Summary of Shashi Tharoor's Inglorious Empire

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 The British East India Company, a trading company, invaded and destroyed the Indian civilization of which Durant was so astonished and outraged. They were carelessly destructive of art and greedy for gain.
#2 The British East India Company subjugated a vast land through the power of their artillery and the cynicism of their amorality. They displaced nawabs and maharajas for a price, and took over their states through various methods.
#3 The East India Company was a British company that was established to trade in silk and spices, but it ended up trading in conquest as well. The first British ambassador, Sir Thomas Roe, presented his credentials in 1615 at the court of the Mughal Emperor, Jehangir, but the empire was collapsed within a century and a half.
#4 The East India Company, with an army of 260,000 men at the start of the nineteenth century, extended its control over most of India. It conquered and absorbed a number of states, and imposed executive authority through a series of high-born governors-general appointed from London.

Sujets

• Obermodern-Zutzendorf
• History
• Modern history
• Histoire
• Modern
• 19th Century

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 08 mai 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9798822502444
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Shashi Tharoor's Inglorious Empire
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5 Insights from Chapter 6 Insights from Chapter 7 Insights from Chapter 8 Insights from Chapter 9
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The British East India Company, a trading company, invaded and destroyed the Indian civilization of which Durant was so astonished and outraged. They were carelessly destructive of art and greedy for gain.

#2

The British East India Company subjugated a vast land through the power of their artillery and the cynicism of their amorality. They displaced nawabs and maharajas for a price, and took over their states through various methods.

#3

The East India Company was a British company that was established to trade in silk and spices, but it ended up trading in conquest as well. The first British ambassador, Sir Thomas Roe, presented his credentials in 1615 at the court of the Mughal Emperor, Jehangir, but the empire was collapsed within a century and a half.

#4

The East India Company, with an army of 260,000 men at the start of the nineteenth century, extended its control over most of India. It conquered and absorbed a number of states, and imposed executive authority through a series of high-born governors-general appointed from London.

#5

The British Industrial Revolution was built on the destruction of India’s textiles industry. The British systematically destroyed India’s textile manufacturing and exports, and replaced them with British ones.

#6

The British monopoly of industrial production drove Indians to agriculture beyond levels the land could sustain. This in turn caused an influx of newly disenfranchised people, formerly artisans, who drove down rural wages.

#7

The story of Indian manufacturing was one of dispossession, displacement, and defeat under British rule. The share of industry in India’s GDP was only 3. 8 percent in 1913, and at its peak, it reached 7. 5 percent when the British left in 1947.

#8

The British ruled India with corruption and brutality. They took away land from Indian farmers and gave it to British settlers, who were often corrupt. They taxed Indian farmers beyond what they could afford, and then stole the rest by bribery, robbery, and even murder.

#9

The scale and extent of British theft in India can be gauged by the impact of Indian-acquired wealth upon England itself. The term nabob was coined by Edmund Burke to describe British employees who made fortunes in India and returned to England, exhibiting the airs of aristocracy and authority that Macaulay found problematic.

#10

The British public began to see Indian diamonds as an imperial insignia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as the diamonds were both envied and attacked as imports that pinched the purses of domestic Britons.

#11

The British view of wealth was changed by the arrival of the nabobs and their money. The East India Company was no longer just a trading concern, but had gone well beyond the terms of its original charter.

#12

The East India Company was both a merchant and a sovereign in India. It engrossed the trade of the country, while appropriating its revenues. The Company’s policies of extraction and the drain of currency and resources from India led to the country’s collapse.

#13

The English company that ruled India was corrupt and abusive, and they treated the Indian people like slaves. They forced the Indians to buy cheap and sell dear, and their enormous fortunes were quickly accumulated in Calcutta while thirty million Indians were reduced to poverty.

#14

The East India Company, as well as the British government, used the revenues from India to justify every expediency. The British installed rulers of princely states who were circumstantially allied with their cause, and charged them copious fees in exchange for installing them on their thrones.

#15

The British introduced the permanent settlement of the land revenue in 1793 as part of the zamindari system. Under this scheme, the Indian cultivators were charged not on the traditional basis of a share of crops produced but by a percentage of the rent paid on their land.

#16

The East India Company, which was in charge of India, did not care about the superstitions or social systems of Indians so long as they paid their taxes to the Company. The Company’s profits skyrocketed, and its dividend payouts were legendary. When its mismanagement and oppression culminated in the Revolt of 1857, called by many Indian historians the First War of Independence, the Crown took over the administration of India.

#17

The drain of resources from India remained a part of British policy. The Indian population literally paid for their own oppression, as they were forced to provide funding for the British Indian Army, which was ostensibly maintaining India’s security.

#18

The British Raj was a regime of expatriates, whose financial interests lay in England. The lavish salaries and allowances of the Government of India were being paid to people with commitments in England and a taste for foreign goods in India. This increased imports of British consumer items and deeply damaged the local industries.

#19

India contributed a large amount to Britain’s imperial expansion, as Indian troops were often deployed overseas to protect or expand British interests. Indian labour was used to foster plantation agriculture in Malaya, southeast Africa, and the Pacific, and build the railways in Uganda.

#20

The British Empire was responsible for the sacrifice of millions of Indian soldiers, who were left with no benefits or rewards. The assumption of responsibility by the Crown also witnessed the dawn of a new language of colonial justification: that Britain would govern for the welfare of the Indian people.

#21

The British empire in India was the result of a series of tactical decisions made in response to events, and it was only possible under the umbrella of effective political and economic control. Indians paid for the privilege of being conquered by the British.

#22

The British East India Company stole so much from India that even Englishmen of the time acknowledged it. They destroyed Indian industry, trade, and shipping.

#23

The British Indian port of Calcutta had 10,000 tonnes of cargo shipping built in India between 1801 and 1839. The reasoning for this was purely professional and based on sound economic calculations. Indian workmanship and the country’s long shipbuilding tradition were highly valued by British shipwrights.

#24

The first legislative act in favor of British companies was a law that prohibited ships built in India below 350 tonnes from sailing between the Indian colonies and the United Kingdom in 1813.