After the revolt of 1857, which was set off partly by a rumour about the grease on new cartridges, the Crown took India from the Company and Queen Victoria's proclamation of 1858 promised that no one would be favoured or molested on account of religious faith. The policy that followed was non-interference in worship combined with deep interference in classification. Personal law was codified by religious community, so that marriage, inheritance and adoption were administered under separate Hindu, Muslim, Parsi and Christian codes; the decennial census required every subject to belong to one religion and one caste; and Orientalist scholarship, working with Brahmin informants and Pali texts, gave the terms Hinduism and Buddhism the shape they now have worldwide.
The record includes coercion. In Canada, church-run residential schools operated under government contract from the nineteenth century, removing Indigenous children from their families and suppressing their languages and ceremonies, a system whose harms the country's Truth and Reconciliation Commission documented in 2015. Comparable school systems and bans on ceremony operated elsewhere in the settler empire.
The empire also produced religions its rulers never intended. Rastafari arose in British Jamaica in the 1930s around the coronation of Haile Selassie, and independent African churches multiplied across the mission field. What survives institutionally is the Anglican Communion, whose membership is now overwhelmingly outside Britain.