Dalrymple’s “Anarchy” — A Panoramic View of the Rise and Fall of the East India Company and its Relevance Today
A review of “The Anarchy — The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire”, By William Dalrymple, Bloomsbury Publishing, 1st Edition, 2019, London, 521 pages, ISBN 978–1–5266–1850–4.
This is a gripping story of the East India Company’s conquest of the Mughal India within a period of fewer than 50 years. It also narrates how the Company’s unregulated power led to extreme violence, large scale pillage, economic destruction, and terrible famines, causing many millions to perish.
William Dalrymple needs no introduction. A master storyteller, he has made reading history an immense pleasure through a number of his works, including The Last Mughal (2006), The White Mughals (2002), and Return of a King (2012), not to mention many of his essays and live talks. This well-researched book is the latest in his long list of works. Apart from the fluid writing style, the main strength is the personal experience Dalrymple has gathered in the book by extensive traveling, research, and interviews. He lives the history he writes.
The book starts with the origin of the word loot, the Hindustani slang word for plunder. It was imported into the English language during the time the Company and its officers were pillaging — for more than a hundred years — Bengal, Mysore, Deccan, Hyderabad, and finally, the ultimate prize Delhi, the seat of the Timurid Dynasty in the vast Indian sub-continent. In the process, the Company also fought the French in what became the fiercest of hostilities between these two rising colonial powers outside Europe, and drove them out of India, ruining Napoleon’s dream of conquering it for France.
One issue the book handles quite well is the legitimacy of power. When Shah Alam ascended the Musnad (throne) of Delhi in 1760, there were already several regional military powers across India. These included, most notably, the Nizams of Hyderabad, the Marathas of the Deccan, Haidar Ali of Mysore, Aliverdi Khan of Bengal, and the Rohillas coming from Afghanistan as Mughal Cavalry but later mutinied against their masters. It was not only the internal powers but also Nadir Shah of Iran who had already ravaged and pillaged Delhi like never before. He took away the Koh-i-Noor as his prize, leaving a much-weakened Mughal Emperor — financially, militarily, politically, and psychologically — to fend for himself against the growing militancy all around. However, in the minds of the people, the legitimate ruler of the whole of India was still the Mughal Emperor. After losing the Battle of Buxar to the Company forces in 1765, Shah Alam was forced to grant it Diwani or the right to collect taxes on behalf of the Emperor directly from the people of the eastern province of Bengal-Bihar-Orissa. It literally meant practically unlimited authority but no accountability for the welfare of those paying the taxes. The Company officers understood the power of legitimacy well and made brutal use of it to their benefit — so much so that within five years, this province faced a devastating famine causing an estimated 10 million to die.
The global power balance of the time
The global power balance of the time is worth noting. By the mid-18th century, the Ottoman military system fell behind that of their European rivals, the Habsburg and the Russian empires. The demise of the Emirate of Granada in 1492 marked the formal end of an already weakened Arab rule in the Iberian Peninsula. Several emerging European powers — especially England and France — were competing against each other for setting up trading posts and colonies in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Both these nations were eyeing the rich but fading Mughal empire — a natural choice for any predatory colonial power — for extending their domination. There was no match in the whole world to stop the march of these emerging powers.
Europe of the 18th century was full of vigor and vitality, hungry for adventures and exploration. Robert Clive, ever the risktaker and central figure in the crucial early wins of the Company against Indian powers, was indeed a personification of this attitude. As Dalrymple says, he had “a willingness to take great risks and a breathtaking, aggressive audacity.” While conventional Indian warfare was usually conducted in daylight with their commanders comfortably riding elephants or horses, Clive often led daring charges in the pitch-black darkness of monsoon nights through mud fields or swamps, taking the enemy by total surprise. With speed, superior strategy, and surprise tactics, he managed to break the moral strength of many an army and secured victory against enormous odds. History turned a page as a declining power was about to move on, making room for an emerging one.
After Aurangzeb’s death in 1707, the Mughal empire was showing sure signs of unraveling. When the remaining Indian powers wanted to modernize their military, they turned to the only available options, the English Company or the French, little realizing that both had come to India with the same agenda. It is hard to tell whether a unified force of the Indian powers could have defeated their European enemies. My view is, in all likelihood, such a reversal of the tide would have been only a short term one. Mughal India was already on the wrong side of history.
But make no mistake. It wasn’t like this right from the start. The first encounter between the English and the Mughals took place in 1685 when the Company refused to pay the local taxes to the Governor of Bengal Subah, Shaista Khan. The Mughals were still the most potent power around and defeated the Company army quite easily, but Aurangzeb granted them a pardon and allowed the Company to continue its business in India.
A gripping story
Whatever the outcome of the confrontation between the old and the new powers, the story that Dalrymple tells is utterly gripping — so much so that you will never quite feel the length of the book. He has a personal interest in this story in which three earlier Dalrymples — Stair, James, and Alexander — were directly involved at its different stages. He makes the book even more enjoyable by mentioning some apparently unimportant but still significant events for setting the tone of this great story. One such is the reply Lutf un-Nissa, the most beautiful of Siraj’s wives, sent to Mir Jafar and his son Miran as both wished to marry her after his death: “having ridden an elephant before, I cannot now agree to ride an ass.”
Robert Clive’s end was rather horrific, although Dalrymple politely puts it as “unpleasant”. One of the wealthiest people in Europe, Clive suffered from deep depression after his return to England in 1773. On 22nd November 1774, at the age of 49, he cut his own throat with a penknife in the water closet. He didn’t leave any suicide note, but the widespread view in England was that Clive had acquired his fortune by such crimes that his consciousness of them had compelled him to end his life in the most gruesome manner.
The rise of corporate greed and relationship with the politicians
The essential theme of the book is the rise of corporate greed and how it utilizes political power for mutual benefit. The East India Company was the world’s first such corporate giant that created its army and gained political power in England as the interests of the two became one. In 1773, the Company faced substantial financial problems caused mainly by its aggressive expansion strategy and incessant wars in India and went almost to the point of bankruptcy. But the Crown was obliged to bail it out with a massive loan of about £1.4m, equivalent to more than £140m in current value because almost a quarter of the Members of the Parliament had stakes in it. The argument at that time will sound pretty familiar even today: the East India Company was too big to fail. With only 35 odd employees at its head office in London, the East India Company conquered and ran a vast empire in India and shipped billions of dollars (in today’s terms) out of it with brutal efficiency, enough to turn any of today’s big corporations green with envy.
Dalrymple makes a strong argument as to how the corporate culture introduced by the East India Company is still prevalent today, as demonstrated by numerous state adventures in Iraq and other parts of the world, paid for by taxpayers’ money, to benefit only a few. Modern corporations protect themselves with all kinds of risk mitigation measures to reduce exposure to the operations of their subsidiaries and agents all over the world, taking advantage of the week governance and legal loopholes. The result? The pillage continues through an even stronger symbiotic relation the Company pioneered in the 18th century.
In an essay in The Guardian on 4th March 2015, Dalrymple discusses how, during the Indian general election of 2014, the big corporations bought their way into its power circle. In 1767, the Company bought off the British Parliament by paying £400,000 to ensure the continuation of its rule and Diwani rights in Bengal. The similarity is striking, but this is not the only one. The big corporations are not allowed to fail because too many stakes are involved. A dangerous mix of power, money, and lack of governance is controlling the majority of the world economy today.
This book is as relevant as could be in today’s world. I will rate it 4/5.
