Zac O’Yeah reviews The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire by William Dalrymple

In this encyclopaedic volume, possibly the crowning glory of William Dalrymple’s oeuvre, his trademark raconteur style has been toned down in favour of viewing history from a somewhat subaltern perspective. “We still talk about the British conquering India, but that phrase disguises a more sinister reality,” he observes and points out how this was done not by competent authorities, “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.” Advanced capitalism This book then is a prequel to Dalrymple’s earlier masterpiece The Last Mughal: The End of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857, which dealt with the twilight years of the Mughal Empire. He has produced a wide-ranging study of how the East India Company — a small stock joint venture fuelled by petty greed and from the outset managed less professionally than the competing Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and French overseas trading companies — turned itself into a humongous world power, dethroning rulers with its armies and running puppet governments, “the most advanced capitalist organisation in the world”. It is here that the true genius of this book lies: in its setting events in context by opening out fresh perspectives via meticulous sifting through auxiliary data and presenting the findings in a well-argued narrative to show how business companies transformed “from trading concerns to increasingly belligerent and militarised entities, part-textile exporters, part-pepper traders, part-revenue-collecting land-holding businesses, and now, most profitably of all, state-of-the-art mercenary outfits.” This then was what ended the Islamic rule, but while other colonials such as the Dutch “degenerated into base, avaricious toads squatting on their heaps of gold and spices” and the French acted “as if drunk”, squandering money in “mad undertakings”, the Britons grabbed their chance and made India the jewel in their crown. The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire ; William Dalrymple, Bloomsbury, ₹699.