Inglorious Empire: An Era Of Darkness

Shashi Tharoor is an Indian politician, writer and a former candidate for Secretary General of the United Nations. In his book, entitled Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India in its British edition, he focuses public attention on Britain’s two-hundred-year rule in India. The book was published previously in India under the title An Era of Darkness: the British Empire in India.
Tharoor’s argument is that British rule destroyed the Indian economy and pushed the country back centuries, challenging the traditional view of the legacy of the British Empire in the region. In a presentation of the book at the Oxford Union Society, Tharoor claimed that, while he believes that no amount of financial reparations can compensate for the damage done, the topic represents an opportunity to debate colonialism.

Shashi Tharoor (Indian accent): How do you put a value on the human lives lost, for example, because of British colonialism? The thirty-five million Indians who died totally unnecessary deaths in faminesengineered by British policy and … all the other, all the other wrongs. So I said you really can’t put a price on it. Why don’t you instead look for moral atonement? But I took the topic as an opportunity to talk about British colonialism, about the balance sheet, as it were, of damage that was done to my country and the reason that… the debate was actually global, not just about India, and the reason I focused on India in that debate was because it’s the country I happen to know best.

The case for moral atonement

The author, however, makes a case for some sort of moral reparation:

Shashi Tharoor: So why is there atonement required? Britain came to a flourishing, thriving, prosperous country and systematically set about ruining it and I say this quite bluntly because you know obviously the experience of British colonialism varies from place to place. Singapore is a lovely country, but it was basically a barren rock when the British took it over. They built it, using a lot of penal Indian labour by the way, and you know their experience in Singapore for example can’t be compared to their experience in India but in India you had a country which was by far the richest country on earth at that time, accounting, according to the Oxford econometrician Angus Maddison, for 27 per cent of global GDP at the time.

Apologies and some teaching

In Tharoor’s opinion, not only should the British government apologise and properly acknowledge the kind of damage that they caused to India, its economy and its people, but they should also teach the real history of the Empire:

Shashi Tharoor: There are other things I’d like them to do… the first, very simply, is to teach unvarnished colonial history in their schools. I was shocked to discover that you can do your A-levels in history in the United Kingdom today without learning a single line of colonial history. There is a convenient historical amnesia where all the wealth drained from the colonies, from India certainly, but also from the sugar plantations of the Caribbean or whatever else you want to… want to point to… that this helped build the industrialized British powerhouse of the 19th century is completely not acknowledged and that today’s Britain is in many ways a legacy of those centuries of plunder and resulting prosperity is also forgotten.