About
BritishIndia.com is a structured reference for the historical geography of colonial South Asia between 1757 and 1947, covering the territory of present-day India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Myanmar. Given a colonial-era place name in any recorded spelling, it returns one page with the modern name, the administrative context and the years it applies to, coordinates and a locator map, and links to the primary sources behind each of those facts.
Who it is for
- Genealogists tracing British, Anglo-Indian and military ancestors.
- Diaspora researchers looking for a pre-Partition family village whose name or country has since changed.
- Historians and students of South Asia, and historical map collectors.
- Journalists and authors checking colonial-era geography, and Wikidata, Wikipedia and OpenHistoricalMap editors after reconciled identifiers.
What it is not
It is not a blog, a genealogy record provider, or a platform for political commentary on empire. It does not treat British India as identical to the modern Republic of India, nor as a static entity with fixed boundaries. It holds no user-generated content and publishes no machine-written prose: every page is generated from cited records.
Coverage and its limits
Coverage is a verified core rather than an exhaustive one. A place absent from this gazetteer is not thereby a place that did not exist — it is a place not yet recorded here. Records are added by ingesting published gazetteer, census and identifier datasets and reviewing the edge cases by hand.
Independence
This is an independent historical reference project. It is unaffiliated with, and not endorsed by, any commercial, retail or lifestyle brand using a similar name, and it sells nothing.
How the records are built and dated is set out in the methodology; every source is listed in the source register.