Amazing, shocking story, very well told. It’s an account, as per the subtitle, of 1756 – to 1803. But if anyone were so ignorant of the subject as to be surprised to find Madras were on the East coast there’s enough in the opening chapter to orient you to the events from 1599 onwards. Not that anyone would be that ignorant. The idea is laughable. And if they were they certainly wouldn’t admit it.

It’s based on original research. I hate to think how much Dalrymple had to leave on the cutting room floor, but he’s somehow managed to pare it down into a narrative that at times is almost fast paced. Just enough information to keep you interested and so you know the people and the issues involved. His battle descriptions are particularly well done. It’s not a military history, despite all the fighting, and in sometimes as little as four or five sentences he manages to describe the lay of the land, the disposition of the troops and the deciding factors. Quite brilliant writing.

And a useful story to know, and not just if you’re Indian or English. There’s a warning here about what happens when a company is unrestrained. Dalrymple describes our current crop of companies as tame, and having just seen the ease with which the US government reigned them in to apply sanctions to Russia I can see what he means. It also made me think a bit about China. Judging by their recent behaviour I would guess that the history of the British Empire is compulsory reading for senior members of the Chinese Communist Party. Unfortunately, where I see a warning in this book, I suspect many people will see an instructional manual.

I see just two problems with the book. The first is the maps. There are three, done in the style of the Belgariad. They look very pretty, but I question the wisdom of using a 1980s fantasy series as the model for historical maps. They don’t show all the places listed and there’s no indication of borders etc. Worse than useless really. The other is the notes. There are footnotes and endnotes. The footnotes are mostly currency conversions with a few asides from the main narrative. The endnotes are mostly references with a few asides from the main narrative so you have to remember the footnote number for when you next need to flip to the end of the book. At one point I was so caught up in the narrative that I forgot to flip for an entire chapter. ( )

Overall, this book is excellent if you want to understand the events of India in the 18th century and the early part of the 19th century and, the factors helping the rise of the East India company.

William Dalrymple has done an excellent job in writing about these events, and combining the various threads of narrative - international and Indian - into one coherent tale.
The British do not come off with honor in this telling. Neither do the Indian merchants who betrayed Siraj ud-Daulah, allowing the British to gain power in India. I believe that this is a story that must be spread. I also think William was unjust in his assessment of Siraj ud-Daulah, and failed to understand the motivation for his actions against the British.

He has, however, done much to repair Tipu Sultan's reputation.

On the whole, an excellent book. This book will give you a good launch pad if you want to study the events of the times, and the East India Company. ( )

Books like this are tough to read. Not because Dalrymple's writing is hard to follow or the history suspect, but rather the opposite: it's just such a clear and depressing march towards atrocity.

The running theme is Dalrymple's comparison of EIC era looting with modern sums of wealth. It helps wrap the mind around just what a tantalizing target India was for corporate looting. The tactics and escalating scale of the EIC are scrutinized in the own words of British politicians and powerbrokers and care is taken to depict the Mughal leaders whose collaboration and conflict with a corporation would decapacitate their own empire.

The only major fault would be Dalrymple's treatment of EIC Governor-general William Hastings and Shah Alam is relatively sympathetic to their openly rapacious brethren. No matter how kind their sentiment to the Indian population was compared to the likes of Clive, rampant exploitation with a kind hand is hardly redemptive. There are no heros in charge during the anarchy. ( )

This is a detailed and well researched account of the rise and (in briefer form) fall of probably the most powerful corporate entity in world history - and it's not a familiar name to 21st century ears, but one that ceased to exist 150 years ago. In the author's words "the East India Company remains today history’s most ominous warning about the potential for the abuse of corporate power – and the insidious means by which the interests of shareholders can seemingly become those of the state". He describes its "conquest of India [as] almost certainly .......the supreme act of corporate violence in world history. For all the power wielded today by the world’s largest corporations – whether ExxonMobil, Walmart or Google – they are tame beasts compared with the ravaging territorial appetites of the militarised East India Company".

The company had modest beginnings in 1600 as a relatively modest late Elizabethan attempt to improve its position in the growing spheres of exploration and economic expansion relative to its key rivals, the Spanish, the Portuguese and the Dutch - it was a joint stock company, "one of Tudor England’s most brilliant and revolutionary innovations". The first century or more of its activity was relatively modest and it wasn't until well into the 18th century that it came to acquire more power, against the backdrop of growing ethnic and regional challenges to the Mughal Empire, the dominant polity in the Indian sub-continent. So for 200 or more years, the growing British influence and power in India was not the government "but a dangerously unregulated private company headquartered in one small office, five windows wide, in London, and managed in India by a violent, utterly ruthless and intermittently mentally unstable corporate predator – Clive. India’s transition to colonialism took place under a for-profit corporation, which existed entirely for the purpose of enriching its investors".

Through the course of some half century of warfare, not only with Indians, but also in imperial rivalry with the French, the company came to acquire a huge private army and security force that by 1803 numbered some 200,000 men, twice the size of the British army, had "seized control of almost all of what had once been Mughal India, created a sophisticated administration and civil service, built much of London’s docklands and come close to generating half of Britain’s trade". But it was not all plain sailing - during the nadir of this period, the company survived only through massive loans from the British government. Its economic exploitation of Bengal exacerbated the effects of the terrible famine in West Bengal in 1769-70, caused by successive failures of harvests and extreme drought. Following this, people in Britain began to sit up and take notice and attempts were made to exercise greater state control over the company's activities.

During the Napoleonic era, the new governor general of India was Richard Wellesley, elder brother of the future Duke of Wellington and with ruthless determination he both beat the French in India and largely subjugated the Indian states under the nominal rule of the ineffective and long-suffering Mughal Emperor Shah Alam. After his recall, and as the 19th century gathered pace, the British Parliament took greater control of the situation, firstly allowing economic competition from other companies in trade with the East, ending the company’s monopoly, and later removing the company's right to trade altogether. Finally, after the crushing of the Great Uprising/Indian Mutiny/First War of Independence in 1857, the company's final functions were subsumed by the British state, thus creating the Raj, the form of British India for the next years until independence, presided over by Queen Victoria as Empress of India.

There are some colourful characters whose careers are traced here, most notably in my view Robert Clive, Warren Hastings and the ineffective and weak but personally honourable Shah Alam. Overall, it was a good read, though I didn't enjoy it quite as much as the author's Last Mughal, about the events of 1857. ( )

Excellent coverage of a dark period that mainstream likes to bypass. It is a warning to the modern world to keep a close eye on Transnational corporations. ( )

The Thesis of this book is similar to one which I read, “The Corporation That Changed the World: How the East India Company Shaped the Modern Multinational” by Nick Robins.

I wasn’t surprised, the Board of Directors of English East India company wanted to rake profits in England. As a result, EIC went on-board into India. They saw an opportunity to expand their treasure chest and wield political influence.

Growing up in India, I was fed the usual Indian narrative in High School. I can barely recall if teachers recommended reading list from both West and Indian Scholars. The usual Indian narrative is popularized by Shashi Tharoor.

I think, When I left India — I realized about the incomplete Indian narrative. There were many Indians involved alongside with the EIC. Dalrymple’s contributing to the Indian side of the story is that Indians were alongside with EIC.

Overall an Impressive book. I would recommend this to anyone who is interested in India.

Dalrymple’s writing is vivid and clear. Someday, I’ll write about Tamil Nadu, India.

Deus Vult,
Gottfried
( )

In 1686, the English East India Company sent a fleet to its trading city of Calcutta to try to teach a lesson to the nominal rulers of India, the Mughal Empire. The Mughals crushed the English like flies, seizing most of their trading ports, and then generously gave most of it back to them.

Half a century later, matters had changed utterly. Europe had undergone a military revolution, sparked by development in artillery and infantry, which left its disciplined armies capable of routing less-trained armies 10 times their numbers or more. This advantage didn't last long, just a few decades until Indian leaders caught up (often with the help of bringing in European military drillmasters) but it was a crucial delay. Over those decades, the East India Company leveraged its military edge and financial resources to establish a dominant position on the Indian subcontinent.

By the late 18th Century, Indian forces were capable of standing toe-to-toe with the EIC's armies (which were largely Indian in composition, too), but by this point it was too late: the EIC was too well established, and had access to too much money, to be truly stopped. Even when canny princes like Tipu Sultan beat EIC contingents, the Company simply raised more troops, bribed away the most dangerous enemy components, and tried again. It was a battle of attrition that the rich but isolated princedoms of India were not in a position to win.

Dalrymple's book, detailed but very readable, tells the story of this conquest, up to the EIC's final ascendancy over the subcontinent during the Napoleonic Wars. He also tells the story of the devastating cost the EIC's conquests had for ordinary people of India, who found themselves oppressed and starved by the company's normal governance as well as by the devastation its wars unleashed.

Interestingly, Dalrymple notes, the directors of the EIC were often opposed to expanding the company's land holdings. Rather, it was usually their delegates on the ground, men like Robert Clive and Richard Wellesley, who exercised their own initiative to make war and peace without the Company's London offices having any say in the matter at all. Sometimes these wars were initiated for the personal profit of these local leaders, other times for ideological reasons (as with Wellesley using the Company's armies to pursue his anti-French beliefs), but when all the dust settled, the Company often found itself unwillingly richer and more powerful (and often more indebted). They often tut-tutted at their freelancing men on the ground, but never gave any of the conquests back, of course.

A fascinating read about a period of history that's drastically overlooked in the United States today. ( )

Dalrymple never disappoints. His scholarly historical narrative paints a sordid picture of a small group of greedy men who geared to profit formed the East India Company. They siphoned the wealth of India, recruited their own army and became a corporate giant weilding vast sums of money and creating eventally huge amounts of debt. Officers of the Company sent to India came back to England very wealthy at the expense of the Indian leaders. Quotations from historical documents from the Company’s archives in Britain and resources in India add a travelogue flavor to the corporate violence and pillage. Eventually the Company’s wings were clipped by British Parliament. The seductive danger of Western imperialism and corporate venality run through each of the chapters as a lesson for us today. Dalrymple treats the Indian players in this drama with respect and cultural sensitivity. Readers interested in military warfare will find much to interest them. ( )

How did a private company conquer a subcontinent? The British East India Company, not “Britain,” took over and extracted untold wealth from India, and it did so by taking advantage of political disunity and by delivering massive profits to its shareholders. It’s a stunning story of corporate power, a reminder that dystopia already came—and only went away provisionally and in some places. ( )

I have recently started a new job as a consequence of which I walk down ‘Clive Steps’ and past the statue of Robert Clive every day. I hadn’t really thought about Clive much. I vaguely remember being taught, rather perfunctorily, about him at school, probably nearly fifty years ago, at a time when today’s sensitivities about imperial aggression and oppression were less prevalent. Then, Clive’s feats in bringing the Indian subcontinent under British rule were seen as heroic, rather than exploitative.

I had certainly never appreciated the extent to which British expansion into India was undertaken by the East India Company. The armies of occupation were primarily despatched and deployed by that commercial leviathan rather than directly by the British state. Of course, some distinctions can be obscured, and British national interests were so closely bound up in those of the East India Company as to become difficult to disaggregate.

Clive’s own experiences are intriguing. Having proved to be a disastrously disruptive element at school, frequently punished for poor performance and dreadful behaviour (including frequent fighting and bullying), he passed into life as a trainee accountant, in which guise he found himself sent east. In the febrile atmosphere of the East India Company’s fractious relationships with local potentates across the subcontinent, Clive came to prominence, emerging as a surprisingly competent military strategist and leader of men.

Corruption and exploitation were endemic, with the East India Company despoiling India on a broad scale as quickly as it could, while prominent figures within the Company siphoned off their own personal fortunes., in fact, Clive did so twice. Having returned from service in India with his first fortune, Clive tried (but failed) to buy his way into politics through the purchase of a rotten borough. He returned to India, and found himself even more successful in his second stint, returning to Britain with a fortune that would now be estimated at several millions. This second foray proved significantly more successful than his first expedition, and Clive was eventually ennobled as the Rt Hon Lord Clive, in which guise he was installed as first British Governor of the Bengal Presidency.

William Dalrymple chronicles Clive’s feats as part of his comprehensive account of the history of the East India Company. This is an impressive, if sobering work, and lays bare the world’s first global corporation. It was formed in 1599 by a group of Elizabethan merchants, eager to establish a means of robust competition with their European counterparts who seemed to have stolen a march on the exploitation of the riches of the East. Within a century, it had established itself as the largest, and most profitable British trading body.

In 2008 the world’s economies were brought to their knees by the near collapse of banks that seemed to have become ‘too big to fail’. The East India Company was an early precursor to that sort of commercial and corporate hubris. Within years of its first trading ventures, its shareholders were so widespread, and so heavily committed, that when the company was threatened with financial disaster, the government had to step in. its reinvestment was soon liberally repaid, but a dangerous precedent had been established, and one that would be repeated on a wider scale nearly three centuries later.

Dalrymple has a pleasing facility for conveying a lot of complex financial material in an open and accessible manner. Although this was not an area of history with which I was at all conversant, Dalrymple’s explanations led me through it painlessly. ( )

Astonishing story of the first corporate multinational, which turned into the absolute ruler of 100 million people in a military state with more people and a bigger army than Great Britain. I confess to getting a bit lost in the sea of Islamic and Hindu rulers, but a worthy listen all the same. ( )

I read this at the same time as Stephen Platt's "Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China's Last Golden Age," which also covered the EIC's trading in China (mostly neglected here). Both books were occasionally interesting, but usually gave far more detail than I cared to know.

> the Company had trained up a private security force of around 200,000 – twice the size of the British army – and marshalled more firepower than any nation state in Asia … the East India Company really was too big to fail. So it was that the following year, in 1773, the world’s first aggressive multinational corporation was saved by one of history's first mega-bailouts – the first example of a nation state extracting, as its price for saving a failing corporation, the right to regulate and severely rein it in

> A trading corporation had become both colonial proprietor and corporate state, legally free, for the first time, to do all the things that governments do: control the law, administer justice, assess taxes, mint coins, provide protection, impose punishments, make peace and wage war. … now the Company no longer had to ship anything from Britain in order to pay for the textiles, spices and saltpetre it wished to buy and export: Indian tax revenues were now being used to provide the finance for all such purchases

> By June 1770, the devastation was unfolding across the entire province. Five hundred a day were now dying of starvation in the streets of Murshidabad. 8 Rice was scarce even in Calcutta, where 76,000 died on its streets between July and September. "The whole province looked like a charnel house," reported one officer. The total numbers are disputed, but in all perhaps 1.2 million – one in five Bengalis – starved to death that year in what became one of the greatest tragedies of the province's history

> We have outdone the Spaniards in Peru! They were at least butchers on a religious principle, however diabolical their zeal. We have murdered, deposed, plundered, usurped – say what think you of the famine in Bengal, in which three millions perished, being caused by a monopoly of the provisions by the servants of the East India Company?

> In America, Britain had lost its colonies not to Native Americans, but to the descendants of European settlers. Cornwallis was determined to make sure that a settled colonial class never emerged in India to undermine British rule as it had done, to his own humiliation, in America. … In 1786 an order had already been passed banning the Anglo-Indian orphans of British soldiers from qualifying for service in the Company army. In 1791 the door was slammed shut when an order was issued that no one with an Indian parent could be employed by the Civil, Military or Marine branches of the Company

> Western imperialism and corporate capitalism were born at the same time, and both were to some extent the dragons' teeth that spawned the modern world. ( )

Amazing book.. great insight into the anarchy year of 1700s which saw the rise of East India Company (a corporate from England) and the fall of Mughal and other dynasties. Very well researched, written and fantastic to read. ( )

The story of the East India Company, nominally of London, is a huge, sprawling, fascinating and gripping collection of great stories. The stories are of wars, battles, heroes, cowards, lovers, fools, incompetents, rape, plunder, torture and death. Lots of death. William Dalrymple has linked the stories into the history of the Company, that unregulated, arrogant and racist firm that took over the Indian subcontinent, piece by piece from the early 1700s, and held it and milked it until 1859 (when the British government took over the milking and abuse itself).

The Anarchy of the title refers to what Indians call the Great Anarchy, a period as the British showed up when constant wars and invasions redistributed (concentrated) the wealth continuously, and when no one was ever quite sure whose empire they were living in from one year to the next. The various Emperors, nabobs, nawabs, viziers and shahs were constantly making alliances, ignoring them, going to war, combining, separating, and killing. Always killing. Piles of bodies and rivers of blood. And betraying. Almost as much betraying as killing it often seems. It makes for a riveting read, which becomes more amazing the farther you get into it. Dalrymple keeps up the pace and entrances with remarkable stories.

India was a dependable engine of wealth. From its fabrics to its jewels, its gold to its spices, it was forever creating wealth. Every so often, an intruder would swoop in from the next province or from Afghanistan, clean out the treasury and take every last thing of value from everyone. Plus future reparations. And yet, a few years later, there was prosperity once again. There was always wealth for bribes, and everyone was on the take, from Company employees up to royalty. And the figures were huge. Prosperity and chaos in one huge package. This was the cycle the Company stumbled into.

It began as a combination of small firms of English traders and pirates to better exploit Indian trade. It had a public share basis, and soon nearly half the members of parliament and the House of Lords were shareholders, and therefore compromised in their dealings with it. The dividends were gigantic, as a ship bringing Indian goods home would regularly net four times their cost. The ship would then return to India, loaded with gold and silver for the next shipment.

This was not good enough.

The Company wormed its way into Indian politics, allying with one potentate or another as needed to maintain its presence and expand it. It would pay taxes or not as it positioned itself more and more firmly as a power on its own. Its employees were on the take, doing side deals and making fortunes for themselves, which they shipped back to England on Company boats, draining more wealth from India.

The tipping point seems to have come in 1761, Dalrymple says. The Company now had as many as 500 factories running throughout eastern India (Bengal, Orissa and Bihar). It had actually founded Calcutta for a factory and it attracted traders and workers, becoming a major city and port, as well as the Company’s head office in India. Even then, Indians recognized it as the threat it could clearly become.

After endless complaints about the arrogance and extortion by the Company Men (as they entered a village all the shops would close and pedestrians fled), the Nawab Mir Qasim in whose territory the Company was located got creative. He decided not to fight. The Company not only trained local sepoys in English style warfare, but hired mercenaries and press-ganged French soldiers into serving. So rather than fight, Qasim decided to end all duties, leveling the playing field. Until this point, the Company simply refused to pay, giving it an unfair advantage over Indian traders, who had to. The Nawab calculated that increasing business for native traders would compensate for the loss of duties. This cost his treasury, and infuriated the Company. Qasim had to go.

By 1763 the Company had transformed into an “autonomous imperial power” Dalrymple says, with its own army, navy, and designs on the whole subcontinent. As it took on Qasim’s territory, it taxed like any other potentate – hugely and harshly, so that ships from home didn’t have to bring gold any longer. The company became self-financing. This didn’t stop greedy and incompetent mangers from nearly bankrupting it several times. Between the shareholders in power and being too big to fail, bailout loans always appeared when needed.

By the 1770s, even Parliament had to take notice. In 1774, the first parliamentary oversight committee landed in Calcutta and was immediately offended that they only received a 17 gun salute instead of 21, thus establishing their priorities. They were further horrified that the governor general received them for luncheon in informal attire – not even a ruffled shirt. Real governance issues and political priorities could clearly wait.

By far the most revolting section concerns Ghulam Qadir’s sacking of Delhi. The personal horrors he inflicted are as brutal as anything ever printed, and indeed, British readers were originally denied the sight by censors. He blinded people with hot needles, gouged out their eyes, took everything they had including their clothes, and those he didn’t kill he threw in prison without food or water. As he left with everything his army could carry, he blew up what remained. When he was finally caught, he was treated the same way. He was chained up and paraded in a cage for three days. Day one his eyes were scooped out, day two his ears cut off and hung around his neck, followed cutting off his hands, feet and genitals. When he was eventually killed, his headless body was hung in public and a dog licked up the blood until a few days later, when both disappeared.

This gory horror was followed by an absurd and fraudulent show trial back in London, the social hit of the season, in which the Company’s head man in India faced impeachment. Ironically, of course, Governor General Warren Hastings had been the most effective, efficient and compassionate of the Company’s leaders, tasked with cleaning up the mess of his predecessors. Edmund Burke, the prosecutor, took four days just to make his opening remarks, all but entirely false accusations. It was a litany of lies perpetrated by one man on that original parliamentary committee visit, Philip Francis. Francis simply hated Hastings and would stoop to absolutely anything to undermine him, right up to phony impeachment charges. In this story, Francis, with no knowledge of weapons whatsoever, challenged Hastings to a duel. Hastings let him shoot first, then shot him. Sadly, Francis survived, now even more determined than ever to take Hastings down. He returned to London and worked Parliament to denounce him.

The man they should have prosecuted, Robert Clive, was instead a national hero and one of the richest men in Europe as a result of his machinations in India. Clive was uncontrollably violent (which is why he was sent away to India), ruthless, corrupt and smarmy, and that’s why the Company had him back for three tours of duty. Despite his fortune(s), Clive ended up committing suicide.

A highly intelligent and hardworking lifelong Company man, Hastings had to stand by and witness it all, noting down everything along the way. Back in England, after seven years of idiotic hearings, Hastings was finally cleared. Completely. But rather than learn from this, the men the Company sent as a series of his successors, each proved far worse than anything Hastings was ever charged with.

His immediate successor, Lord Cornwallis, had recently managed to lose the 13 colonies that became the USA. He set out to avenge himself. He went to war of course, greatly expanding the Company’s territory, implemented racist laws such as keeping the children of mixed marriages out of the Company, and as Dalrymple explains it, prevented a middle class that could rise up against him as in the USA. His approach to India was ancient Roman: 1) divide and conquer, lying to allies keep them out of battles as needed, and then attack them when convenient, and 2) Buy the local potentates, give them salaries, and let the citizenry think they still had independence and integrity – personal, political and territorial. Much like the USA replacing foreign governments as needed to keep its trade unhindered, so the Company used everyone to expand on the ground.

Cornwallis was followed by the arrogant Lord Wellesley, and his younger brother Arthur, who later became the Duke of Wellington. When the last Indian leader’s troops were defeated, its people raped, tortured and killed, its wealth pillaged and plundered, Governor General Lord Wellesley proposed a toast “to the corpse of India.” Wellesley went his own way, communicating little with head office, eventually bagging almost all of India before he was recalled.

By the early 1800s the Company’s private army stood at 195,000, twice the size of the British army. Its spending in Britain alone amounted to a quarter as much as government expenditure. The entire London headquarters staff of the Company numbered all of 35, in a building “just five windows wide.” And this was the largest company in the world. From there, they directed the conquest and acquisition of the entire Indian subcontinent and hundreds of millions of people. It was not just too big to fail, it was an actual threat. As Jeff Mulgan said elsewhere: “It used to be that the banks feared the sovereign. Now the sovereign fears the banks.” So with the East India Company, the poster child for rampant unregulated corporate greed.

By 1859, after just 150 years, even the government had had enough and took control of India itself, merging the Company’s army into the British army and disbanding its navy. Things did not get better.

Dalrymple ends by showing how gigantic multinationals have mutated into not needing expensive armies and navies to effect their conquests. They use big data, surveillance, lobbying and influence instead. He says the history of the East India Company has never been more relevant than it is today. So it’s not just great storytelling, it’s a look in the mirror.

David Wineberg ( )

Audiobook, read 2021