An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

by Shashi Tharoor

history is neither for excuses nor for revenge

History, in any case, cannot be reduced to some sort of game of comparing misdeeds in different eras; each period must be judged in itself and for its own successes and transgressions.

Indeed, the best form of atonement by the British might be, as Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has suggested, to start teaching unromanticized colonial history in British schools.

Indian Summers,

The past is not necessarily a guide to the future, but it does partly help explain the present. One cannot, as I have written elsewhere, take revenge upon history; history is its own revenge.

The Case for India,

The India that the British East India Company conquered was no primitive or barren land, but the glittering jewel of the medieval world. Its accomplishments and prosperity—‘the

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, as the British economic historian Angus Maddison has demonstrated, India’s share of the world economy was 23 per cent, as large as all of Europe put together. (It had been 27 per cent in 1700, when the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb’s treasury raked in £100 million in tax revenues alone.) By the time the British departed India, it had dropped to just over 3 per cent. The reason was simple:

is said that when Nadir Shah and his forces returned home, they had stolen so much from India that all taxes were eliminated in Persia for the next three years.

Ironically, the British used Indian raw material and exported the finished products back to India and the rest of the world, the industrial equivalent of adding insult to injury.

The East India Company created, for the first time in Indian history, the landless peasant, deprived of his traditional source of sustenance.

when you blame a tragedy on everybody, you blame it on nobody—there lies

‘believed that the introduction of Western education and Christianity would transform a morally decadent society’.

In 1600, when the East India Company was established, Britain was producing just 1.8 per cent of the world’s GDP, while India was generating some 23 per cent. By 1940, after nearly two centuries of the Raj, Britain accounted for nearly 10 per cent of world GDP, while India had been reduced to a poor ‘third-world’ country, destitute and starving, a global poster child of poverty and famine.