THE ANARCHY

THE RELENTLESS RISE OF THE EAST INDIA COMPANY

Founded in 1599 as a trading Company, the East India Company eventually conquered India with an army of 200,000 men. ‘Dalrymple shines a forensic light on the knotty historical relationship between commercial and imperial power,’ wrote John Mcaleer in the Evening

Standard. ‘ The Anarchy explodes myths that have accreted around the history of the Company like barnacles on the hulls of its ships. Dalrymple’s beautifully paced prose corrects the view that there was a masterplan for conquering the subcontinent... More significantly, the cataclysmic failures of what we might today call corporate responsibility reverberate throughout, not least in relation to the famine that ravaged Bengal in the late 1760s.’ Ian Morris, in the New York

Times, noted that ‘the company sucked £1 million (equivalent to $120 million today) out of Bengal in 1769-70 even as one in five Bengalis starved — yet while native rulers certainly did better, when famine struck their own territories in

1784-86 it also killed one Indian in five’. Although Dalrymple’s conclusion that the East India Company’s corporate leader lacked a sense of decency seems obvious, ‘the greatest virtue of this disturbingly enjoyable book’ is the new questions ‘it provokes about where corporations fit into the world, both then and now’. For Maya Jasanoff, in the

Guardian, Dalrymple’s achievement is ‘to render this history an energetic page turner that marches from the counting house on to the battlefield, exploding patriotic myths along the way... And nobody sets a scene as well as he does, whether scoping out an enemy fleet through an informant’s spyglass, or watching the waterlogged bodies of famine victims floating down the Hooghly river, or roaming the rubbished and ruined streets of ransacked Delhi.’