Owing to the inertial effect of the flow, an unsteady hydrodynamic force will act on a particle of arbitrary shape undergoing a steady rigid-body motion with small but finite Reynolds number if the axis of rotation of the particle is not its axis of rotational symmetry. Unsteady flow field is generated owing to such rotation of the body and as a result the particle experiences a time-dependent translational resistance. In this paper, we analyse this time-dependent hydrodynamic force and obtain its higher-order correction by systematically expanding the Navier–Stokes equation in small Reynolds number.