<P> British imperial strength was underpinned by the steamship and the telegraph, new technologies invented in the second half of the 19th century, allowing it to control and defend the empire . By 1902, the British Empire was linked together by a network of telegraph cables, called the All Red Line . </P> <P> The East India Company drove the expansion of the British Empire in Asia . The Company's army had first joined forces with the Royal Navy during the Seven Years' War, and the two continued to co-operate in arenas outside India: the eviction of the French from Egypt (1799), the capture of Java from the Netherlands (1811), the acquisition of Penang Island (1786), Singapore (1819) and Malacca (1824), and the defeat of Burma (1826). </P> <P> From its base in India, the Company had also been engaged in an increasingly profitable opium export trade to China since the 1730s . This trade, illegal since it was outlawed by the Qing dynasty in 1729, helped reverse the trade imbalances resulting from the British imports of tea, which saw large outflows of silver from Britain to China . In 1839, the confiscation by the Chinese authorities at Canton of 20,000 chests of opium led Britain to attack China in the First Opium War, and resulted in the seizure by Britain of Hong Kong Island, at that time a minor settlement . </P> <P> During the late 18th and early 19th centuries the British Crown began to assume an increasingly large role in the affairs of the Company . A series of Acts of Parliament were passed, including the Regulating Act of 1773, Pitt's India Act of 1784 and the Charter Act of 1813 which regulated the Company's affairs and established the sovereignty of the Crown over the territories that it had acquired . The Company's eventual end was precipitated by the Indian Rebellion in 1857, a conflict that had begun with the mutiny of sepoys, Indian troops under British officers and discipline . The rebellion took six months to suppress, with heavy loss of life on both sides . The following year the British government dissolved the Company and assumed direct control over India through the Government of India Act 1858, establishing the British Raj, where an appointed governor - general administered India and Queen Victoria was crowned the Empress of India . India became the empire's most valuable possession, "the Jewel in the Crown", and was the most important source of Britain's strength . </P>

Countries of the british empire in the 19th century