The Sunday Times Top 10 bestseller on India s experience of British colonialism, by the internationally-acclaimed author and diplomat Shashi Tharoor Tharoor s impassioned polemic slices straight to the heart of the darkness that drives all empires ... laying bare the grim, and high, cost of the British Empire for its former subjects. An essential read Financial Times In the eighteenth century, India s share of the world economy was as large as Europe s. By 1947, after two centuries of British rule, it had decreased six-fold. The Empire blew rebels from cannons, massacred unarmed protesters, entrenched institutionalized racism, and caused millions to die from starvation. British imperialism justified itself as enlightened despotism for the benefit of the governed, but Shashi Tharoor takes demolishes this position, demonstrating how every supposed imperial gift - from the railways to the rule of law - was designed in Britain s interests alone. He goes on to show how Britain s Industrial Revolution was founded on India s deindustrialization and the destruction of its textile industry. In this bold and incisive reassessment of colonialism, Tharoor exposes to devastating effect the inglorious reality of Britain s stained Indian legacy.
[Paperback-2017], 336 pages
SHASHI THAROOR is the bestselling author of twenty books, both fiction, and non-fiction, besides being a noted critic and columnist. His books include the pathbreaking satire The Great Indian vel (1989), classic India: From Midnight to the Millennium (1997), the bestselling An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India, for which he won the Ramnath Goenka Award for Excellence in Journalism, 2016, for Books (n-Fiction), and The Paradoxical Prime Minister: Narendra Modi and His India. He has been Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations and Minister of State for Human Resource Development and Minister of State for External Affairs in the Government of India. He is a three-time member of the Lok Sabha from Thiruvananthapuram and chairs the Parliament Information Technology committee. He has won numerous literary awards, including a national Sahitya Akademi award, a Commonwealth Writers Prize, and the Crossword Lifetime Achievement Award. He was awarded the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, India s highest honor for overseas Indians, in 2004, and was honoured as New Age Politician of the Year (2010) by NDTV.