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

by William Dalrymple

the Company had trained up a private security force of around 200,000 – twice the size of the British army

The second big English settlement in India came into the hands of the Company via the Crown, which in turn received it as a wedding present from the Portuguese monarchy. In 1661, when Charles II married the Portuguese Infanta, Catherine of Braganza, part of her dowry, along with the port of Tangier, was the ‘island of Bumbye’. In London there was initially much confusion as to its whereabouts, as the map which accompanied the Infanta’s marriage contract went missing en route. No one at court seemed sure where ‘Bumbye’ was, though the Lord High Chancellor believed it to be ‘somewhere near Brazil’.

Mir Jafar,

As for Hastings’ only ally on the Council, Richard Barwell, ‘he is an ignorant, false, presumptuous blockhead’.

‘Your entitlement is to the deed alone, never to its results. Do not make the results of an action your motive. Do not be attached to inaction. Having renounced rewards resulting from actions, wise men endowed with discrimination are freed from the bondage of birth and go to the Regions of Eternal Happiness.’

His ADC and young cousin, James Dalrymple, received a severe back wound and ‘two cuts in my head’.*

‘If God had allowed me a longer career, you need only have enjoyed the success of my enterprises.’

Such was the notoriety of the bloody looting of Srirangapatnam that it later inspired Wilkie Collins’ pioneering detective novel, The Moonstone.

The last survivor of the older generation of rulers was the Emperor Shah Alam. Now seventy-five, the old, blind king still sat on the gilt replica of the Peacock Throne amid his ruined palace, the sightless ruler of a largely illusory empire.