Inglorious Empire

Shashi Tharoor, a former United Nations Under-Secretary-General and Indian Member of Parliament, builds his case against British colonialism in India across eight chapters that dismantle the principal claims made in defense of the British Raj. The book originated from a 2015 speech Tharoor delivered at the Oxford Union on the proposition that Britain owes reparations to its former colonies. The speech went viral, and its reception convinced Tharoor that arguments he considered foundational to Indian nationalism were unfamiliar to most educated Indians. The resulting book is not about reparations, which Tharoor treats as a symbolic rather than financial matter, but about the legacy of roughly two centuries of British rule, from the rise of the East India Company in the 18th century to Indian independence in 1947.

Tharoor opens with the economic case. Drawing on British economic historian Angus Maddison, he establishes that India's share of the world economy stood at 23 per cent at the start of the 18th century, as large as all of Europe combined, and had fallen to just over 3 per cent by the time the British departed. He traces this decline to the East India Company, a commercial enterprise incorporated by royal charter in 1600, which exploited the collapse of the Mughal empire after the Persian sacking of Delhi in 1739 to transform itself from a trading concern into a conquering force. Robert Clive, a Company military commander, secured a 1757 victory at the Battle of Plassey through the betrayal of the Nawab of Bengal, the province's ruler, and transferred the equivalent of £250 million in today's money to the Company's coffers.

Tharoor documents what he calls the deliberate deindustrialization of India. The British destroyed India's textile manufacturing, which had once commanded 25 per cent of global trade, by smashing looms, imposing tariffs of 70 to 80 per cent on Indian textiles, and flooding the Indian market with cheap British fabric. Taxation was so onerous that two-thirds of the population fled their lands; the British created, for the first time in Indian history, the landless peasant. Company officials like Clive amassed personal fortunes equivalent to tens of millions in today's currency, and these returning officials, known as "nabobs," used their Indian loot to buy seats in Parliament. The systematic drain of resources continued under the Crown: The Indian nationalist Dadabhai Naoroji documented that India exported an average of £13 million worth of goods to Britain each year from 1835 to 1872 with no corresponding return. The destruction extended to shipping, shipbuilding, and steel, with discriminatory legislation strangling Indian industries well into the 20th century.

Tharoor challenges the claim that Britain gave India political unity, arguing that an impulse toward unification existed from the Maurya empire in the third century BCE through the Mughals. He constructs a counterfactual in which the Maratha confederacy, an expanding Indian power, could have consolidated the subcontinent and transitioned to constitutional rule, as occurred in non-colonized countries like Japan and Thailand. Rather than building institutions, the British dismantled them: Village self-governance was enfeebled under the Permanent Settlement of 1793, and the Indian Civil Service was, in the words of Jawaharlal Nehru, a leading nationalist and later India's first prime minister, "neither Indian, nor civil, nor a service." As late as 1930, only 4 per cent of senior positions were filled by Indians.

Tharoor acknowledges that the British established India's first newspapers and created incipient parliamentary structures but demonstrates that both operated under severe constraints. The Vernacular Press Act of 1878 targeted Indian-language papers while British-owned publications faced no equivalent restrictions. The parliamentary reforms of 1909 gave Indian legislators no real power. The "rule of law" was racially biased, with Indian defendants facing sentences ten times those of Europeans for the same crimes. Thomas Babington Macaulay, the British architect of the colonial penal code, drafted it for "a conquered race," criminalizing homosexuality and creating a sedition law later used against figures including Mahatma Gandhi, the leader of India's independence movement.

Tharoor reserves his sharpest criticism for the policy of divide et impera, or divide and rule, which he calls Britain's most damaging legacy. He argues that the Hindu-Muslim divide was deliberately constructed: In precolonial India, Muslims served in the army of the Hindu warrior king Shivaji, and Hindus and Muslims worshipped together at syncretic shrines. The British instigated the founding of the Muslim League, a political party claiming to represent Muslim interests, in 1906, partitioned Bengal in 1905 to create a Muslim-majority province, and introduced separate electorates that forced Indians to vote along religious lines.

The political narrative accelerates through the 20th century. Mahatma Gandhi's return to India in 1915 transformed the independence movement from elite politics to mass mobilization through satyagraha, or non-violent resistance. India's enormous contribution to World War I, including 74,187 soldiers killed, was rewarded with the repressive Rowlatt Act rather than the promised self-governance. The Jallianwala Bagh massacre of April 1919, in which Brigadier General Reginald Dyer ordered troops to fire on unarmed civilians at Amritsar, killing at least 379, marked a decisive rupture. Dyer was exonerated by the House of Lords and hailed by the pro-Empire British writer Rudyard Kipling as "The Man Who Saved India." The path to Partition saw the British strengthen the Muslim League at the expense of the Indian National Congress, the main nationalist party. After Congress resigned its provincial ministries in 1939 over not being consulted on India's entry into World War II, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the League's leader, seized the opening. The British imprisoned Congress leaders after the 1942 Quit India movement while nurturing the League. The 1946 Cabinet Mission, a British delegation sent to negotiate a constitutional settlement, failed. Jinnah's "Direct Action Day" in August 1946 left 16,000 dead in Calcutta. Lord Mountbatten, the last Viceroy, rushed through Partition by 15 August 1947, a date chosen because it marked his acceptance of Japan's surrender. Sir Cyril Radcliffe, a lawyer who drew the boundary lines, had never visited India. Over a million people died and 17 million were displaced.

Tharoor dismantles the myth of "enlightened despotism" through evidence of famine, forced migration, and brutality. Between 30 and 35 million Indians died of starvation during the Raj while grain was exported to Britain. The Bengal Famine of 1943, which killed nearly 4 million people, saw Britain's wartime prime minister Winston Churchill divert food from starving civilians to well-supplied soldiers and European stockpiles. Between 1.9 and 3.5 million Indians were shipped as indentured labor to British colonies worldwide, under conditions sometimes worse than the transatlantic slave trade.

The remaining claims for Empire receive systematic treatment. The railways were built for British extraction: Each mile cost £18,000, versus £2,000 in the United States, with all equipment imported from England and profits repatriated. The English language was an instrument of colonial administration: Macaulay's 1835 Minute on Education aimed to create a class "Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect." The British left India with 16 per cent literacy. Tea was grown by Scottish planters using exploited Indian labor, and cricket, though brought by the British, was embraced by Indians as an expression of anti-colonial identity.

Tharoor draws up his final balance sheet. At the start of the 18th century, India generated approximately 23 per cent of world GDP; by 1950, this had fallen to 4 per cent. Freedom reversed the decline: GDP growth averaged 7.8 per cent from 2001 to 2010, literacy climbed from 16 to 72 per cent, and life expectancy rose from 27 to nearly 70. The book concludes by examining the afterlife of colonialism, noting that residual problems remain dangerously active, from the India-Pakistan hostility to the legacy of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the Anglo-French deal that carved up the Middle East. Tharoor calls for moral reckoning rather than financial reparations, and he closes by observing that tomorrow's conflicts may still be due, in no small part, to yesterday's colonial attempts at order.