His books include the path-breaking satire The Great Indian Novel (1989), the classic India: From Midnight to the M. In this bold and incisive reassessment of colonialism, Tharoor exposes to devastating effect the inglorious reality of Britain's stained Indian legacy. SHASHI THAROOR is the bestselling author of twenty books, both fiction and non-fiction, besides being a noted critic and columnist.

Within a century and a half, the Company had become a power to reckon with in India. He is the author of Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India, published by Hurst with a guide price of 25. He goes on to show how Britain's Industrial Revolution was founded on India's deindustrialisation, and the destruction of its textile industry. 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. Dr Shashi Tharoor is an Indian MP, writer and a former career diplomat. The Empire blew rebels from cannon, massacred unarmed protesters, entrenched institutionalised racism, and caused millions to die from starvation.īritish 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. By 1947, after two centuries of British rule, it had decreased six-fold. In the eighteenth century, India's share of the world economy was as large as Europe's. laying bare the grim, and high, cost of the British Empire for its former subjects. Tharoor recently finished the Mumbai-born authors latest novel, 'Victory City', which is based around the medieval city of Hampi, the ruined site in Karnataka of the Vijayanagara empire. 'Tharoor's impassioned polemic slices straight to the heart of the darkness that drives all empires.

The Sunday Times Top 10 bestseller on India's experience of British colonialism, by the internationally-acclaimed author and diplomat Shashi Tharoor

Shashi tharoor empire