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Name: The Anarchy
Rating: 4.5 (127 reviews)
Author: William Dalrymple

William Dalrymple

The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire

4.5 (127 ratings)

30 mins

Topics

Asian History International Economics

Table of Contents

The Anarchy
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What’s in it for me? Learn how a single corporation took over an empire in just 47 years.

You’ve heard of “too big to fail,” right? Well, the British East India Company epitomized this phrase, to a tee. Beginning as a joint-stock company, it transformed from trade entity to political power to territorial conqueror. In pursuit of a singular goal – making its investors rich – the Company plundered millennia of accumulated wealth in the Indian subcontinent in a matter of decades. It caused widespread famine, chaos, and cultural devastation from which the subcontinent never fully recovered.

The Company succeeded largely because of timing; it received crucial military backing from the British Crown and financial backing from European and Indian financiers at exactly the right moments. Perhaps more importantly, its directors shrewdly took advantage of a series of chaotic power struggles in the constellation of Indian political powers to lead the Company to the top. If you want to understand how a single company came to rule 200 million people, these are the blinks for you.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

how a country with only 5 percent of the world’s population came to rule a country four times its size;
how one company reversed the global trade flow; and
why “loot” became one of the first Indian words to enter the English language.

By the eighteenth century, the East India Company had transformed from a trading concern to a militarized entity bent on exploitation.

The East India Company was founded in 1599 as a joint-stock company. The joint-stock company was a sixteenth-century English innovation that allowed collectives of medieval craft guilds to combine their purchasing power. The aim of this new type of corporation was to enrich shareholders and investors. Spurred by lucrative colonial profiteering in the Caribbean, Queen Elizabeth I gave the Company a royal charter, granting it monopoly over trade in the East Indies.

The first English men stepped foot on Indian soil in 1608. Their mission? Establish trade with the Mughal empire, which had been the dominant political power on the subcontinent for nearly a century. Dripping in jewels and draped in lavish fabrics, the Mughals stunned the Europeans with their wealth and sophistication; these first interactions are the origin of the modern-day word “mogul.”

But it wasn’t until 1614 that the Mughal emperor, Jahangir, received English emissary Thomas Roe. Roe tried to focus the conversation on trade, but Jahangir – bored of talking about money – wanted to discuss art and astronomy for hours.

Finally, Roe got permission to build a trading fort in Madras. Soon after, another fort was built in Bombay. And then another, in Calcutta.

At first, it was a beneficial relationship for everyone. Company trade blossomed, and more European investors soon lined up. Drawn by the stable trade in India, thousands of artisans and merchants moved to the Company’s new settlements. By the 1690s – just 30 years after the Company built its first fort – Bombay had grown from a backwater port to a commercial capital that was home to 60,000 people.

Many migrants to the cities were seeking refuge from an increasingly unstable countryside. The Mughal emperor Aurangzeb died in 1707, leaving no clear heir. His rivals pounced. First came the Marathas, Hindu peasant guerrilla fighters. Then Afghan warlord Nader Shah ruthlessly sacked Delhi in 1737. The many wars against these enemies drained the Mughal coffers.

Mughal power was in chaos. The East India Company and its rival French counterpart, Le Compagnie, took advantage by surreptitiously building more forts. When the Mughals tried to punish this impudence, 700 French sepoys – European-trained Indian soldiers – trounced 10,000 Mughals at the Battle of the Aydar River in 1745.

It was now clear that eighteenth-century European military tactics could best anything in the Mughal armory. The English and French trading concerns in India transformed into increasingly bellicose, militarized entities.

India was primed to be violently transformed into the richest colony the world had ever known.

As the Mughal empire crumbled, several factions angled for power.

By the 1750s, the Company was the most advanced capitalist organization in the world, generating an eighth of Britain’s import trade. Company officer Robert Clive would go on to oversee its transformation into a political power, usurping the increasingly anarchic Mughal empire.

As a child, Clive had been a violent bully. To keep him out of trouble in England, his father had sent him to India, where he developed a hatred for the country that would stay with him his whole life.

Clive’s victory at the Battle of Plassey resulted in the Company acquiring political power for the first time.

With his massive army and bad attitude, Siraj set the stage for a Mughal-Company confrontation that would be a critical turning point in Indian history. In 1756, he showed up at the gates of Calcutta with 70,000 soldiers – surprising the incompetent governor Roger Drake and his army of 515.

Needless to say, Siraj’s troops looted Calcutta. The British prisoners were herded into a tiny cell called The Black Hole, where most of them suffocated to death.

After Plassey, Company officers mercilessly looted the countryside.

The new arrangement between the Company and the puppet Nawab of Bengal was one of convenience – not of mutual appreciation, or even comprehension. Mir Jafar didn’t understand he was dealing with a corporate board, rather than a single sovereign ruler. In letters Clive referred to him as “the old fool.”

For his part, Robert Clive was smugly reveling in his victory. In 1760, he returned home with a fortune greater than anything Europe had seen since Spanish conquistador Cortès returned from plundering the Americas. He set London gossips atwitter with his shopping spree of estates and townhouses.

At the Battle of Buxar, the Company defeated three Indian powers and set the stage for the territorial conquest of the whole country.

Like his father-in-law Mir Jafar, Mir Qasim was a clever military tactician. In advance of the coming battle with the Company, he allied himself with Mughal emperor Shah Alam – whose power was mostly symbolic – as well as with the Nawab of the neighboring Avadh province, Shuja ud-Daula – whose power was very real. Shuja was huge in stature and immensely strong; by 1763 he was past his prime but could still sever the head of a young bull with one stroke of his sword.

Despite almost besting the Company at a siege in Patna, Mir Qasim and his assembled armies lost their ultimate battle at the Buxar river in 1764. Mir Qasim fled; he later died in poverty. Shuja was installed as the Company’s puppet. Shah Alam, knowing his symbolic value, allied himself with the Company.

Distracted by economic turmoil and executive infighting, the Company was unprepared for its worst military challenge in decades.

In 1770, catastrophe struck. A two-year drought made the price of rice skyrocket. Bengal was racked with famine. The Company did almost nothing to help. In fact, it continued to enforce tax collection – and in some cases even increased it. All in all, 1.2 million Bengalis died of starvation or disease.

As word of the horror made it back to England, public opinion of the Company soured. Then, in the European financial crisis of 1772, Company stock plummeted. Company directors were forced to ask the Bank of England for a bailout of over £1.5 million.

Shah Alam’s desperation to return to his ancestral throne and his reliance on the Marathas ended in disaster.

By 1771, Shah Alam had had enough of the Company’s and the Nawabs’ vain promises to install him back on his ancestral Peacock Throne in Delhi. He knew his worth as the symbolic leader of India, and he was determined to go home.

He made an alliance with the Marathas, who helped him raise an army of 16,000 to escort him on the dangerous journey back to Delhi. The Marathas also promised to support him once he settled on the throne, in a court filled with intrigue and potential usurpers.

Consolidating its finances and bureaucracy allowed the Company to defeat its remaining challengers.

In 1776, the American Revolution shook colonial Britain. Neither the Company nor the Crown could afford the same thing to happen in India. They sent General Cornwallis, who had just been defeated in America, to ensure India remained under British control.

Cornwallis arrived to boomtown Calcutta – population 400,000 – in 1786. The Company was back in business after a period of uncertainty, which meant it was able to groom its sizable army.

For the Company to finally secure the support of Mughal emperor Shah Alam, it had to go through the Marathas and the French.

The last Indian challengers to Company dominion were the mercurial Marathas, who had been both allies and foes of the British over the decades. With the support of the French, the Marathas had held onto Delhi – as well as the blind and unhappy Shah Alam, nominal Mughal emperor, whose sole remaining pleasure was writing poetry.

In 1800, the death of Maratha politician Nana Phadnavis brought chaos. “The Maratha princes,” writes one modern observer, “bore less resemblance to a confederacy than to a bag of ferrets.”

Philip Francis launched a smear campaign against his old enemy, Warren Hastings; it failed and instead led to the downfall of the Company.

In London, former Company governor Warren Hastings was impeached by Parliament in 1788. He, and by proxy the Company itself, was accused of nothing less than the “rape of India.” Practically speaking, these crimes included extortion, cruelty, and abuse of power. Company rule, argued the prosecutor, had done nothing for India but asset-strip it, impoverishing and destroying its population in the process.

The trial spectators – including the Queen, as well as commoners who had slept on the streets to catch the scandalous proceedings – were convinced of the Company’s guilt. The trouble was, they had impeached the wrong man.

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What is The Anarchy about?

The Anarchy (2019) details how the East India Company, an English joint-stock corporation, came to rule the British economy – and the fates of 200 million South Asians. From its founding in 1599 by privateers and pirates to its time as master of the largest standing army in South Asia, the Company fanned the flames of anarchy, then used the resulting chaos as an opportunity to loot an empire.

Who should read The Anarchy?

History hounds so appalled by colonialism that they can’t look away
Those interested in how corporations came to rule our lives
Travel junkies looking to contextualize their time in India

About the Author

William Dalrymple is an acclaimed Scottish travel writer and historian whose work focuses on South Asia and the Middle East. In addition to writing over a dozen award-winning books, he has created TV series, curated museum exhibits and music compilations, and received honorary doctorates from three universities. He has lived in India on and off since 1989.

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