Right-wing critics of mine suspended their ‘trolling’ of me on social media to hail my speech. One site swiftly crossed over three million views others did not keep track, but reported record numbers of hits.

Within hours it was being downloaded and replicated on hundreds of sites, sent out on WhatsApp and forwarded by email. I promptly tweeted a link to it-and watched in astonishment as it went viral. In early July, however, the Union posted the debate on the web, and sent me a video copy of my own speech.

The British public is woefully ignorant of the realities of the British empire, and what it meant to its subject peoples Indeed, the best form of atonement by the British might be, as Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has suggested, to start teaching unromanticized colonial history in British schools. The event, in the Union’s impressive wood-panelled premises dating back several centuries, was a success and I left pleased enough, but without giving the proceedings a second thought. Since I was already scheduled to speak at the Hay Festival of Literature in Wales later that week, I thought it might be pleasant to stop in Oxford on the way and debate there again (as I had once done, on behalf of the United Nations, a decade earlier). THIS book, somewhat unusually, began as a speech.Īt the end of May 2015, I was invited by the Oxford Union to speak on the proposition ‘Britain Owes Reparations to Her Former Colonies’. The British edition, ' Inglorious Empire- What the British did to India' by Hurst is out March. This is the full preface of the book (reprinted with the permission of the author) published by the Aleph Book Company. He examines India's experience under the yoke of Empire as Britain's economic fortunes grew and India sank under the onslaught of institutionalized plunder. Tharoor cuts through jargon, dog-eared history tomes and confounding chronology, to get to the heart of key issues, not in the dreary linear fashion favoured by historians, but with neat bundles of robust interconnected essays tinged equally with wisdom and wit. Subsequent durbars were held in 19 (the last for the coronation of King George V who visited India with Queen Mary.Īn Oxford Union debate sowed the seeds for ' An Era of Darkness - The British Empire in India' - a sweepingly erudite yet thoroughly entertaining, enlightening, and readable book, by Indian politician and writer Shashi Tharoor. The Delhi Durbar of 1877 was held on a cold January morning in Coronation Park to proclaim Queen Victoria the Empress of India.

An era of darkness