An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

by Shashi Tharoor

So instead of integrating India into the global capitalist system, as a few postcolonial countries like Singapore so effectively were to do, India’s leaders were convinced that the political independence they had fought for could only be guaranteed through economic independence. That is why self-reliance became the default slogan, the protectionist barriers went up, and India spent forty-five years with bureaucrats rather than businessmen on the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy, spending a good part of the first four and a half decades after Independence in subsidizing unproductivity, regulating stagnation and trying to distribute poverty. One cannot blame the British for the choices Indians themselves made in reaction to British rule, but it only goes to prove that one of the lessons you learn from history is that history sometimes teaches the wrong lessons.