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

by William Dalrymple

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.

founding the world’s first chartered joint stock company: the Muscovy Company, or to give it its full and glorious title, The Mysterie and Companie of the Merchant Adventurers for the Discoverie of Regions, Dominions, Islands and Places Unknown.

The wording was sufficiently ambiguous to allow future generations of EIC officials to use it to claim jurisdiction over all English subjects in Asia, mint money, raise fortifications, make laws, wage war, conduct an independent foreign policy, hold courts, issue punishment, imprison English subjects and plant English settlements.

Wishing to indicate to the waiting tribesmen that he wanted to buy meat, Lancaster, showing a linguistic aptitude that would come to distinguish English imperialism, ‘spake to them in cattel’s language … moath [‘moo’] for kine and oxen, and baah for sheep’.

Continual Bankruptcies, universal Loss of Credit, and endless Suspicions,’ David Hume wrote to Adam Smith from Edinburgh in June. ‘Do these Events any-wise affect your Theory?

‘the supremacy of the English was a source of evil to all God’s creatures’.

He was buried in a modest tomb in a garden a short distance from that of Safdar Jung.* Like much of his life’s work, it was never completed.

Its brand name is now owned by two brothers from Kerala who use it to sell ‘condiments and fine foods’ from a showroom in London’s West End.