Tabish Khair praised the book for presenting an 'intricate mixture of fact and anecdotes' that served as an effective counter to the view of 'colonial apologists' but at the same time, did praise the British, when it merited.

The Guardian called it a 'passionately argued book provides a crushing rebuttal of such ideas with regard to India'. The Hindu Business Line called the book 'one breathless read'. Shashi Tharoor, The Looting of India, Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India (2017) Reception Britain's rise for 200 years was financed by its depredation in India.' The reason was simple: India was governed for the benefit of Britain. By the time the British departed India, it had dropped to just over 3 per cent.

At the beginning of eighteenth century, as the British economic historian Angus Maddison has demonstrated, India's share of world economy was 23 per cent, as large as all of Europe put together. Its accomplishments and prosperity - 'the wealth created by vast and varied industries' - were succinctly described by a Yorkshire-born American Unitarian minister, J. India that the British East India Company conquered was no primitive or barren land, but the glittering jewel of the medieval world. 'Company official John Sullivan observed in the 1840s: 'The little court disappears - the capital decays - trade languishes - the capital decays - the people are impoverished - the Englishman flourishes, and acts like a sponge, drawing up riches from the banks of the Ganges, and squeezing them down upon the banks of the Thames'. The following quote summarises the core theme of the book. Subsequently, his publisher floated the idea to transform the speech into a book despite being initially skeptical, he went on to write a 330 page book.

Tharoor made a speech at a 2015 Oxford Union debate on the topic ' Does Britain owe reparations to its former colonies?', which went viral over the web. In 2017, Tharoor won the 2017 Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism Award and the 2019 Sahitya Akademi Award for this work. Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India, first published in India as An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India, is a work of non-fiction by Shashi Tharoor, an Indian politician and diplomat, on the effects of British colonial rule on India.

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