Shashi Tharoor: Inglorious Empire – What the British did to India

On 28 May 2015, the Indian lawyer, writer, MP and former UN diplomat Shashi Tharoor delivered a remarkable speech in Oxford on the proposition “Britain Owes Reparations to Her Former Colonies”.¹ In his speech, Tharoor revealed the wrongs of the British colonial regime and concluded by proposing that Britain should pay India a symbolic reparation of one pound a year payable for the next two centuries – as atonement for the crimes committed by the United Kingdom during the 200 years of imperial rule.
    His speech was very well received. However, Tharoor noted that many people in Britain, as well as in India, were still unfamiliar to what the British Empire had meant for the subjugated peoples; on the contrary, British films and television series still romanticise the Empire with nostalgia to this day. To counter this amnesia, Tharoor converted his speech into a book, which was first published in 2016 in India under the title “An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India” and in 2017 in Britain under the title “Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India”.
    In the preface of the German edition, Tharoor already highlights the disastrous consequences of British exploitation for the Indian subcontinent:
    “Colonial rule in India meant, for millions of people, economic exploitation and ruin, the destruction of flourishing industries, the systematic denial of fair opportunities to compete, the elimination of indigenous governing institutions, the transformation of traditional ways of life, and the eradication of the colonised people’s most precious possession – their identity and their self-respect.”
    The consequences are still apparent today in the political divisions between Hindus and Muslims systematically promoted by the British colonial power, “which led almost inexorably to the tragedy of Partition.” (p. 246)

Historical development

“In 1600, when the East India Company was established, Britain was producing just 1.8 per cent of the world’s GDP, while India was generating 23 per cent.” (p. 216)
    India had produced excellent textiles; Bengali muslins were among the world’s most desirable fabrics. India had been the centre of a thriving and highly specialised shipbuilding industry, with Indian ships sailing the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea. Furthermore, India had been a pioneer of steel production and processing; Indian steel acquired global renown as the world’s finest.
    However: “By 1940, after nearly two centuries of the Raj², Britain accounted für nearly 10 per cent of world GDP, while India had been reduced to a poor ‘third-world’ country, destitute and starving, a global poster child of poverty and famine. […] The British left a society with 16 per cent literacy, a life expectancy of 27, practically no domestic industry and over 90 per cent living below what today we would call the poverty line.”
(p. 216/217)
    India’s thriving trade and industry had been systematically destroyed by the colonial regime in order to eliminate troublesome and more formidable competition.
    “Britain’s Industrial Revolution was built on the destruction of India’s thriving manufacturing industries.” (p. 5)
    The British destroyed the Indian textile industry using unscrupulous methods, including crude force. For instance, the soldiers of the East India Company systematically smashed “the looms of some Bengali weavers” and broke “their thumbs so they could not ply their craft.” (p. 6) Indian textiles were substituted by British ones manufactured in England using plundered Indian raw material, only to be exported back to India and sold to the Indian people.
    Indian shipping and shipbuilding were destroyed in what amounted to a veritable economic war; amongst other things, duties were imposed on Indian merchant ships moving to and from their own Indian ports. (p 27)
    Many people were forced into the agricultural sector as day labourers. There, they were not allowed to work in peace. “Having acquired rights to collect revenue early on in the Company’s overlordship, the British proceeded to squeeze the Indian peasant dry […] Where local leaders had once understood local conditions, making due allowances for droughts and crop failures or even straitened family circumstances […] now British revenue collectors ruled with a rule book that allowed no breathing space for negotiation or understanding local problems at a given time.” (p. 17/18)
    Indian farmers were forced to grow poppy in order to extract opium for export to China – and China was coerced by military force into opening its ports to opium traders. The British Empire flooded the Chinese population with an unstoppable drug epidemic; international merchants grew rich from the opium trade, whilst Indian farmers were kept in a precarious state of dependency.³ As late as 1921, the British Government vetoed a bill introduced by elected Indian members of the impotent Central Legislature prohibiting the growth or sale of opium in India, on the grounds that “one-ninth of the government’s annual revenue came from drugs.” (p. 227)
    The British grew tea on a massive scale – tea that was intended solely for the British – which led to the widespread destruction of India’s forests and wildlife. All this resulted in famines on a level never seen before in the country.
    “As a result of what one can only call the British Colonial Holocaust, thanks to economic policies ruthlessly enforced by Britain, between 30 and 35 million Indians needlessly died of starvation during the Raj. Millions of tonnes of wheat were exported from India to Britain even as famine raged. When relief camps were set up, the inhabitants were barely fed and nearly all died.” (p. 149/150)
    The parallel with Britain’s policy towards Ireland is obvious, as Tharoor points out. (p. 151)
    Britain’s wealth, as well as its rising global power status in the context of the onset of industrialisation, was largely based on the exploitation of India’s resources and its population. India itself suffered massive forced deindustrialisation as a result.

The East India Company

Founded in 1600 as a joint-stock company, the East India Company received military backing from the British Government and was supported by relevant legislation, loans from the Bank of England and a foreign policy aimed at breaking local resistance and eliminating competitors. It began with trading posts along the Indian coast. As events unfolded, this private enterprise became involved in internal Indian conflicts that accompanied the decline of Mughal power. Initially, it supported one or other contender for power with gold and money; subsequently, however, the East India Company also deployed entire armies of mercenaries to subdue and ultimately occupy individual Indian provinces, to gear the local economy towards its own profits, and to extract taxes. The East India Company emerged as the most powerful private enterprise in history, later controlling almost half of world trade and functioning as a state in the guise of a trading company.⁴ For the unscrupulous businessman, a position in the East India Company served as a jumping-off point to a seat in Parliament and a glittering career in England. Many families in high society in present-day England owe their nobility and wealth to the machinations of their ancestors. They might best be compared to today’s transnational corporations, which prey on countries, creating as much chaos as possible in order to exploit their resources with impunity.
    In 1858, governance over India was transferred from the East India Company to the Crown. Finally, with Queen Victoria’s coronation in 1877, “the British monarchy was reinvented ... as an imperial instrument – the Queen became an empress, with India the newest and most glittering possession …” (p. 47) This is true in the literal sense, as one of the world’s largest glittering diamonds, the Koh-i-Noor – which was stolen by the British – can still be admired today as part of the British Crown Jewels in the Tower of London. The British claim that it was presented to Queen Victoria by the Sikh Maharaja of the Punjab as “compensation” (p. 240) for the expenses caused by the Sikhs in their attempts to prevent the East India Company from taking over the region. To this day, no one in Britain seems to be considering the return of this looted property.
    Victoria promised that, from that moment on, the Indians would be governed solely for their own good, quite in the spirit of Rudyard Kipling’s poem, “The White Man’s Burden”. However, the people’s desire for self-government was suppressed, and those who called for national independence and autonomy were persecuted. Village self-government structures, as they had existed on the Indian subcontinent before colonialism, were destroyed. The British class system was imposed on India, with a hierarchical system of rule exercised by individuals loyal to the British. The British colonial administration devolved smidgens of government authority to unelected Indian provincial and central legislative councils (p. 41), whose members represented a tiny educated elite; they had no accountability to the masses, exercised no real power, and satisfied themselves they had been consulted by the government from time to time. The exploitation of the country continued as before.

Divide et impera

An entire chapter of the book is devoted to the colonialist policy of “divide and rule”. According to Tharoor, the British “had a particular talent for creating and exaggerating particularist identities and drawing ethnically-based administrative lines in all their colonies and attaching excessive importance to them.” (p. 102) By doing so, the colonial rulers entrenched the injustices of the caste system. “Caste had not been a particularly stable social structure in the pre-British days; […] caste had broadly been a mobile form of social organisation constantly shaped and reinvented by the beliefs, the politics and quite often the economic interests of the dominant men of the times. The British, however, promulgated the theory that caste hierarchy and discrimination influenced the working of Indian society.” (p. 104) Caste became the colonial form of civil society. (p. 105)
    Of particular devastation was the British colonial power’s policy of accentuating and legitimizing the Hindu-Muslim divide and, at the same time, a new political Muslim division between Shia and Sunni communities. (p. 122) Tharoor states clearly: “Large-scale conflicts between Hindus and Muslims […] only began under colonial rule; many other kinds of social strife were labelled as religious due to the colonists’ Orientalist assumption that religion was the fundamental division line in Indian society.” (p. 114) This policy was intended to weaken the Indian independence movement; its leaders, such as Jawaharlal Nehru, were arrested, while at the same time the Muslim League – which represented merely a minority of Muslims and advocated the secession of the Muslim provinces – was bolstered by the British. Shaken by the desertion of Indian soldiers and the mutiny of Indian sailors in 1945, Britain – itself weakened by World War II – could divide but it could no longer rule. Tharoor states unequivocally that Britain bears responsibility for the horrors of Partition in 1947, leaving behind a million dead and thirteen million displaced. (p. 148)

Old wine in new bottles

Tharoor is not concerned with reparations. His aim is to counter imperial amnesia and attempts to “consign colonialism to the proverbial dustbin of history.” (p. 392) He does so primarily in view of the present and the future, in order to detect and prevent similar developments.
    Therefore, Shashi Tharoor’s book is a valuable resource for anyone interested in colonial history and wishing to gain an understanding of the recent history of the Indian subcontinent, and this for three reasons: Firstly, it offers an Indian perspective on the impacts of British colonial policy, presenting it clearly and unambiguously, without making any excuses.
    Secondly, alongside many important details, the reader also gains an insight into the various forms of colonial exploitation: at the start of the colonial era India was exploited and devastated by a profit-driven private enterprise, the East India Company; it was not until 1858 that the British Crown officially occupied the country.
    Thirdly, the book encourages readers to compare these unique historical events with current developments and, by doing so, to gain a clearer insight into contemporary forms of neo-colonial exploitation. “The East India Company has collapsed, but globalization has ensured that its modern-day successors in the former imperial states remain the predominant instruments of capitalism.” (p. 236) In other words, what has been presented to us as globalization since the 1990s is nothing more than old wine in new bottles. •

¹https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7CW7S0zxv4
² Author’s note: In Hindi, “Raj” means “rule” or “kingdom” and historically refers to British colonial rule in India.
³ For those who wish to explore the consequences of the opium trade in India and China in greater detail, we recommend Amitav Ghosh’s book “Smoke and Ashes”.
⁴ See also Dalrymple, W.. The Anarchy – The Relentless Rise of the East India Company. Dalrymple takes a detailed look at the history of the East India Company and outlines how a profit-driven private company based in London was gradually able to subjugate the whole of India.