As William Dalrymple shows in his rampaging, brilliant, passionate history, The Anarchy, the East India Co. was the most advanced capitalist organization in the world . . . Mr. Dalrymple gives us every sword-slash, every scam, every groan and battle cry. He has no rival as a narrative historian of the British in India. The Anarchy is not simply a gripping tale of bloodshed and deceit, of unimaginable opulence and intolerable starvation. It is shot through with an unappeasable moral passion.” —The Wall Street Journal
“Superb. . . a vivid and richly detailed story . . . the greatest virtue of this disturbingly enjoyable book is perhaps less the questions it answers than the new ones it provokes about where corporations fit into the world, both then and now. . . Dalrymple's book [is] worth reading by everyone.” —The New York Times Book Review
“A great story told in fabulous detail with interesting, if at times utterly rapacious or incompetent, characters populating it.” —NPR
“Gripping . . . Drawing richly from sources in multiple languages, The Anarchy is gorgeously adorned with luminous images representing a range of perspectives . . . Delightful passages abound, including of the duel between Warren Hastings and Philip Francis, Shah Alam as 'the sightless ruler of a largely illusory empire,' and action-packed scenes of battle . . . Dalrymple has taken us to the limit of what page-turning history can be and do.” —Los Angeles Review of Books
“An energetic pageturner that marches from the counting house on to the battlefield, exploding patriotic myths along the way … Dalrymple's spirited, detailed telling will be reason enough for many readers to devour The Anarchy. But his more novel and arguably greater achievement lies in the way he places the company's rise in the turbulent political landscape of late Mughal India.” —The Guardian
“How timely [The Anarchy] feels, how surprisingly of the moment … It serves as a reminder that early capitalism was just as perverse, predatory, and single-minded in its pursuit of profit as its much-derided late-model equivalent.” —The Daily Beast
“William Dalrymple, the most versatile chronicler of India past and present, distilled another complex yet highly topical history into The Anarchy, a bloodcurdling account of the East India Co.'s ascent to imperial dominance, full of implications for corporate behavior today.” —Maya Jasanoff
“A well- known historian both in his native Britain and his adoptive India . . . Dalrymple has influenced the scholarly as well as the popular understanding of South Asian history through his use of both European and Indian sources, thus uniting the halves of a previously bisected whole.” —New York Review of Books
“Splendid . . . Dalrymple's book is an excellent example of popular history-engaging, readable, and informative.” —National Review
“William Dalrymple's The Anarchy makes sense of the E.I.C. and the political and economic conditions that enabled its curious ascent. . . [Dalrymple] navigates the teeming current of events smoothly, here gliding forward, there slowing to study the view.” —Airmail
“[The Anarchy] compelled my admiration . . . In William Dalrymple's deft hands we have an epic tale. It's very strong stuff.” —Paul Kennedy
“Mr. Dalrymple sails through this story in fine style. . . . The reader will find plenty that echoes in modern India.” —The Economist
“Dalrymple has been at the forefront of the new wave of popular history, consistently producing work that engages with a wider audience through writerly craft, an emphasis on characters and their agency, evocative description of place and time, and the inclusion of long-neglected perspectives. [The Anarchy]'s real achievement is to take readers to an important and neglected period of British and south Asian history, and to make their trip there not just informative but colorful.” —The Observer
“The author is a marvelous storyteller. By quoting extensively from the company's own voluminous records, private letters, and diaries, Persian-language sources, eyewitness accounts penned by an insightful local historian, and other reports, Dalrymple creates a 'You Are There' environment for the reader that makes the book hard to put down.” —Washington Independent Review of Books, Favorite Books of 2019
“Dalrymple recounts the remarkable history of the East India Company from its founding in 1599 to 1803 when it commanded an army twice the size of the British Army and ruled over the Indian subcontinent. . . . It's a hell of a story.” —Marginal Revolution
“[An] expert account of the rise of the first great multinational corporation.” —Kirkus Reviews
2019-07-28
The often nasty history of the British company that grew to rule India in the 18th century.
Veteran historian Dalrymple (Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan, 2013, etc.) reminds readers that the Spice Islands, around what is now Indonesia, were a source of lucrative trade, dominated in the 16th century by the Dutch. In 1600, Queen Elizabeth granted envious British merchants a monopoly in the region. Ships of the fledgling East India Company made some profitable voyages, but the Dutch defended their territory violently. Consequently, Britons turned their attention to India, then an open market mostly ruled by the Mughal Empire, considered the wealthiest in the world. The EIC established thriving trading settlements along the coast and respected Mughal authority. Matters changed after 1707, when the last competent ruler died and the empire dissolved into chaos and war between ambitious men and principalities. This was no secret to the EIC, which began training its own armies and expanding its influence by taking sides. Perhaps the key event was the pugnacious Robert Clive's 1757 victory at the Battle of Plassey, which gave the company control of Bengal, the richest province in India. The result, as characterized in Dalrymple's unsparing account, was a feeding frenzy in which fortune-seeking Britons forcibly ejected native merchants and landowners, took over tax collection, and literally stripped the land bare. In 1770, Bengal suffered its first disastrous famine, and others followed. The author diligently recounts decades of violence ("the Anarchy") that followed, ending just after 1800 with the defeat of the last local Indian potentate. "In less than fifty years," writes Dalrymple, "a multinational corporation had seized control of almost all of what had once been Mughal India. The author concludes gloomily that the EIC has no exact modern equivalent, but Walmart, Apple, and other massive corporations do not need their own armies; governments are happy to protect their interests.
A depressing but expert account of the rise of the first great multinational corporation.
