes of mortality through the population. In 1833 almost a third of the population of Guntur in south India perished through famine. In 1900 alone, as Victoria's reign drew to a close, 800,000 people died of cholera, the highest total ever recorded.
It is through the keyhole of attitudes to death and dying in Victorian India that we can begin to understand the wider frameworks that governed British attitudes to India in general, and its perceived otherness. It provides a platform from which we can explore the Victorian rationalisation of empire and conquest.
In this seminar, David Arnold, professor of south Asian history at the School for Oriental and African Studies, University of London, explores Victorian attitudes to death and dying in India. He argues that an increasing European sense of security from disease and sudden death was matched by an increasing tendency to label Indians as the authors of their own misery, and to view the scale of death in this era as signs of a feebler race, an inferior civilisation.
