![]() ![]() The soldiers of the East India Company obliged, systematically smashing the looms of some Bengali weavers and, according to at least one contemporary account (as well as widespread, if unverifiable, belief), breaking their thumbs so they could not ply their craft. ![]() Indian textiles were remarkably cheap-so much so that Britain's cloth manufacturers, unable to compete, wanted them eliminated. His World War II adventure novel Operation Bellows, inspired by the Biggles books, was serialized in the Junior Statesman starting a week before his 11th birthday. As British manufacturing grew, they went further. Tharoor began writing at the age of 6 and his first published story appeared in the Bharat Jyoti, the Sunday edition of the Free press Journal, in Mumbai at age 10. They cut off the export markets for Indian textiles, interrupting long-standing independent trading links. They squeezed out other foreign buyers and instituted a Company monopoly. They stopped paying for textiles and silk in pounds brought from Britain, preferring to pay from revenues extracted from Bengal, and pushing prices still lower. In power, the British were, in a word, ruthless. In this extract he talks about British manufacturing in the Indian market… In the book Shashi Tharoor attempts to correct many misconceptions about one of the most contested periods of Indian history. ![]() Shashi Tharoor won the Sahitya Akademi Award 2019 for his book 'An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India' on December 18. ![]()
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