![]() ![]() It pillaged India’s economy looting its treasure, stealing its steel manufacturing techniques, dismantling its shipping industry, transferring its textile production to Britain, manipulating its currency, extracting punitive taxes, and fixing tariffs and regulations to favour British industry. Then the British East India Company arrived in the 17th century, with its private army and royal backing to ‘wage war’ in pursuit of its aims. India’s steel, shipbuilding and textile industries were world-leading and its architectural achievements among the finest. Shashi Tharoor’s latest book on British rule in India aims to combat what he calls Britain’s ‘historical amnesia’ over its past atrocities.ĭrawing on an impressive array of historical sources, Tharoor claims that, prior to British rule, India was one of the richest countries in the world, with a 23 percent share of the global economy, as large as all of Europe put together (Britain’s share was just 1.8 percent). ![]() ![]() Over the years, many writers and scholars have challenged the view that the British empire was, in Winston Churchill’s words, a ‘valiant and benignant force in the history of mankind’. Reviewed by Callum Alexander Scott for Peace News, August – September 2017 | Issue 2608 – 2609 Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India By Shashi Tharoor ![]()
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