Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India, Shashi Tharoor (Hurst, March 2017 Aleph Book Company, October 2016)ĭr Shashi Tharoor suffered much of this in the western press and television during the twenty-nine years he served as a career bureaucrat at the United Nations in New York, particularly during George W Bush’s neocon years when Andrew Roberts was the toast of the administration. To any Indian, Pakistani or Bangladeshi sensitive about his country’s past, all of this must have been a sore provocation. The trend has been continued by works such as Niall Ferguson’s Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, which, in 2003 told us how the British built the infrastructure of the globe Andrew Roberts’s A History of the English Speaking Peoples since 1900, which, in 2006, once more took up the white man’s burden and Nick Lloyd’s revisionist account in 2011 of the Amritsar massacre. These helped the Empire, at least in Britain, become a subject of nostalgia. Recent years have seen a spate of popular histories lauding the achievements of the Raj, kicked off in 1997 by Lawrence James’s Raj: the Making and Unmaking of British India. It is not surprising that writers in the Indian sub-continent should seek to redress the balance in accounts about what happened there when it was part of the British Empire.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |