By 2022, India will have overtaken China to become the most populous country in the world and, growing fast, will be rapidly returning towards the dominant position it held in the world economy for centuries. It was the world’s economic superpower when imperial Rome and Han China were its junior trading partners. It still represented one quarter of the world economy when Britain began to conquer it in 1757.

And it was we British who impoverished it. So argues Inglorious Empire, a remarkable new book by the Indian MP Shashi Tharoor, a former candidate for secretary general of the United Nations who is being touted as a potential leader of the Congress Party. The book is savagely critical of 200 years of the British