"Shashi Tharoor reveals with acuity, impeccable research, and trademark wit, just how disastrous British rule was for India. Besides examining the many ways in which the colonizers exploited India, ranging from the drain of national resources to Britain, the destruction of the Indian textile, steel-making and shipping industries, and the negative transformation of agriculture, he demolishes the arguments of Western and Indian apologists for Empire...

In August 1756 the East India Company defeated the young Mughal emperor and forced him to establish in his richest provinces a new administration run by English merchants who collected taxes through means of a ruthless private army--what we would now call an act of involuntary privatization. The East India Company's founding charter authorized it to "wage war" and it had always used violence to gain its ends. But the creation of this new government...

"From the acclaimed author of India After Gandhi: a group biography of seven remarkable men and women who arrived in India during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in order to join the freedom movement and struggle for a country and people other than their own"-- Guha explores the fight for Indian independence by focusing on foreigners to India who across the late 19th to late 20th century arrived to join the freedom movement fighting...