Britain's 'discovery' of India

Unlike the Germans, Britons began to face the hard truths about their colonial empire only recently

It has taken a little under seven decades for British academia, if not ordinary Britons, to acknowledge the deleterious nature of their 200-odd year rule of the Indian sub-continent. The past two years has seen a raft of revisionist histories from British writers that seek to highlight in unequivocal terms the combination of outright violence and chicanery that the British employed on their way to dominating India. These new writings constitute a comprehensive contradiction of popular delusions — held by some Indians too — that the British possessed some sort of inherent racial greatness that enabled a small white minority