An Era of Darkness

An Era of Darkness is Shashi Tharoor’s meticulously researched and fiercely argued examination of the British Empire’s rule in India, written with the dual power of historical evidence and moral rebuttal. The book begins by overturning the fundamental colonial claim that Britain “civilized” or “developed” India. Tharoor asserts that India was not a declining or impoverished land before British rule, but one of the world’s richest and most industrially advanced regions, producing 25% of global manufacturing output in the early 18th century. Indian industries—especially textiles like the famed Bengal muslin, metalwork, shipbuilding, and inland trade—were thriving, globally competitive, and expert-led. The British did not arrive to build this wealth; they arrived to capture it, control it, and redirect it outward. Tharoor explains the infamous “Drain of Wealth,” where revenues generated in India were permanently sent to Britain through administrative salaries, trade manipulation, currency control, and “home charges” that India paid for its own exploitation. Indian producers were forced to compete in a market rigged against them—raw materials were exported out of India at prices favorable to Britain, while finished British goods flooded Indian markets duty-free, destroying Indian manufacturing. The same India that once clothed the world was converted into a consumer of cheap British cloth, and millions of Indian artisans lost their livelihoods not because they lacked skill, but because economic policy was weaponized to eliminate them commercially. Even infrastructure like railways, roads, and ports, which are often celebrated as British contributions, are reframed by Tharoor as extraction logistics, not nation-building tools—built to move coal, cotton, opium, spices, timber, revenue, and other resources quickly from villages to ports for export, not to empower Indian mobility or internal commerce.

The book then surveys the human cost of colonial rule, which Britain masked behind administrative language. Taxes were crushingly regressive—British authorities extracted revenue directly from peasants while abolishing protective support for local industry. Tharoor argues that famines were not unforeseen natural events but catastrophically enabled and intensified by British policy: traditional irrigation systems were ignored or dismantled, wartime policies diverted essential grain away from the starving, and colonial economic priorities allowed mass human death while protecting British military or commercial needs. The Bengal Famine of 1943, though the climax of this devastation, was not the only famine—Tharoor documents multiple drought-linked famines where millions died while Britain continued exporting resources out of India. Beyond economics and hunger, colonial rule also imposed cultural humiliation: Indians were barred from senior civil service positions for decades, the legal system was structured around racial superiority, Indian education budgets were starved, and colonial administration created a class of Indians trained to view British history as progress and Indian culture as deficiency. Tharoor calls this “psychological colonization,” where English-medium schooling produced Indian elites educated to interpret India through British frameworks, weakening cultural confidence and inverting historical pride. India, he explains, lost not only revenue, industry, and population—it lost institutional autonomy, narrative power, cultural evaluation, and intellectual self-belief, a loss whose consequences survived even after independence.

Tharoor concludes the book by reframing British rule into three stages of colonization: first wealth, then institutions, then identity. The British were not passive rulers; they were architects of extraction, deploying governance as disguise, trade as weapon, currency as control, civil service barriers as hierarchy, famine response as selective empathy, infrastructure as export machinery, and education as psychological programming. The book’s ultimate thesis is that colonialism was neither governance, investment, nor partnership—it was economic extraction, administrative theft, racial hierarchy, cultural humiliation, institutional sabotage, and psychological occupation packaged as administration. Tharoor’s narrative turns what is often taught as a period of “British progress” into its historically correct frame: India’s era of darkness was Britain’s era of enrichment, sustained by a massive inversion of morality where the colony bore the cost while the Empire claimed the credit.