One might add, by similar depredations in China, Singapore, Hong Kong, West, and East Africa, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, although in the case of the latter three, mostly exploitation of human resources during war. Its depredations in India financed the British rise for 200 years.” The reason was simple: India was governed for the benefit of Britain. “By the time the British departed India, it had dropped to just over 3 percent. “(It was 27 percent in 1700 when the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb’s treasury raked in 100 million pounds in tax revenues alone). “At the beginning of the eighteenth century, as the British economic historian Angus Maddison has demonstrated, India’s share of the world economy was 23 percent, as large as all of Europe put together,” Tharoor writes. His Inglorious Empire (also published under the title An Era of Darkness) is an eight-chapter, 250-page indictment of the British for sucking the wealth and resources out of India for more than 200 years of plunder. “But in more complex situations, it cannot and, more to the point, does not work as well.”

“Gandhiism is viable at its simplest and most profound in the service of a transcendental principle like independence from foreign rule,” Tharoor writes. He is even miffed at one of his idols, Mahatma Gandhi. He is angry at historian Niall Ferguson for suggesting that the British occupation benefitted India. He is angry at Rudyard Kipling for being a romantic imperialist and inventing “the white man’s burden. He is angry at Winston Churchill for being an obdurate imperialist. He is bitter at the British as he outlines their more than two centuries of exploiting Indian resources and people, then departing hastily in 1947 to permit a partition during which hundreds of thousands died.

Shashi tharoor empire