India was Britain's biggest cash cow, and Indians literally paid for their own oppression. how Britain's rise was built upon its depredations in India.

The soldiers of the East India Company obliged, systematically smashing the looms of some Bengali weavers and, according to at least one contemporary account (as well as widespread, if unverifiable, belief), breaking their thumbs so they could not ply their craft. In Inglorious Empire, Shashi Tharoor tells the real story of the British in India, from the arrival of the East India Company in 1757 to the end of the Raj, and reveals. Indian textiles were remarkably cheap-so much so that Britain's cloth manufacturers, unable to compete, wanted them eliminated. As British manufacturing grew, they went further. They cut off the export markets for Indian textiles, interrupting long-standing independent trading links. They squeezed out other foreign buyers and instituted a Company monopoly.

They stopped paying for textiles and silk in pounds brought from Britain, preferring to pay from revenues extracted from Bengal, and pushing prices still lower. Mr 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. In power, the British were, in a word, ruthless. In this extract he talks about British manufacturing in the Indian market… Chapter by chapter, the book convincingly. In the book Shashi Tharoor attempts to correct many misconceptions about one of the most contested periods of Indian history. Inglorious Empire both reiterates long-standing, persuasive and well-founded critiques of the British Raj’s countless exploitative activities and the damage done under colonialism, and expresses Tharoor’s surprise and disappointment that such basic points still need to be made anew today. Tharoor's latest book, Inglorious Empire. Shashi Tharoor won the Sahitya Akademi Award 2019 for his book 'An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India' on December 18. Shashi Tharoor is an Indian politician and former UN diplomat who is currently serving as Member of Parliament, Lok Sabha for Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala.

Shashi tharoor empire