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

by William Dalrymple

The Prime Minister, Lord North, may have lost one battle, but he was still determined to bring the EIC to heel. Shortly after Burgoyne’s bill of censure had been defeated, he declared, ‘I think, sir, it is allowed that Parliament have a right over the East India Company … Such continual excesses, such frauds at home, oppressions abroad, that all the world may cry out, let it go to the Crown.’63 His aim was to take all the EIC’s Indian territories, and the 20 million Indians who lived there, under the authority of the state. As one MP put it, the House must ‘make some attempt to rescue so many unhappy, industrious natives of the country from the yoke of this government they now live under’.64 But in this, too, North ultimately failed. The Company enjoyed chartered privileges, guaranteed by the Crown, and its shareholders were tenacious in their defence of them. Moreover, too many MPs owned EIC stock, and the EIC’s taxes contributed too much to the economy – customs duties alone generated £886,922* annually – for it to be possible for any government to even consider letting the Company sink. Ultimately, it was saved by its size: the Company now came close to generating nearly half of Britain’s trade and was, genuinely, too big to fail.