About the Book: An Era Of Darkness: The British Empire In India
In 1930, the American historian and philosopher Will Durant wrote that Britains
'conscious and deliberate bleeding of India… was the greatest crime in all
history. He was not the only one to denounce the rapacity and cruelty of British
rule, and his assessment was not exaggerated. Almost thirty-five million Indians
died because of acts of commission and omission by the British—in famines,
epidemics, communal riots and wholesale slaughter like the reprisal killings
after the 1857 War of Independence and the Amritsar massacre of 1919. Besides
the deaths of Indians, British rule impoverished India in a