000			01339nam a2200157 4500
008			170823b xxu||||| |||| 00| 0 eng d
020			_a9789383064656
082			_a954.03 _bTHA
100			_aTharoor, Shashi _915891
245			_aAn Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India
260			_aNew Delhi _bAleph Book Company _c2016
300			_a333p
500			_aIn 1930, the American historian and philosopher Will Durant wrote that Britain’s ‘conscious and deliberate bleeding of India… [was the] greatest crime in all history’. He was not the only one to denounce the rapacity and cruelty of British rule, and his assessment was not exaggerated. Almost thirty-five million Indians died because of acts of commission and omission by the British—in famines, epidemics, communal riots and wholesale slaughter like the reprisal killings after the 1857 War of Independence and the Amritsar massacre of 1919. Besides the deaths of Indians, British rule impoverished India in a manner that beggars belief. When the East India Company took control of the country, in the chaos that ensued after the collapse of the Mughal empire, India’s share of world GDP was 23 per cent. When the British left it was just above 3 per cent.
600			_aHumanities and Social Science _99370
942			_2ddc _cLB _k954.03 _mTHA
999			_c109245 _d109245