The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire

by William Dalrymple

‘The cost of living rose immediately with the coming of this Croesus,’ wrote Horace Walpole, the waspish Whig, in his diary. ‘He was all over estates and diamonds … and if a beggar asks charity, he says, “Friend I have no small brilliants with me.”’