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genizah 's review for:
Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India
by Shashi Tharoor
informative
slow-paced
Tharoor clearly states that he's not writing a history, but he doesn't quite hit polemic either. Instead, this is more like a heavily annotated bibliography (or an undergraduate thesis, if you're feeling uncharitable). It's quite a good summary of quotations and citations from both primary and secondary sources (especially contemporary Western anti-imperialists), and you don't need a particularly subtle argument to arrive at the conclusion that the British Empire was bad for India. However, the only topics on which Tharoor seems to have his own strong opinions are 1) ways the Indian National Congress screwed up during and after WWII, and 2) cricket.
On a personal note, while I understand why the book is arranged thematically rather than chronologically, I wish there had been some introductory explanation of the colonial financial structure under both the Company and the Raj. I felt this lack particularly in the first section, which is full of sentences that begin "The Indian Government paid for..." with the assumption that the reader will know what that means in this context.
On a personal note, while I understand why the book is arranged thematically rather than chronologically, I wish there had been some introductory explanation of the colonial financial structure under both the Company and the Raj. I felt this lack particularly in the first section, which is full of sentences that begin "The Indian Government paid for..." with the assumption that the reader will know what that means in this context.