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

by William Dalrymple

Najaf,

Me mention

One of the very first Indian words to enter the English language was the Hindustani slang for plunder: loot.

This speaks volumes

There are more Mughal artefacts stacked in this private house in the Welsh countryside than are on display in any one place in India – even the National Museum in Delhi.

An international corporation was in the process of transforming itself into an aggressive colonial power.

That is so embarrassing for us

‘What honour is left to us?’ asked a Mughal official, ‘when we have to take orders from a handful of traders who have not yet learned to wash their bottoms?’

India’s transition to colonialism took place under a for-profit corporation, which existed entirely for the purpose of enriching its investors.

I'd argue that this is the end goal of all British colonialism, but the EIC was shameless about it. The Crown typically lied to its community and itself about the reality of their imperialism. EIC got their ideas from somewhere and it was all encouraged.

Jahangir’s father Akbar had flirted with a project to civilise India’s European immigrants, whom he described as ‘an assemblage of savages’, but later dropped the plan as unworkable. Jahangir, who had a taste for exotica and wild beasts, welcomed Sir Thomas Roe with the same enthusiasm he had shown for the arrival of the first turkey in India, and questioned Roe closely on the oddities of Europe.

I know Akbar took a sniff of the air and called it quits

In many ways the East India Company was a model of commercial efficiency: one hundred years into its history, it had only thirty-five permanent employees in its head office. Nevertheless, that skeleton staff executed a corporate coup unparalleled in history: the military conquest, subjugation and plunder of vast tracts of southern Asia. It almost certainly remains the supreme act of corporate violence in world history.

Historians propose many reasons for the astonishing success of the Company: the fracturing of Mughal India into tiny, competing states;

An additional point to why they fractured the states is that the later Mughals focused more on the arts and luxury and rekigious discrimination rather than growing resentment in their own empire

Yet perhaps the most crucial factor of all was the support that the East India Company enjoyed from the British Parliament.

Exactly the British political players of the time completely encouraged it. The EIC was the monster child of already existing barbaric cultural values that valued profit over human existence. This isn't unique to the English, but they embodied it the most

Returned nabobs like Clive used their wealth to buy both MPs and parliamentary seats – the famous Rotten Boroughs. In turn, Parliament backed the Company with state power:

Lobbying before lobbying became a thing

Indeed, the East India Company probably invented corporate lobbying.

Well........

The parliamentary investigation into this, the world’s first corporate lobbying scandal, found the EIC guilty of bribery and insider trading,

the painter, Benjamin West, had never been to India.

Typical of most Orientalist paintings

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.

India being brutalized literally triggered wars and revolutions that is insanity

But the East India Company really was too big to fail. So it was that the following year, in 1773, the world’s first aggressive multinational corporation was saved by one of history’s first mega-bailouts – the first example of a nation state extracting, as its price for saving a failing corporation, the right to regulate and severely rein it in.

Given the reality of the Anarchy is something recorded not just by a few disconsolate Mughal gentlemen like Fakir Khair ud-Din and Ghulam Hussain Khan, but by every single traveller in the period, I believe that the process of revisionism may have gone a little too far. From Law and Modave to Pollier and Franklin, almost all eyewitnesses of late eighteenth-century India remark, over and over again, on the endless bloodshed and chaos of the period, and the difficulty of travelling safely through much of the country without a heavily armed escort. Indeed, it was these eyewitnesses who first gave currency to the notion of a Great Anarchy.

In retrospect, the rise of the Company seems almost inevitable. But that was not how it looked in 1599, for at its founding few enterprises could have seemed less sure of success.

But while Fitch brought back many enticing details of the pepper trade, he had arrived home with no actual pepper.14

That is the answer I need answered in this book. Why is British food bland?

The last survivors, five men and a boy, worked it home with its cargo of pepper which they had earlier looted from a passing Portuguese ship. Lancaster himself, marooned on the Comoro Islands with the rest of his crew after he was shipwrecked during a cyclone, finally found his way home in 1594. On the way he had been stuck in the doldrums, ravaged by scurvy, lost three ships and seen almost all his fellow crew members speared to death by angry islanders. It was lucky that the Levant Company had deep pockets, for the voyage was a devastating financial failure.

I love how this is considered just a financial failure