Inglorious Empire

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 satireThe Great Indian Novel(1989), the classicIndia: From Midnight to the Millennium(1997), the bestsellingAn 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), andThe 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.

Tharoor convincingly demolishes some of the more persistent myths about Britain's supposedly civilising mission in India ... [he] charts the destruction of pre-colonial systems of government by the British and their ubiquitous ledgers and rule books ... The statistics are worth repeating.
Inglorious Empireis a timely reminder of the need to start teaching unromanticised colonial history in British schools. A welcome antidote to the nauseating righteousness and condescension pedalled by Niall Ferguson in his 2003 bookEmpire
His writing is a delight and he seldom misses his target ... Tharoor should be applauded for tackling an impossibly contentious subject ... he deserves to be read. Indians are not the only ones who need reminding that empire has a lot to answer for.
Remarkable ... The book is savagely critical of 200 years of the British in India. It makes very uncomfortable reading for Brits
Tharoor's impassioned polemic slices straight to the heart of the darkness that drives all empires. Forceful, persuasive and blunt, he demolishes Raj nostalgia, laying bare the grim, and high, cost of the British Empire for its former subjects. An essential read
Ferocious and astonishing. Essential for a Britain lost in sepia fantasies about its past,Inglorious Empireis history at its clearest and cutting best
Those Brits who speak confidently about how Britain's "historical and cultural ties" to India will make it easy to strike a great new trade deal should read Mr Tharoor's book. It would help them to see the world through the eyes of the ... countries once colonised or defeated by Britain
Rare indeed is it to come across history that is so readable and so persuasive
Eloquent ... a well-written riposte to those texts that celebrate empire as a supposed "force for good"
Tharoor's book - arising from a contentious Oxford Union debate in 2015 where he proposed the motion "Britain owes reparations to her former colonies" - should keep the home fires burning, so to speak, both in India and in Britain. ... He makes a persuasive case, with telling examples
Brilliant ... A searing indictment of the Raj and its impact on India. ... Required reading for all Anglophiles in former British colonies, and needs to be a textbook in Britain
Persuasive and well-founded ... the book convincingly demolishes the nostalgic, self-serving arguments voiced by imperial apologists