how did India suffer under the rule of british
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Chronicling the evils of British imperialism is imperative given the impact and legacy of that imperialism, and given the dishonest and selective nostalgia about it, not to mention downright ignorance. Almost 60 per cent of Britons were proud of the British Empire and almost 50 per cent thought it had made the colonies better off – a manifestation of what the scholar Paul Gilroy has termed postcolonial melancholia – according to a YouGov poll in 2014.
Inglorious Empire, by Shashi Tharoor, a United Nations diplomat turned Indian National Congress MP in New Delhi, adds to a growing list of books on what the British did to India, most recently Jon Wilson’s India Conquered: Britain’s Raj and the Chaos of Empire. Wilson underlines how the British view of themselves as conquerors generated a racist delusion of “victor’s sovereignty”, an argument still fuelled by the current wave of empire nostalgia.
Tharoor notes, somewhat quietly in a footnote towards the end, that Wilson’s effort was published “just as this book was going to press” and “makes much the same case” about the extent to which Britain benefited from imperial rule at the expense of the conquered.