The Politics Of Plunder

In a departure from ‘postcolonial melancholia’, an unsparing account of the exploitation, expropriation and racism that accompanied the imperial project in India

- Shashi Tharoor

In the first decade of the 21st century, it began to seem that the British Empire was coming back into fashion. At the high noon of early 21st-century imperial hubris, with America poised to invade Iraq, Russia in retreat, the Taliban in disarray and bin Laden in hiding, and the currents of globalisation flowing strongly (and seemingly irresistibly) around the world, the controversial Scottish historian Niall Ferguson published Empire: How Britain Made the World, which saw in the past all the virtues he wished to celebrate in the present.

The British, Ferguson wrote, echoing a string of imperial apologists like Lawrence James and Jeremy Paxman, combined commerce, conquest and some ‘evangelical imperialism’ in an early form of globalisation or, in a particularly infelicitous word, ‘An globalisation’. In so doing, Ferguson argued, Britain bequeathed to a large part of the world nine of its most distinctive and admirable features, the very ones that had made Britain great: the English language, English forms of land tenure, Scottish and English banking, the common law, Protestantism, team sports, the ‘night watchman’ state, representative assemblies and the idea of liberty.