An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

by Shashi Tharoor

Overview

In 1930, the American historian and philosopher Will Durant wrote that Britain's conscious and deliberate bleeding of India... [was the] greatest crime in all history . He was not the only one to denounce the rapacity and cruelty of British rule, and his assessment was not exaggerated. Almost thirty-five million Indians died because of acts of commission and omission by the British in famines, epidemics, communal riots and wholesale slaughter like the reprisal killings after the 1857 War of Independence and the Amritsar massacre of 1919. Besides the deaths of Indians, British rule impoverished India in a manner that beggars belief. When the East India Company took control of the country, in the chaos that ensued after the collapse of the Mughal empire, India's share of world GDP was 23 per cent. When the British left it was just above 3 per cent. The British empire in India began with the East India Company, incorporated in 1600, by royal charter of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth I, to trade in silk, spices and other profitable Indian commodities. Within a century and a half, the Company had become a power to reckon with in India. In 1757, under the command of Robert Clive, Company forces defeated the ruling Nawab Siraj-ud-Daula of Bengal at Plassey, through a combination of superior artillery and even more superior chicanery.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9789383064656
Publisher:	Aleph Book Company
Publication date:	10/27/2016
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	360
Sales rank:	542,912
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.94(d)

About the Author

Shashi Tharoor is the bestselling author of fifteen previous books, both fiction and non-fiction, besides being a noted critic and columnist. His books include the path-breaking satire The Great Indian Novel (1989), the classic India: From Midnight to the Millennium (1997), and most recently, India Shastra: Reflections on the Nation in Our Time (2015).

Editorial Reviews

An excellently written book. Tharoor has based his books on verifiable events and on facts rather than his opinion. This is what makes the book a compelling read. You would need a dictionary to get through this book though. --ByAmazon Customeron 15 September 2017

From the Publisher