In 1700 India is estimated to have accounted for 27 percent of the world economy and a quarter of the global textile trade. Such drawbacks tended to put off all but those whom circumstances had already disfavored: second sons, members of the down-at-heel Anglo-Irish gentry, dispossessed Scottish landowners who had backed the losing side in a rebellion against the crown.īeing on the company payroll was rather a means to an end moonlighting was where the money lay in one of the richest places on earth. In the 1720s junior clerks, or “writers,” received just £5 per year, not enough to live on in Bengal or Madras and a pittance when set against the handsome 8 percent annual dividend the company’s shareholders awarded themselves back in London. Arriving in India wan and scurvy after a year at sea, many quickly succumbed to disease, madness, or one of the innumerable little wars that the company fought in order to embed itself on the subcontinent. In the eighteenth century a career with the East India Company was a throw of the dice for unattached young British men. In this bold and incisive reassessment of colonialism, Tharoor exposes to devastating effect the inglorious reality of Britain’s stained Indian legacy.An East India Company official, probably the Scottish surgeon William Fullerton of Rosemount, with attendants painting by Dip Chand, circa 1760–1764

He goes on to show how Britain’s Industrial Revolution was founded on India’s deindustrialisation, and the destruction of its textile industry.

The Empire blew rebels from cannon, massacred unarmed protesters, entrenched institutionalised racism, and caused millions to die from starvation.īritish imperialism justified itself as enlightened despotism for the benefit of the governed, but Shashi Tharoor takes demolishes this position, demonstrating how every supposed imperial ‘gift’ – from the railways to the rule of law – was designed in Britain’s interests alone. By 1947, after two centuries of British rule, it had decreased six-fold. In the eighteenth century, India’s share of the world economy was as large as Europe’s.

‘Tharoor’s impassioned polemic slices straight to the heart of the darkness that drives all empires … laying bare the grim, and high, cost of the British Empire for its former subjects. The Sunday Times Top 10 bestseller on India’s experience of British colonialism, by the internationally-acclaimed author and diplomat Shashi Tharoor

Inglorious empire online