‘This vast Empire on which the sun never sets'

The Empire symbolised British power and its assumed ascendancy over competitor nations. The same people who considered the British version of Imperialism particularly advanced and enlightened believed implicitly in the uniquely beneficent message of Christianity. As George Nathaniel Curzon put it in 1894, the British Empire was, under God, the greatest empire for good that the world has seen. Cecil Rhodes said that the British are the first race in the world, and the more of the world they inhabit; the better it is for the human race. In 1858, India became a formal part of the Empire, although about a third of the subcontinent remained owned by almost six hundred quasi-autonomous Indian princes. By 1878, the British were in control over parts of Afghanistan and the Afghan foreign policy. Britain's action in annexing the Boer province of Transvaal in 1877 precipitated a Boer rebellion and the outbreak of the first of the two Boer wars in 1880.