Rise of Empires: Spain.

Chapter 205: Queen of India
In the UK, in addition to the big news of the resurgence of the economic crisis, there is another piece of news that has also aroused heated discussion among the British people. That is the Royal Titles Bill promulgated in May.

This act gave Queen Victoria a new title: Empress of India.

Although the United Kingdom is called the British Empire, the title of the British ruler is actually the King or Queen of the United Kingdom. At a time when European empires are everywhere, Britain, as the most powerful country in Europe, has finally taken a step towards the level of an empire.

But compared with the titles of other European empires, the title of Queen of India is somewhat embarrassing.

As for the imperial titles of other European countries, the Russian Empire claimed to have inherited the title of the Eastern Roman Empire, while the Austro-Hungarian Empire was formed by the merger of the Austrian Empire and Hungary, which were originally established by the Holy Roman Emperor.

Although the German Empire was only an empire in the German region, the German region once had the title of the Holy Roman Empire, an imperial title with reasonable legal basis.

On the contrary, the title of the Queen of India, for whom the British had been preparing for a long time, was legally derived from the Mughal Empire, the previous ruler of the Indian region.

From the legal perspective of imperial titles, the so-called Indian Empire is completely disproportionate to the imperial titles of other European countries. Europe is also a place that attaches great importance to legal principles, which also put Queen Victoria under a lot of pressure when she was crowned as the Queen of India.

The title of Queen of India originally came from the nickname given to the Queen of England by the rulers of the Indian states. When the British rule over India changed from the East India Company to the East India Colony, Victoria, as the Queen of England, also began to believe that she was the Queen of India.

More than a decade earlier, Queen Victoria had become accustomed to the title of Empress of India and regarded the Indian land as part of the empire under her rule.

In June 1872, when the envoys from the East Indian colonies prostrated themselves before Queen Victoria, Queen Victoria used the title of Queen of India: "As Queen of India, I refuse to accept such etiquette."

Queen Victoria's public acceptance and love of the title of Queen of India inspired some nobles to push for Queen Victoria to be crowned the Indian throne.

As early as three years ago, Queen Victoria's secretary Frederick Ponsonby had publicly proposed to Earl Granver that Queen Victoria be crowned the title of Queen of India.

The reason given by Frederick Ponsonby was that the title of Empress of India had long been used to refer to Her Majesty Queen Victoria, but it had not been publicly announced.

As Queen Victoria's secretary, it was impossible for Frederick Ponsonby to promote ideas that the Queen disagreed with.

This also means that it was Queen Victoria's own opinion that she be crowned the Empress of India.

The reason why Queen Victoria was so anxious to become the Queen, besides her love for the title, was that her son-in-law Friedrich Wilhelm Nikolaus Karl had been promoted from Crown Prince of Prussia to Crown Prince of the German Empire, and his father William I had been promoted from King of Prussia to Emperor of the German Empire.

When her son-in-law inherits the throne in the future, she will still be just the Queen of England. Wouldn't she be one level lower than her son-in-law in terms of title rank?

Among the five traditional powers in Europe, Germany, Austria-Hungary and Tsarist Russia are all at the imperial level, while France, a republic, is not included.

Britain, which has the strongest comprehensive strength, is just a kingdom, which is also what Queen Victoria is not satisfied with.

It is also because of this that, even though there were many obstacles in the UK, Queen Victoria was crowned as the Empress of India with the help of the Title Act, becoming the fourth monarch among European rulers to have the title of emperor.

While Britain was busy crowning its queen with the title of Queen, Britain's arch-rival France was also not idle.

As the United States is about to celebrate its 100th anniversary, France announced that it would present a statue of freedom to the United States. This statue is very famous in later generations. It is the Statue of Liberty, a symbol of American freedom.

The proposal was made by French political intellectual Édouard de La Boulaye in 1865, and was helped by many French people, including sculptor Auguste Bartholdi, and was approved by the French and American governments.

It was also in this year that Bartholdi began work on the statue. In just a short time, he completed the torch held by the Statue of Liberty and shipped it from France to the United States to participate in the Centennial Exposition held in Philadelphia.

When the United States gained independence a hundred years ago, the French made great efforts. And a hundred years later, the French also took great pains to present the United States with the famous landmark Statue of Liberty. France has a deep and profound debt to the United States.

1876 ​​was a busy year for European countries, and the same was true for Spain.

Carlo is closely following the situation in the Balkans. At present, the Russians do not seem to have any intention of starting a war.

After the British added the title of Queen of India to Queen Victoria's head, they hurriedly prepared for the coronation ceremony in Britain.

After all, this is India's imperial title. If the coronation ceremony is not held in India, the so-called imperial title will have no significance.

One has to admire the British's attention to the situation in the Balkans. Even though they were so busy at home, the British were able to pay close attention to the situation in the Balkans and even completed material assistance to the Ottoman Empire on time to help the Ottoman Empire stabilize the situation in the Balkans.

Seeing that there was no war in the Balkans, Carlo turned his attention back to Spain. While revising Spain's problematic laws, he accelerated Spain's development and moved towards the goal of making Spain great again.

For Spain, there has been a lot of good news in recent years.

The first is the railway mileage.

More than two years have passed since the end of the last five-year plan, and Spain's achievements in railway construction are still quite gratifying.

Since the start of the second five-year plan, the average annual railway mileage built has exceeded 550 kilometers, bringing Spain's current railway mileage to an astonishing 8875 kilometers. There is hope that the total railway mileage will be increased to more than 9000 kilometers this year.

Judging from the current speed of railway construction, Spain's total railway mileage of over 100 kilometers will be completed within the second five-year plan, and there is even hope of exceeding the target of 1.1 railway kilometers set in the second five-year plan.

In terms of railway mileage, Spain has surpassed Italy, which was once on par with it, and is catching up with the five traditional European powers.

The construction of railway mileage not only brings convenience in transportation, but also a series of improvements in railway-related ancillary industries.

The invisible benefit of building railways is to stimulate the overall growth of the Spanish economy by radiating these ancillary industries.

As for what we can see on the surface, there are actually many benefits, including facilitating communication and cargo transportation between different regions of Spain, facilitating the Spanish government to control the various regions more quickly and effectively, and stimulating population mobility, etc. These are all benefits brought by railways.

The total length of Spanish railways does not include the simple railways built in the colonies. Otherwise, the total length of railways in the Spanish sphere of influence would have exceeded tens of thousands of kilometers. Currently, Spanish colonies can be divided into Cuban colonies, South Morocco colonies, Guinea and Congo colonies, and Philippine colonies.

Spain built a large number of railway and road systems in these four major colonies, among which the railways in Cuba and the Philippines have the longest mileage.

However, with the decline in the importance of Cuba and the new occupation of the colonies of southern Morocco and the Congo, Spain shifted its focus on building railways in its colonies to Africa.

Although railways were also being built in Cuba and the Philippines, the intensity of construction and the proportion of investment were obviously less than those in the other two African colonies.

It is worth mentioning that after the military guidance group arrived in Lan Fang, it also planned a railway construction plan connecting the Lan Fang Republic and the Spanish-occupied area.

The Lan Fang Republic and the Spanish-occupied area are located in the southwest and northeast of Kalimantan respectively, and it is difficult to build a railway connecting the two regions.

It was impossible for the railway to go through the Dutch colony in the southernmost part, which meant that there were only two options for building a railway between the two regions. Either go north through the Kingdom of Sarawak and Brunei, or go through central Kalimantan, pass through the virgin forest and then go north along the Sultanate of Burungan to connect to the land controlled by Spain.

Going north would pass through the British sphere of influence, and going central would pass through the Ilan Mountains in central Kalimantan, which made it difficult to realize the plan to connect the Lan Fang Republic and the Spanish-controlled Philippine colony by rail.

The good news is that with the help of the Military Guidance Group, the training of the new army of the Lan Fang Republic went quite smoothly. After a year of training, this army of about 2 people has officially become the main force of the Lan Fang Republic.

During the military training, the local natives and the Dutch did cause trouble, but due to their small numbers, they were quickly defeated by the newly formed new army.

After all, it was an army of 20,000 people, all using muskets and cannons. Although their weapons and equipment were not as good as those of the main armies of European countries, they were more than enough to defeat the natives in Kalimantan.

Most of the indigenous troops were equipped with cold weapons, and there were very few hot weapons. Even if they were equipped with hot weapons, it was difficult for the indigenous soldiers to figure out how to use them.

The muskets and cannons owned by the natives were basically sold to them by Britain and the Netherlands, which also meant that they were extremely dependent on ammunition supplies from Britain and the Netherlands.

Even if they could learn how to use guns and artillery, they would be helpless once the bullets and shells were exhausted.

The British mainland and the Dutch mainland are tens of thousands of kilometers away from Kalimantan Island, which also means that the weapons, equipment and ammunition supplies available to these natives are limited.

Under such circumstances, it would be difficult for them to pose a threat to the 20,000 new troops trained by the Lan Fang Republic, unless the Dutch were willing to take action themselves and transport a batch of weapons and ammunition to the colonies before launching a war.

In the Philippine colony, after unifying the entire Philippine region, Spain carried out a series of reforms and investments in the Philippine colony.

Not only did it strengthen the construction of railways to ensure the colonial government's control over the colonies, it also invested in some plantations and mines to generate sufficient profits for the Philippine colony.

In managing the Philippine colony, the Spanish government adopted a strategy of division and suppression.

Separate the newly ruled indigenous people from those who originally belonged to the Philippine colony, and allow the indigenous people who originally belonged to the Philippines to enjoy certain privileges.

In this way, the indigenous people of the Philippines would no longer be a monolithic entity, which would be more conducive to Spain's rule.

If the privileged indigenous people wanted to maintain their privileges, they had to support Spanish rule in the Philippines and fight against the non-privileged indigenous people.

The non-privileged indigenous people face oppression from the privileged indigenous people, and they will also transfer their hatred to the privileged indigenous people.

Through division and suppression, the Filipinos, who were supposed to hate the Spanish colonists, were divided into two factions, ensuring that they would not unite to oppose Spanish colonial rule.

In fact, in Carlo's conception, the Republic of Lan Fang is also a very important part.

Although it is currently possible to effectively control the Philippines by dividing the indigenous Filipinos, this is ultimately only temporary.

There are not many conflicts among the indigenous people of the Philippines, and their hatred will sooner or later be directed back at the Spanish colonists.

But if the Lan Fang Republic also joins in, it will turn into a conflict between the Lan Fang people and the Filipinos.

Because of their ethnic and cultural differences, it was difficult for the two ethnic groups to unite to oppose Spanish colonial rule. Spain could also stabilize its rule in the Philippines by controlling the two ethnic groups and making them its thugs.

The future World War I and World War II will still require a large number of manpower to participate in the war. Spain itself has a small population. If it can provide a large number of vassal troops through the Philippines and Lanfang people, it will be able to reduce the loss of the native Spanish population.

The loss of these vassal armies was acceptable to Spain. Even if the casualty ratio was slightly lower, as long as they could make a contribution, the cost of forming the army would not be lost at all.

The amount of human loss also affects the distribution of post-war benefits. France's losses in World War I were staggering, and almost wiped out a generation of French people.

The economic and agricultural losses caused were even more severe. It was not until more than ten years after the end of World War I that France gradually emerged from the shadow of World War I.

But it was only a step out of the shadows. The war lost young and strong laborers, and the impact on the country could not be made up in more than ten years.

The fact that France later changed from a traditional white country in Europe to a black country where the majority of the population is black is also related to the huge losses in the First and Second World Wars.

France lost too much population in World War I, forcing it to rely on the labor force from its colonies to supplement its domestic manpower needs.

The consequence of this was that a large number of white people were dyed, and France eventually became a representative country where black people became the masters.

Carlo did not want to see the day when Spain was stained. Because of this, how to minimize the loss of Spanish manpower in the war was a question that Carlo needed to think about.

(End of this chapter)