An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

by Shashi Tharoor

Though the Mughal emperor’s firman referred to the directors of the East India Company as ‘the high and mighty, the noblest of exalted nobles, the chief of illustrious warriors, our faithful servants and sincere well-wishers, worthy of our royal favours, the English Company’, no royal favours were required, other than signing on the dotted line. Shah Alam II and his successors lived on the sufferance of the Company, prisoners and pensioners in all but name. ‘What honour is left to us?’, the historian William Dalrymple quotes a Mughal official named Narayan Singh as asking after 1765, ‘when we have to take orders from a handful of traders who have not yet learned to wash their bottoms?’ But honour was an irrelevant concern for his emperor’s ‘faithful servants and sincere well-wishers’. The Company ran India, and like all companies, it had one principal concern, shared by its capitalist overlords in London: the bottom line.