An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

by Shashi Tharoor

It must not be forgotten, after all, that the India the British entered was a wealthy, thriving and commercializing society: that was why the East India Company was interested in it in the first place. The Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama, who found his way around the Cape of Good Hope to Calicut (Kozhikode), rather breathlessly spoke to King Manuel I of Portugal of large cities, large buildings and rivers, and great and prosperous populations. He talked admiringly of spices and jewels, precious stones and ‘mines of gold’. The trinkets he offered were deemed unworthy gifts for the Indian monarch he offered them to, the Zamorin of Calicut; da Gama’s goods were openly mocked and scorned by merchants and courtiers accustomed to far higher quality items. Far from being backward or underdeveloped, as we have seen, precolonial India exported high quality manufactured goods much sought after by Britain’s fashionable society. The British elite wore Indian linen and silks, decorated their homes with Indian chintz and decorative textiles, and craved Indian spices and seasonings. (Indeed, there are tales of British manufacturers in the seventeenth century trying to pass off their wares as ‘Indian’ to entice customers into buying their poorer quality British-made imitations.) The annual revenues of the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb (1618-1707) were vast. Indeed, tax revenues aside, which I have mentioned earlier in the book, his total income at the time is said to have amounted to $450,00...