An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

by Shashi Tharoor

companies were discouraged from recruiting them for voyages to England, where they were likely to be exposed to licentious behaviour by the locals that would ‘divest them of the respect and awe they had entertained in India for the European character’. (Morality and racism could always be used to dress up naked commercial interests.)

If India’s GDP went down because it ‘missed the bus’ of industrialization, it was because the British threw Indians under the wheels.

Counterfactuals are, of course, impossible to prove. One cannot assert, for instance, with any degree of certitude, events that did not in fact occur,

(Indeed there were outstanding examples of good governance in India at the time, notably the Travancore kingdom, which in 1819 became the first government in the world to decree universal, compulsory and free primary education for both boys and girls.)

‘In the beginning, there were two nations. One was a vast, mighty and magnificent empire, brilliantly organized and culturally unified, which dominated a massive swath of the earth. The other was an undeveloped, semifeudal realm, riven by religious factionalism and barely able to feed its illiterate, diseased and stinking masses. The first nation was India. The second was England.’