Hundreds of volumes have been written on Queen Victoria. Finding something new to say about her or her reign poses no small challenge, yet one that Miles Taylor's Empress manages to achieve through an intensively researched and historiographically significant examination of the relationship between Queen Victoria and India. It is the first book to do this and manages to break significant new ground on our understandings of Queen Victoria. Taylor compellingly and persuasively challenges the notion of her as a largely symbolic figure in the history of the Raj, requiring us to revise how we understand her as a political actor. Above all, Taylor emphasizes the “agency of the queen” in assessing her efforts to shape British policy and the role of the monarchy in India, acting “more of a dynastic imperial ruler of the long eighteenth century” than of the ritual- and philanthropy-driven monarchy of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (7). He also contributes to a rich and growing literature on representations and uses of Queen Victoria for the purposes of rule by British administrators and as a venue of reform and protest by Indian reformers and activists for whom Victoria the empress-queen was “all things to all people.”

Taylor's most significant, and quite remarkable, contribution is in understanding Victoria as an active maker of British policy and her image in the Raj, presenting Victoria as “Empress in practice as well as in name” (116). Historians of Victoria and the Victorian monarchy have tended to view Victoria as a queen who, alongside Prince Albert, expressed interest in India and the Raj, and in particular sought control over how her own image and person and those of her family were employed for the purposes of rule. At the same time, historians largely accept that the monarchy had by this point largely settled into its “dignified,” theatrical monarchy of Walter Bagehot's English Constitution and stayed out of politics. Taylor impressively and effectively demonstrates the ways in which Victoria was interested and invested in Indian policy, particularly the Crown's authority of the army and Indian Civil Service (even going as far as to advocate for the expansion of her Indian empire!). He locates her presence in the genesis of the Raj, her proclamation of 1858, which became a rallying point for Indian activists and intellectuals. Historians have largely understood Victoria's presence in the proclamation as a performance of political ventriloquism, as a speech from the throne that represents the views of the government as a means of personalizing the promises laid out therein and of appealing to the “Oriental mind.” As Taylor demonstrates, Victoria offered very specific feedback on drafts of the so-called Indian Magna Carta, requesting that her own voice be better emphasized and making the case that some form of equality for all British subjects ought to be recognized.

As a symbol, however, she was both everywhere and nowhere in India. The Victoria who inhabited Indian imaginaries, Taylor contends, was quite different from the actual queen or representations of her at home, down to an Indianized profile of the queen on the currency of the Raj. In the Raj, Victoria was employed by the British government in India, missionaries, even Indian activists such as Mohandas Gandhi as a “fount of justice” (94), “dina janani” or “mother of the poor” (137), a “benign matriarch” (208), both a Anglo-Christian queen and Indianized as a Hindu deity (260). As Taylor so describes it, Victoria became a “discursive space within which Indian claims for inclusion within the imperial polity could be made” (88). The real Victoria is largely absent from this space, where Indians could make claims, demand reform, and critique the government. Taylor argues that Victoria and these languages of loyalism provided a kind of vehicle for “articulating citizenship without talking about the nation” (226). There has been considerable important work on the ways in which the languages of protest and reform, appeals to the British constitution and the equality of the queen's subjects shaped the politics of indigenous people and other people of color, and Taylor contributes uniquely and importantly to that conversation. In this context, Taylor is right to suggest the need for Indian politics to be cloaked in a language of loyalism but ought to consider how Indian subjects could appeal to Victoria and her proclamation in ways that that were not entirely practical or somehow inauthentic. In the Raj, and across the empire, colonial subjects appealed to their own place and importance in the empire, even while not being blind to its failures and injustices. They wanted it to live up to the promises of 1858. These complications and complexities require further attention.

Moreover, one must consider the limits of Victoria's interest, that it came in fits and starts, that there were moments, periods of intense engagement with Indian affairs, particularly during the last decades of her reign and there were plenty of moments when she was disinterested or unengaged. Attending to these limits does not lessen or undermine Taylor's argumentative framework, but they are worth considering. While a short-term success in many ways, the cultural and intellectual work of her reign suppressed, rather than solved, some of the basic problems of governance in India. Taylor's book shows us the active, present Victoria in India as well as the absent queen whose projection and embrace as a queen of justice or friend of the ryot, while useful for the purposes of the short term, its incongruencies with the realities, helped sow the seeds of failure for loyalism as a discourse, as the queen—who could not and probably would not if she could—help the famine-stricken poor or the reformist Indian National Congress activist or the rebel seeking royal pardon from the hangman's noose. And such is the complicated legacy of the Empress of India.