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

by William Dalrymple

Indeed, one of the principal fears of the American Patriots in the run-up to the war was that Parliament would unleash the East India Company in the Americas to loot there as it had done in India.

The idea of a joint stock company was one of Tudor England’s most brilliant and revolutionary innovations.

India then had a population of 150 million – about a fifth of the world’s total – and was producing about a quarter of global manufacturing; indeed, in many ways it was the world’s industrial powerhouse and the world’s leader in manufactured textiles.

August 1608

En route, Clive lost much of his baggage off Brazil, then managed to fall overboard and narrowly avoided drowning; he was only spotted by a sailor entirely by chance, fished out and saved.

He was travelling to India by way of Brazil?

Shah Alam believed that God could be found not in the rituals of the mosque, but in all the wonders of God’s creation: Don’t waste your time in the mosque and the Ka’ba, oh Mullah, Go and search for the footprints of the divine beloved everywhere.

Clive and his colleagues had intended to do little more than re-establish British trade on a favourable footing and to ensure the accession of a more friendly Nawab. But what they had in fact done was fatally and permanently to undermine the authority of the Nawabs, bringing chaos to what had been up to that point the most peaceful and profitable part of the old Mughal Empire.

The new Nawab also set up a formidable new intelligence network, with three head spies, each with hundreds of informers under them. Before long, all three of his intelligence chiefs had been executed for their suspected intrigues. Mir Qasim’s rule was quickly proving as chilling as it was effective.

So it was that Mir Qasim finally met his Emperor, the Refuge of the World, sitting on a makeshift throne, within an East India Company opium factory.