Ankit

“Half of India’s revenues went out of India, mainly to England. Indian taxes paid not only for the British Indian Army in India, which was ostensibly maintaining India’s security, but also for a wide variety of foreign colonial expeditions in furtherance of the greater glory of the British empire, from Burma to Mesopotamia. In 1922, for instance, 64 per cent of the total revenue of the Government of India was devoted to paying for British Indian troops despatched abroad. No other army in the world, as Durant observed at the time, consumed so large a proportion of public revenues.”
― Shashi Tharoor, An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

“Much of the British conquest and expansion before 1857 took place against either benign, or not particularly oppressive, native rulers. The Maratha Peshwas, the Mysore rulers and the chess-playing Nawab of Oudh, to name three, were not accused of misgovernance: they were merely too powerful for colonial comfort or too rich to avoid attracting British avarice. (Indeed there were outstanding examples of good governance in India at the time, notably the Travancore kingdom, which in 1819 became the first government in the world to decree universal, compulsory and free primary education for both boys and girls.)”
― 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

“By the early 1800s, India had been reduced from a land of artisans, traders, warriors and merchants, functioning in thriving and complex commercial networks, into an agrarian society of peasants and moneylenders.”
― Shashi Tharoor, An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India