The Grand Old Man of India who became Britainࢀ™s first Asian MP

Naoroji was nearly 90 years old when he met with the Irish-Indian nationalist Annie Besant In a torrent of scholarship, he proved that the exact opposite was true. British rule, he argued, was “bleeding” India to death, unleashing catastrophically deadly famines. Many enraged Britons, hurling charges of sedition and disloyalty, could barely believe that a colonial subject could make such claims in public. Others, however, benefitted from Naoroji’s foundational contributions to anti-colonial thought. His idea of how imperialism caused a “drain of wealth” from colonies informed European socialists, American Progressives like William Jennings Bryan, and possibly even Karl Marx. Slowly,…