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The Sunday Times Top 10 bestseller on India''s experience of British colonialism, by the internationally-acclaimed author and diplomat Shashi Tharoorbr>br>''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 subjects. An essential read'' Financial Timesbr>br>In the eighteenth century, India''s share of the world economy was as large as Europe''s. By 1947, after two centuries of British rule, it had decreased six-fold. The Empire blew rebels from cannon, massacred unarmed protesters, entrenched institutionalised racism, and caused millions to die from starvation.br>br>British imperialism justified itself as enlightened despotism for the benefit of the governed, but Shashi Tharoor takes demolishes this position, demonstrating how every supposed imperial ''gift'' - from the railways to the rule of law - was designed in Britain''s interests alone. He goes on to show how Britain''s Industrial Revolution was founded on India''s deindustrialisation, and the destruction of its textile industry.br>br>In this bold and incisive reassessment of colonialism, Tharoor exposes to devastating effect the inglorious reality of Britain''s stained Indian legacy.>
A propos de l'auteur
SHASHI THAROOR is the bestselling author of twenty books, both fiction and non-fiction, besides being a noted critic and columnist. His books include the pathbreaking satire
The Great Indian Novel (1989), the classic
India: From Midnight to the Millennium (1997), the bestselling
An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India, for which he won the Ramnath Goenka Award for Excellence in Journalism, 2016, for Books (Non-Fiction), and
The Paradoxical Prime Minister: Narendra Modi and His India. He has been Under Secretary-General of the United Nations and Minister of State for Human Resource Development and Minister of State for External Affairs in the Government of India. He is a three-time member of the Lok Sabha from Thiruvananthapuram and chairs the Parliament Information
Technology committee. He has won numerous literary awards, including a national Sahitya Akademi award, a Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the Crossword Lifetime Achievement Award. He was awarded the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, India's highest honour for overseas Indians, in 2004, and honoured as New Age Politician of the Year (2010) by NDTV.
