The Salt Holocaust

The Salt Holocaust: Britain's Forgotten Genocide in India (1757-1947) makes the case that British colonial rule was not merely exploitative but genocidal. Drawing on economic history, colonial records, and famine data, it traces how a land that produced roughly a quarter of the world's wealth in 1700 was systematically drained over two centuries. At its heart is the salt monopoly - laws that taxed a life-sustaining necessity beyond the reach of the poor - and the famines that killed an estimated 60 million Indians while grain was exported and relief withheld. Marshalling evidence from British administrators' own admissions, the book argues these deaths were the predictable result of policy, not accident. Part history and part indictment, it asks readers to remember a catastrophe that has been largely erased from the record.