Empire strikes back

The Inglorious Empire, is a book arising form a contentious Oxford Union debate in 2015, where Shashi Tharoor proposed the motion “Britain owes reparations to her former colonies” should keep the home fires burning, so to speak, both in India and in Britain.

Shashi Tharoor, an Indian politician, writer and former UN under-secretary-general, whose book on the effects of British colonial rule on India, from the arrival of the East India Company to the end of the Raj -revealing how Britain’s rise was built upon its plunder in India. Shashi Tharoor was the recipient of literary awards including a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and his Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India was a Sunday Times bestseller and a Financial Times Book of the Year.

India’s share of the world economy was as large as Europe’s  in the eighteenth century, and two centuries of British rule, later by 1947, it had decreased six-fold. The Empire blew rebels from cannon, massacred unarmed protesters, entrenched institutionalised racism, and caused millions to die from starvation after conquest and deception.

British imperialism justified itself as enlightened despotism for the benefit of the governed,  but Tharoor demonstrates how every supposed imperial gift – from the railways to the rule of law – was designed in Britain’s interests alone. He also reveals how Britain’s industrial revolution was founded on India’s deindustrialisation, and the destruction of its textile industry. He exposes the reality of Britain’s stained Indian legacy and expose how British empire plundered India’s resources and riches and left the country broken, and British Raj’s countless exploitative activities and the damage done under colonialism, and expresses surprise and disappointment that such basic points still need to be made anew today. The book also demolishes the nostalgic, self-serving arguments voiced by imperial apologists.

By the time the British left India’s share of global GDP had sunk to just over 3 per cent. According to Tharoor, India was governed strictly for the benefit of Britain. The rise of industrial Britain was financed by the depredations of the Raj. The soldiers of the East India Company smashed the handlooms of the Bengal weavers, whose delicate silks and muslins were prized all over Europe. After Brexit, those Brits who speak so confidently about how Britain’s historical and cultural ties to India will make it easy to strike a great new trade deal must read Mr Tharoor’s book. Tharoor demolished Raj nostalgia,  counting the cost of the British Empire for its former subjects.

Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India  by Shashi Tharoor, paperback. Penguin Books £9.99, 336 pages

 Hardback, Hurst Publishing  £20