After the Battle of Plassey in 1757, he was one of the richest men in Europe and his machinations set the Company on the path to what it came to be.Īs intriguing is the figure of Shah Alam, the Mughal emperor who was king only in name. He was ambitious, power-hungry and incredibly avaricious. Clive had only contempt and near-hatred for Indians, describing them as “indolent, luxurious, ignorant and cowardly”. Take Robert Clive, for whom Dalrymple appears to reserve the greatest disdain. The Anarchy employs a bigger canvas, showing at close quarters the British, Mughal, Maratha, Afghan, Rohilla, Nawab personalities. The White Mughals, the author had shown the ebb and flow of history and the men and women who are caught as flotsam in it.

For a corporate entity to wield such power would be unthinkable ever again.ĭalrymple tells this story adroitly, delving into a huge number of sources, both British and Indian, and describing in detail the people who played key roles in the rise of the Company, as well as the many battles and invasions across the subcontinent during this tumultuous time. By 1802, it had captured most of the subcontinent’s richest areas and set itself up as a regent to the Mughal emperor, effectively gaining administrative and revenue control of most of the subcontinent. By the 1750s, this entity accounted for one million pounds out of Britain’s eight million pounds import trade. The Anarchy starts off with the birth of the Company in 1599, when a group of investors came together to trade with the East. The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire William Dalrymple Bloomsbury Non-fiction ₹699

India’s transition to colonialism took place under a for-profit corporation, which existed entirely for the purpose of enriching its investors,” says Dalrymple in the introduction to the book. “It was not the British government that began seizing large chunks of India in the mid-eighteenth century, but a dangerously unregulated private company. And how, amazingly, this was done by a privately held conglomerate over a period of just 50-odd years. He shows how India, which was once among the greatest economic powers in the world, became a colonised State exploited for its natural resources, her people reduced to penury and degradation. In clearly his most ambitious book to date, Dalrymple traces the story of the East India Company from its birth to the height of its glory.

The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire. “Now seventy-five, the old, blind king still sat on the gilt replica of the Peacock Throne amid his ruined palace, the sightless ruler of a largely illusory kingdom.” Blinded, humiliated, used as a pawn, the Mughal king with no kingdom is one of the many compelling cast of characters who come to life in the pages of William Dalrymple’s latest book It is the dawn of the 19th century, and in a desolate fort, on a frayed throne, sits Emperor Shah Alam.

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