Inglorious Empire

Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India

Author	Shashi Tharoor
Language	English
Genre	History
Publisher	C Hurst & Co
Publication date	March 2017
ISBN	978-1-84904-808-8 (hardcover)

Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India is a book by the Indian historian and author Shashi Tharoor. The book depicts the atrocities and wrongdoings that were committed in the Indian sub-continent during the British Raj.

It was published in India under the title An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India.

Background

The event that led the author to write this book was a 2015 Oxford Union speech he delivered on the topic "Does Britain owe reparations to its former colonies?" The speech went viral on the internet leading to some million views on Youtube. According to Shashi Tharoor, his publisher called him and gave him the idea to transform this into a book. He replied that everyone knows about it. The publisher insisted that if everyone had known this, then the speech would not have gone viral to such an extent. This inspired him to convert his 15 minute speech into a 330 page book.^[1]

Synopsis

Shashi Tharoor has written a number of books and articles on the British Empire's colonial activities in India. He has demanded an open apology from the British government for the atrocities he claims they carried out in India during British rule. Tharoor believes that the best time for this apologetic act would be 13 April 1919, the centenary of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar on 13 April 1919.^[2]

In Inglorious Empire, he presents his research on various events that took place in India during British rule. He openly criticises Winston Churchill and his policies in India, and contends that they were inhumane and led to a millions of deaths. He particularly cites the 1943 Bengal famine, which he calls a "British induced famine".

The Drain Theory represents the idea that India was a prosperous society, which British repression made poor. This theory has circulated through academic and political circles since 1900, especially within the Indian National Congress, the political party to which Tharoor belongs. A large part of the book restates this idea.

Reception

Tharoor's book has been challenged by a number of historians, both Indian and British. In a review published in the Cambridge Review of International Affairs in 2017 the economic historian, Professor Tirthankar Roy, who teaches South Asia and Global History at the London School of Economics and whose recent publications include India in the World Economy from Antiquity to the Present, has described Tharoor's grasp of economic history as "ill-informed" and his political history "naïve". He praised Inglorious Empire for its "passion and plain good writing" while adding that "none one of these qualities makes the interpretation right, however". Roy challenges the central thesis of Tharoor's argument in support of the so-called Drain Theory.

Another review of Inglorious Empire, published in the Literary Review, by historian John Keay, whose many writings on India include India: A History, applauds Tharoor for "tackling an impossibly contentious subject". However, he deplores the fact that "moral venom sometimes clouds his judgment" and notes that many of Tharoor's statistics are seriously out of date, many coming from the polemics contained in the American Will Durant's Story of Civilisation written in the 1930s, which itself drew on the even earlier work of the crusading American missionary Jabej T. Sutherland, author of India in Bondage.

A more detailed criticism of Tharoor's book and his use of statistics was set out by the writer of South Asian history Charles Allen in a lecture entitled Quis custodiet ipsos custodes: who owns Indian history? read to the Royal Society for Asian Affairs in London on 25 April 2018 and soon to be published in Asian Affairs under the revised title Who Owns India's History? A Critique of Shashi Tharoor's Inglorious Empire.

References