Inglorious Empire

By Shashi Tharoor,

Book cover of Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India

Book description

The Sunday Times Top 10 bestseller on India's experience of British colonialism, by the internationally-acclaimed author and diplomat Shashi Tharoor

'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


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Why read it?

2 authors picked Inglorious Empire as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

This book is among the most informative and inspiring books ever. The subject treats–the Indian subcontinent’s experience (comparable to that of Ireland) of profit-seeking ‘entrepreneurs’ [especially the predatory East India Company] backed by British governments and opportunistic Western/Christian evangelical forces [giving ‘religious/moral’ ‘justification’ to foreign invasion, occupation and related apartheid type instituted rule–provides need to know detail for those in the West [UK] in an age where those wilfully or through ignorance of the facts are attached to supremacist nostalgic ‘Brexit’ views of yesteryear colonialism as benign, are still poorly challenged.

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This is a polemic and pretends to be none other but it serves as an antidote to the apologists of Empire. Why is it needed? You can’t read the Ibis trilogy and not understand the exploitation of the East India Company. The first war of independence (1857) failed and was brutally put down. There were attempts at reform and not all legacies of the Raj are regrettable, my Victorian maverick works on the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India. But the tendency in the UK is to highlight the positives and ignore the racism, the famines, the massacres, and the horrors


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