An Era of Darkness The British Empire in India

This book, somewhat unusually, began as a speech. At the end of May 2015, I was invited by the Oxford Union to speak on the proposition ‘Britain Owes Reparations to Her Former Colonies’. Since I was already scheduled to speak at the Hay Festival of Literature in Wales later that week, I thought it might be pleasant to stop in Oxford on the way and debate there again (as I had once done, on behalf of the United Nations, a decade earlier). The event, in the Union’s impressive woodpanelled premises dating back several centuries, was a success and I left pleased enough, but without giving the proceedings a second thought.