The history of the East India Company is relevant today because its story is a damning insight into human cruelty and greed. The Anarchy can teach us a lot about that. But Dalrymple claims the East India Company is especially significant in our world of multi-national corporations, powerful enough to dictate national polices on issues like taxation and the environment, because it was the first of its kind to gain that kind of power, the first company to become more powerful than a country. It gained that power by corrupting governments and individuals, and went on to devastate the environment and control the economy of the whole of India. In this respect it was the canary in the coal mine, a forerunner of the tobacco and oil companies of today, which cross national boundaries, avoid paying taxes, and pollute the national debate with lies and half truths about global warming and pollution.
Dalrymple begins in Elizabethan England, an impoverished outcast on the edge of Europe. A motley crew of investors from different social backgrounds gather to ask the queen’s permission to invest in a boat to trade with the Indies. He describes the traders’ first tentative steps, referring to a Mughal painting that shows the British King James as a minor and irrelevant figure begging at the court of the all powerful emperor in Delhi. As late as 1687 European troops bearing pikes were no match for the Mughal’s Indian armies, but rapid developments in tactics and weaponry during the wars of the eighteenth century gave European soldiers a significant advantage over the Indian forces. In 1746. Joseph-François Dupleix, Director General of the French Compagnie des Indes, seized Madras from the British without bothering to consult the local Indian rulers. He refused to hand it back to them, preferring to keep it for the French, and when Mahfuz Khan objected, Dupleix defeated Khan’s 10000 strong army with just 700 troops.
The writing was on the wall: it was around this time that an English soldier of fortune said it would be easy to conquer the whole of the sub-continent, and that India would be at the mercy of any ruthless and well organised European army.
The rest, as they say, is history. The French and English were at war for much of this period: the Austro-Hungarian War of Succession lead to a short time of peace, but British and French colonial ambitions created a rivalry that erupted in violence around the world, including Canada, and its effects were even more significant in India. The rivalry was intensified during the Napoleonic and Revolutionary wars at the turn of the century, and by the end of them the fate of India was sealed: it was in the hands of the British.
But it was not just the Europeans who were squabbling, murdering and cheating for the sake of money and power. India had been ruled since the 1400s by Moslem descendants of Timur the Lame – himself a notorious builder of empires. But during the eighteenth century a series of internal rivalries fractured his descendants’ empire, and Persian invasions, organised for the sole purpose of looting the Mughals’ vast wealth, further damaged their power.
Dalrymple gives a blow by blow account of the Machiavellian machinations of British French and Indian rulers during the whole of this period. It is dense and detailed, but Dalrymple does a good job of moving from one theatre of war or diplomatic conflict to another without losing the reader’s interest, whilst keeping the main threads of the narrative clear. The pen portraits of each of the main characters at the front of the book are helpful in this respect. They divide the dramatic personae into several key sections, of which the British, French, and Mughals are perhaps the most well known. There are also the Nawabs, who took over Bengal in 1740 in a military coup financed by Indian bankers, the Rohillas, soldiersof the last Mughal emperor Shah Alam, who in the end betrayed him, and the Sultans of Mysore including the famous, Sultan Tipu who created a prosperous and well organised kingdom but had to cede half of it to Lord Cornwallis and the British. (You might know Cornwallis better as the general who lost north America to the yanks!) Finally, there were Marathas from the Deccan plateau who were a perpetual thorn in the Mughal emperor’s side.
The story of Shah Alam is especially tragic – the last Mughal emperor, a mere puppet on the throne for most of his life, kept in place by ever shifting alliances of British, French and Indian forces, cruelly blinded by a rebel from his own court, and subject to the whims of whatever breeze blew past his former stronghold in Delhi. The conquests of Clive of India, who committed suicide, and the story of the Black Hole of Calcutta are well known in England, but there is so much more to The Anarchy. Dalrymple, a resident of India, provides a balanced view of these epoch defining events, and many more, acknowledging different perspectives and often quoting large sections directly from the original source.
The Anarchy is not a book for the casual reader. The lack of detailed maps exemplifies this as much as anything: there are only three, so I had to make frequent references to Google to find out what was going on.
I really recommend The Anarchy, but you will probably need to read it twice, with an atlas of India open on your lap, to absorb even a small proportion of the detail Dalrymple includes. Unfortunately I don’t think I’m going to find time for that.
Senior Reader 