Tharoor made a speech at a 2015 Oxford Union debate on the topic "Does Britain owe reparations to its former colonies?

"Company official John Sullivan observed in the 1840s: 'The little court disappears - the capital decays - trade languishes - the capital decays - the people are impoverished - the Englishman flourishes, and acts like a sponge, drawing up riches from the banks of the Ganges, and squeezing them down upon the banks of the Thames'.

Its accomplishments and prosperity - 'the wealth created by vast and varied industries' - were succinctly described by a Yorkshire-born American Unitarian minister, J. T. Sunderland.

At the beginning of eighteenth century, as the British economic historian Angus Maddison has demonstrated, India's share of world economy was 23 per cent, as large as all of Europe put together.

The story is meant to be "blood-curdling and colourful language" — including liberal use of "depredation," "loot," "rapaciousness," "vicious," "brutality," "plunder" and "extraction" — produces that effect.

However, he deplores the fact that "his moral venom sometimes clouds his own judgement" and notes that many of Tharoor's statistics are very seriously out of date, many coming from the polemics contained in the American Will Durant's Story of Civilisation written in the 1930s, which itself drew on the even earlier work of the crusading American missionary Jabej T. Sutherland, author of India in Bondage.