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The Anarchy: The East India Company,…
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The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire (original 2019; edition 2019)

by William Dalrymple (Author)

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1,2711615,004 (4.06)52
In August 1765 the East India Company defeated and captured the young Mughal emperor and forced him to set up in his richest provinces a new government run by English traders who collected taxes through means of a vast and ruthless private army.0The creation of this new government marked the moment that the East India Company ceased to be a conventional international trading corporation, dealing in silks and spices, and became something much more unusual: an aggressive colonial power in the guise of a multinational business. In less than half a century it had trained up a private security force of around 260,000 men - twice the size of the British army - and had subdued an entire subcontinent, conquering first Bengal and finally, in 1803, the Mughal capital of Delhi itself. The Company's reach stretched relentlessly until almost all of India south of the Himalayas was effectively ruled from a boardroom in London. 0'The Anarchy' tells the remarkable story of how one of the world's most magnificent empires disintegrated and came to be replaced by a dangerously unregulated private company, based thousands of miles overseas and answerable only to its shareholders. In his most ambitious and riveting book to date, William Dalrymple tells the story of the East India Company as it has never been told before, unfolding a timely cautionary tale of the first global corporate power.… (more)
Member:ziska
Title:The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire
Authors:William Dalrymple (Author)
Info:Bloomsbury Publishing (2019), 576 pages
Collections:Your library
Rating:*****
Tags:History, India, England, audio

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The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire by William Dalrymple (2019)

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Showing 1-5 of 15 (next | show all)
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. ( )
  Lukerik | Mar 1, 2023 |
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. ( )
  RajivC | Feb 2, 2023 |
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. ( )
  Kavinay | Jan 2, 2023 |
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. ( )
1 vote john257hopper | Aug 24, 2022 |
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. ( )
  motorbike | Aug 25, 2021 |
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A commercial company enslaved a nation comprising two hundred million people.Leo Tolstoy, Letter to a Hindu, 14 December 1908
Corporations have neither bodies to be punished, nor souls to be condemned, they therefore do as they like.Edward, First Baron Thurlow (1731-1806), the Lord Chancellor during the impeachment of Warren Hastings
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On 24 September 1599, while William Shakespeare was pondering a draft of Hamlet in his house downriver from the Globe in Southwark, a mile to the north, barely twenty minutes' walk across the Thames, a motley group of Londoners was gathering in a rambling, half-timbered building lit by many-mullioned Tudor windows.
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In August 1765 the East India Company defeated and captured the young Mughal emperor and forced him to set up in his richest provinces a new government run by English traders who collected taxes through means of a vast and ruthless private army.0The creation of this new government marked the moment that the East India Company ceased to be a conventional international trading corporation, dealing in silks and spices, and became something much more unusual: an aggressive colonial power in the guise of a multinational business. In less than half a century it had trained up a private security force of around 260,000 men - twice the size of the British army - and had subdued an entire subcontinent, conquering first Bengal and finally, in 1803, the Mughal capital of Delhi itself. The Company's reach stretched relentlessly until almost all of India south of the Himalayas was effectively ruled from a boardroom in London. 0'The Anarchy' tells the remarkable story of how one of the world's most magnificent empires disintegrated and came to be replaced by a dangerously unregulated private company, based thousands of miles overseas and answerable only to its shareholders. In his most ambitious and riveting book to date, William Dalrymple tells the story of the East India Company as it has never been told before, unfolding a timely cautionary tale of the first global corporate power.

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