Ankit

“The British in India were never more than 0.05 per cent of the population. The Empire, in Hobsbawm’s evocative words, was ‘so easily won, so narrowly based, so absurdly easily ruled thanks to the devotion of a few and the passivity of the many.”
― Shashi Tharoor, An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

“The extensive and detailed calculations of William Digby, the British writer, pointed to the diminishing prosperity of the Indian people and the systematic expropriation of India’s wealth by Britain—including the telling fact that the salary of the Secretary of State for India in 1901, paid for by Indian taxes, was equivalent to the average annual income of 90,000 Indians.”
― Shashi Tharoor, An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

“There are no victimless colonial actions: everything the British did echoes down the ages.”
― Shashi Tharoor, An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

“Agricultural taxes amounted at a minimum to half the gross produce and often more, leaving the cultivator less food than he needed to support himself and his family; British estimates conceded that taxation was two or three times higher than it had ever been under non-British rule, and unarguably higher than in any other country in the world.”
― Shashi Tharoor, An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India