As the scholar and Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen has explained, there has never been a famine in a democracy with a free press, because public accountability ensures effective response. Lack of democracy and public accountability, however, is what characterized British rule in India.
Inglorious Empire by Shashi Tharoor. Download Inglorious Empire by Shashi Tharoor. Copyright Disclaimer: This site does not store any files on its server.
Your Rating:. Your Comment:. Read Online Download. Add a review Your Rating: Your Comment:. The Empire blew rebels from cannon, massacred unarmed protesters, entrenched institutionalised racism, and caused millions to die from starvation.
British 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. He goes on to show how Britain's Industrial Revolution was founded on India's deindustrialisation, and the destruction of its textile industry.
In this bold and incisive reassessment of colonialism, Tharoor exposes to devastating effect the inglorious reality of Britain's stained Indian legacy. Inglorious Empire. The British in India is a breathtaking accomplishment, a vivid and balanced history written with brio, elegance, and erudition. A dogged enemy of Hitler, resolute ally of the Americans, and inspiring leader through World War II, Winston Churchill is venerated as one of the truly great statesmen of the last century.
As journalist Madhusree Mukerjee reveals, at the same time that Churchill brilliantly opposed the barbarism of the Nazis, he governed India with a fierce resolve to crush its freedom movement and a profound contempt for native lives. The streets of eastern Indian cities were lined with corpses, yet instead of sending emergency food shipments Churchill used the wheat and ships at his disposal to build stockpiles for feeding postwar Britain and Europe.
Winston Churchill may have found victory in Europe, but, as this groundbreaking historical investigation reveals, his mismanagement—facilitated by dubious advice from scientist and eugenicist Lord Cherwell—devastated India and set the stage for the massive bloodletting that accompanied independence.
While imperial blockbusters fly off the shelves, there is no comprehensive history dedicated to resistance in the 19th and 20th century British Empire. The Trouble with Empire is the first volume to fill this gap, offering a brief but thorough introduction to the nature and consequences of resistance to British imperialism. Historian Antoinette Burton's study spans the 19th and 20th centuries, when discontented subjects of empire made their unhappiness felt from Ireland to Canada to India to Africa to Australasia, in direct response to incursions of military might and imperial capitalism.
The Trouble with Empire offers the first thoroughgoing account of what British imperialism looked like from below and of how tenuous its hold on alien populations was throughout its long, unstable life.
By taking the long view, moving across a variety of geopolitical sites and spanning the whole of the period , Burton examines the commonalities between different forms of resistance and unveils the structural weaknesses of the British Empire.
There are over a billion Indians alive today. But are some more Indian than others? To answer this question, one that is central to the identity of all who belong to modern India, Shashi Tharoor explores hotly contested ideas of nationalism, patriotism, citizenship and belonging. A contest has emerged between two opposing ideas of India: ethno-religious nationalism, versus civic nationalism. The struggle for India's soul has heightened, deepened and broadened, threatening to hollow out and destroy the remarkable concepts of pluralism, secularism and inclusive nationhood that were bestowed upon the nation at Independence.
The Constitution is under siege; institutions are being undermined; mythical pasts propagated; universities assailed; minorities demonized, and worse. Every passing month sees new attacks on the ideals that India has long been admired for, as authoritarian leaders and their supporters push the country towards a state of illiberalism and intolerance.
If they succeed, millions will be stripped of their identity, and bogus theories of Indianness will take root in the soil of the subcontinent. However, all is not yet lost. This erudite and lucid book shows what needs to be done to win the battle of belonging-to strengthen everything that is unique and valuable about India.
This is London as you've never seen it before. It recalls the journalism of Orwell' Financial Times. The Tears of the Rajas is a sweeping history of the British in India, seen through the experiences of a single Scottish family.
For a century the Lows of Clatto survived mutiny, siege, debt and disease, everywhere from the heat of Madras to the Afghan snows. They lived through the most appalling atrocities and retaliated with some of their own.
Each of their lives, remarkable in itself, contributes to the story of the whole fragile and imperilled, often shockingly oppressive and devious but now and then heroic and poignant enterprise. On the surface, John and Augusta Low and their relations may seem imperturbable, but in their letters and diaries they often reveal their loneliness and desperation and their doubts about what they are doing in India.
The Lows are the family of the author's grandmother, and a recurring theme of the book is his own discovery of them and of those parts of the history of the British in India which posterity has preferred to forget.
The book brings to life not only the most dramatic incidents of their careers - the massacre at Vellore, the conquest of Java, the deposition of the boy-king of Oudh, the disasters in Afghanistan, the Reliefs of Lucknow and Chitral - but also their personal ordeals: the bankruptcies in Scotland and Calcutta, the plagues and fevers, the deaths of children and deaths in childbirth. And it brings to life too the unrepeatable strangeness of their lives: the camps and the palaces they lived in, the balls and the flirtations in the hill stations, and the hot slow rides through the dust.
An epic saga of love, war, intrigue and treachery, The Tears of the Rajas is surely destined to become a classic of its kind.
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