Its only unadulterated benefits, according to Tharoor, were tea and cricket. In successive chapters, Tharoor argues that British rule, despite hypocritical government claims to the contrary, intentionally impoverished India economically for Britain’s benefit, undermined its political unity to keep it under British control, applied a racist rule of law, underfunded India’s schools and colleges and introduced the English language for utilitarian reasons – all of which left Indians with a lack of self-respect from which they have taken decades to recover. Tharoor’s book – arising from a contentious Oxford Union debate in 2015 where he 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. In due course, Indians joined in, such as Dadabhai Naoroji, with Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (1901), and Mahatma Gandhi, whose extensive critique started with Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule (1909) and continued up to his assassination in 1948. It began with the British Parliament’s official condemnation of the Company’s rapacious economic exploitation of Bengal. In the intervening period the subcontinent had been ruled by outsiders, namely, the British East India Company until 1858, then by the British Raj until 1947.īritish rule in India, the subject of former United Nations diplomat and serving Congress Party politician Shashi Tharoor’s Inglorious Empire, has always attracted severe criticism. By 1950, as India became a secular democracy, its share had dropped to just over three per cent. In 1700, India, then ruled by the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, an autocratic religious zealot, boasted 24.4 per cent of global GDP: a share almost equal to that of Europe’s 25 per cent.

Inglorious empire review