Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India

Historians bemoan a lack a balance in books. They desire to be an emotionless onlooker give cold hard facts. Tharoor rips up the banal rule book and gives us a fantastic read. As an Irishman I can see the parallels of empire on every page. A common statement in Ireland is that if it weren’t for the nice English buildings we would have no nice buildings at all. They ruled the country for 800 years. An Irishman didn’t have the money to build a home, let alone a palace. Such are the parrallels in India. The British ripped up the age of disconnected village feudalism and brought something much worse the India. Collectivism. Collective poverty. Tharoor starts off with the most striking chapter. The looting of India. If you take anything from this book, it is this line “when the British arrived in India in the 1700s, India was 27 percent of the global economy. When they left in 1948 it was 3%”. People will state the world moved on without India but frankly India was chained to the floor. The British were not there to help. The trains, as Tharoor describes, and as is detailed further in the incredible book Empire of Cotton, were there to speed up the looting, the transfer of Cotton to the ships. The trains were also to be used mainly by the British people and furthermore by their Soldiers. The trains would quickly speed them to point of any mutiny. Tharoors gives details on Indian involvement in WW1 and WW2 where Indian soldiers accounted for up to one quarter of Commonwealth forces. Though not detailed in this book, Indian soldiers were often sent in first. At Gallipoli their bodies became human sandbags. Indeed in WW2, it was the British who declared war on Germany on India’s behalf without consulting the Indian hierarchy. Other shameful aspects of Empire in India are expanded upon. Murder (Amritsar and others) and famine. Of course the Bengal famine, not to mention the almost 100 million Indians who died from starvation during the course of British rule. Famines are not a natural phenomenon. The bibliography of the book is substantial enough (5 pages) to be awarded a credible work of history. No doubt Thatoor is guilty of a slightly one sided argument and choosing the facts in line with the mood of the book. But guess what, British history books for the last 300 years have done something similar so here is the balance historians are looking for.

As an educator in a previous life I would like to see this book made required reading in all British secondary schools. Why? Because it offers the perfect object-lesson in why it is always, yes always, wrong to march into another country under the pretence of a civilising mission. And, just as importantly, it shows why national myth-making leads unsuspecting citizens into very dangerous intellectual and emotional territory. Let’s start with the few quibbles that can be raised in order to discredit the value of this book. It verges occasionally, but only occasionally, on a quasi-rant against the evils of colonialism and the utter iniquities of British rule. It also slips into an emotional use of language, sometimes through unnecessary repetition, in its desire to make a point. The index is woefully inadequate, but it shares this failing with many another work of non-fiction. However, Tharoor has produced a meticulously researched book with thirty pages of notes and references in addition to footnotes (but don’t let that put you off) which comprehensively deals with the British involvement in India as well as many a backward glance to what the country was like before the British government decided it had to intervene in order to support the activities of the East India Company. In that year, 1600, England produced just 1.8 per cent of the world’s GDP in contrast to India’s 23 per cent. India had a flourishing manufacturing industry, especially in textiles, and one of its celebrated universities, Nalanda, had already predated the foundation of Oxford and Cambridge by centuries. When the British finally left, having systematically expropriated as much as they could, literacy rates and life expectancy rates were amongst the lowest in the Third World. Tea was grown solely for the satisfaction of consumers in Blighty, wild animals were slaughtered for the benefit of trophy-hunters, whole forests were cut down to provide railway sleepers and exotic furniture back home, the economy was turned into a largely agrarian base, taxes were extracted to finance colonial overlords and their staff while denying the native population any say in how they were governed. In modern times there has never been a famine in India; throughout British rule there were several. Even today there are British historians who continue to peddle the myths of the huge civilising influence the mother country exercised in the swathes of world territory it once ruled. Read Tharoor and you will be disabused of such fanciful notions. You will also be shocked to read how brutally and inhumanely the native Indian population was treated. It is one of the absurdities advanced by adherents to the Brexit cause that they imagine the Indians of today are falling over backwards to do all kinds of major trade deals with the erstwhile mother country. It betrays a total lack of historical understanding by such modern myth-makers that they indulge their fantasies of a Global Britain keen to resurrect the supposed glories of the past. Amongst the debunking of dangerous national myths is the historical evidence that Tharoor presents to show what an incorrigible racist Churchill was. I suspect that one reason why historians on the right have done all they can to discredit this book is because of the many uncomfortable instances of the great man’s bigotry and racial superiority. Equally unsettling is the history of British withdrawal in the wake of the Second World War. Divide and rule was always the British approach previously, but the fact that they largely stood back while Hindus and Moslems massacred each other while still retaining overall responsibility for the running of the country is an utterly shameful comment on the alleged superiority of the British civilising influence. Read this book in order to understand how shockingly and shamefully human beings behave towards others under their control and how national myths continue to be perpetuated despite all evidence to the contrary.

On the whole, the author makes a very compelling case about the injustices the Raj perpetuated upon India and its people; together with the massive drain and looting of India's resources during the Raj. The reservations I hold however about this work are many. This book reads as a poltical treatise that at times leans far too heavily on the Two-Nation theory of Indian High Politics. The author also glorifies his idol Gandhi far too much, which the record shows, did not represent all of India's interests or views. Lastly, this work ultimately reads as a review and criticism of Niall Fergusson's Empire, which too have its merits and flaws, but is still an interesting read, if nothing more than his imbalanced views. Whilst both Tharoor and Fergusson examine the merits and shortcomings of the Raj, I will concede that Tharoor does well to refute Fergusson's thesis. However, Tharoor plays far too much emphasis on the 'What Ifs' scenarios that could have played out, flirting with an alternate history that may have panned out, had the Raj not exisited. The debate and legacy of Empire and Colonialism should continue, but it would be encouraging to see authors pay more attention to subaltern experiences; together with that of minorities that do not fit neatly into their cental arguments. For me this is what was more disappointing about Tharoor's approach, for he focused too much of the 'national' experience, whilst glossing over the differing regional, cultural, and economic experiences of minorities and the subaltern in British India. His emphasis on Congress history, Gandhi, and the Big Names of the Independence movement is what made this feel a bit unbalanced. That being said, the author has made a good effort in providing a thought provoking account of how we perceive the British Empire and the Raj. A commendable read.

Enjoyable demolition of the recently revived imperialist arguments that the British Empire was good for India using facts rather than generalisations. It's quite a short book, but the bibliography gives plenty of further reading options. I'd not read anything by Mr Tharoor previously but will certainly check out his other books. Overall this was a very easy read and is highly recommended.

Great, insightful writing! Full of facts that we don’t learn about at school or university. The facts that this brilliant writer presents are supported by evidence which cannot be disputed.

This book should be required reading for history students in the UK. The same Britons who condemn the ravages and abuse of British working class men, women and children during the 19th century, would defend the much harsher treatment of Indians and Africans as a civilising force. Shashi Tharoor with a wealth of research, demolishes the myth of a benevolent British rule, that treated it's subjects with kindness and charity and lifted them from a state of barbarism to civilization. And the silly argument that railways, roads, technology, an effective Civil Service could only happen in the British Empire, is demolished. For example, Japan, in 1850, was in an isolated and primitive state, India at that time was impoverished by British greed. In 1900, Japan was a rich and powerful country and "British Imperial Benevolence" had made India even poorer. Shashi Tharoor does not romanticise India or absolve it of responsibility for it's own condition, nor does he criticise everything that Britain did. He does not fall into the trap of the British left, who criticise Imperial Britain and defend communism. In fact, he draws parallels with what communists did in the Soviet Union and China, to what the British did in India. Why does this matter today, surely we should forget the past and focus on the future ? However, even if we cannot change the past, we should learn from it and use it's lessons to make a better tomorrow. After reading Churchill's Secret War, an excellent book about the Bengali Famine, I started an e petition calling on the UK Government to apologise for it's predecessor's role in millions of deaths. I emailed the petition to my colleagues at work and I almost lost my job, so British people are still sensitive about this issue.

Anyone intending to read Shashi Tharoor’s Inglorious Empire should firstly appreciate that it’s not an academic piece that presents a well-rounded account of the various causes and effects of British colonialism in India. At least, lip service is paid to other significant factors but the main emphasis is centred on the greed of the British, what they took out of India, how little was left behind after decolonisation, and how the British created a generation of Indian ‘apologists’ who are apparently largely responsible for any poor decision making following independence. That ‘Britain’ stripped a great deal from India was appalling, and Tharoor provides a very interesting and detailed account of just how invasive this plundering was. However there is also a lot of misleading content in this book due to poor contextualisation of time. You only have to read the British history of social development of the same period to see the same perpetrators of India’s miseries were doing the same thing at home by creating population movement, class consciousness and divisions, as well as causing untold privations through scientifically unsupported policies that were based on ‘thinkers’ such as Thomas Malthus and Jeremy Bentham. What made matters worse for India though was the application of those principals by a private company, namely the British East India Company. However, ‘The British’ should not be taken to mean all the people of Britain; education was sparse, and most people there could not even be regarded as citizens due to their lack of enfranchisement (the vote). Additionally, MPs in the UK weren’t paid until 1911 so power lay in the hands of those of private means. Tharoor asserts India would have been a great and leading nation today had it not been for the British but this does not acknowledge the presence of other colonising forces around at the same time that would have jumped into the breach, or why India was unable to defend itself during this dangerous window in global history. Since social self-awareness was exploding globally over the 18th and 19th centuries, it is also just as likely that India could have descended into its own civil conflict had it not been colonised, especially as the population rapidly increased. Alternatively, if India’s military had not been organised over many decades by the British it is likely Japanese troops might have taken over during WW2, or earlier as it did in China. This book has to be read with context in mind, and Tharoor does not provide it sufficiently. Whilst India’s abilities in the modern world are beyond question, Tharoor uses some poor examples of it such as one which celebrates India’s great success in sending a probe to Mars at the first attempt in 2014, describing it as ‘…a feat even the US could not accomplish…’ but fails to acknowledge the US attempts were in fact in the early 1970s and had no precedent (p176). Tharoor also states that India is ‘the world’s third largest economy’, which is inaccurate, and suggests the spoils from India paid for the Industrial Revolution, leaving aside British transatlantic history and rapidly advancing technology. These points aside though, there is a great deal to learn from this book and Tharoor’s account of colonial piracy by Britain’s elite is an excellent account of what the horrendous consequences are when power goes democratically unchecked.

This book is worth a read with interesting and eye opening facts on the crimes of the British. Tharoor writes extensively and unapologetically on how a progressive India became regressive under the British, how the British destroyed Indian institutions and stole Indian wealth. India was more developed than Britain before colonisation. The only blemish in the book is that Tharoor is anti Pakistan/Muslim and does not fully credit India's development and progress to the Muslims who ruled India for 1100 years prior to The Muslims, India was a divided country that had very little morals, culture and civilisation.