The Anarchy: Appalling and enriching – but not in equal measure

The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of The East India Company

Author: William Dalrymple

ISBN-13: 978-1408864371

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Guideline Price: £30

With William Dalrymple’s tenth publication, The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of The East India Company, there has been discussion as to which he is– travel writer or historian? It’s a game anyone can play, so here’s the first sentence in the book to help you: “On the 24th of September 1599, William Shakespeare was pondering a draft of Hamlet in his house downriver from the Globe in Southwark…(while) a motley group of Londoners were gathering in a rambling half-timbered building lit by many-mullioned Tudor windows.”

Most of Dalrymple’s books have been travel books, many of them set in India, but here’s the surprise: this one zooms in on a specific period of India’s history when the shape and future of the country was irrevocably changed by that group of Londoners, merchants all, who came together to form the East India Company, later known as the Company. Already active in the financial world were the Jagat Seths. Their name means “bankers of the world” and they were a family group of influential Indian bankers and moneylenders, originally from Jodhpur in north India who later settled in Bengal. Giving their support to the Company when it suited them, they bankrolled uprisings, coups, borrowings and investments. Made rich by territorial aggrandisement, they were well placed to control the fortunes of India.

The Company demanded obedience from overlords, or at least their co-operation

Meanwhile, that powerful group of Londoners was also flexing its wings. The Company, as Dalrymple says, was fast becoming an international corporation, engaged in the process of transforming itself into an aggressive colonial power.

This 16th century east India trade was dominated by the Dutch whose navy had started sailing to India in search of spices. England too eyed the spice routes but with the Dutch already there, the London traders switched to textiles, which has left its linguistic mark in such textile-related words as dungarees, shawl and calico.

At first, the Company was interested only in trade, fearing anything else might dilute its expansionist endeavours. Instead, it funded local wars, rewarded winners, punished disloyalty, left historic cities devastated and thousands dead.

The great dynasties of India – the Mughals, the Marathas, the Nawabs, the Sultans of Mysore – all decayed or blossomed depending on whether they were supported or not by the Jagat Seths. The Company, too, demanded obedience from overlords, or at least their co-operation. If this was not forthcoming then the only option was annihilation by the joint forces of the British Crown and the Company’s own private army. Many major inter-state battles would not have been won, Dalrymple tells us, had it not been for the financial support of the Company, a debt often repaid by bestowal of the right to mint money, form an army and impose laws.

Dalrymple doesn’t tell us much about the ordinary people of the day – what they ate, wore, how they survived in such times of terrible unrest. Instead, we read of how sepoys (local soldiers) often went unpaid by their overlords and then were given permission to loot, their leaders torturing captive prisoners by slitting their eyes with red hot needles.

What he is especially good at is recording the bloody details of this era so that at times the reader is caught up in the excitement of galloping across a plain, part of a great cohort of soldiers stopped in their tracks only by a troop of enemy elephants rounding the bend. Indeed Robert Clive, employed initially as accountant by the Company, later rose to the position of Governor of Bengal, partly due to his “streetfighter’s eye for sizing up an opponent”.

It wasn't the British government that first started seizing great chunks of India, but an unregulated private company

It was he who, using the Company’s own system of tax collecting, oversaw the scandalous transfer of wealth – some €295 million in today’s money – from the defeated rulers of Bengal to the Company. This system, known as “the shaking of the pagoda tree” would today, Dalrymple says, be seen as a major violation of human rights.

It was a system which allowed Clive return to Britain with a personal fortune that made him the richest self-made man in Europe. Chillingly, Dalrymple reminds us that it wasn’t the British government that first started seizing great chunks of India, but a dangerously unregulated private company managed in India by a violent and ruthless corporate predator sometimes known as Clive of India.

Dalrymple is based with his family in India where he lives on a cherished goat farm just outside Delhi. And yes, he is an historian but a lively story-teller as well so that in reading The Anarchy you will be both appalled and enriched, though not necessarily in equal measure, for Dalrymple takes no prisoners recognising that deceit and cruelty were to be found, to different degrees, on both sides in this invigorating account of colonial history.