The first Asian Member of Parliament in Britain — and the figure who, more than any other, transmitted the moral argument against British rule in India back into the Westminster system that ruled it. Elected for Finsbury Central in 1892 by five votes, after a campaign in which Lord Salisbury publicly described him as a man who could not represent an English constituency on grounds of race. Naoroji disproved that opinion with three years in the Commons. His earlier economic work — the drain theory, the calculation that India was being annually relieved of a transferable surplus by the imperial system — became, in the next generation, the intellectual foundation of the nationalist movement. The first Indian in a Western legislature. The first Indian to make Western audiences look at imperial economics through Indian eyes. Both at once. The grandfather of the diaspora's political voice.