| Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India | |
| Author: | Shashi Tharoor |
| Language: | English |
| Genre: | History |
| Publisher: | Aleph (India) C. Hurst & Co. (UK) |
| Pub Date: | March 2017 |
| Isbn: | 978-1-84904-808-8 |
| Isbn Note: | (hardcover) |
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. The book has received mixed reviews. In 2017, Tharoor won the 2017 Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism Award[1] and the 2019 Sahitya Akademi Award[2] for this work.
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. 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.[3]
The following quote summarises the core theme of the book.