The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company

by William Dalrymple

By 1825 there was growing opposition in Parliament to the continuing existence of the East India Company at all. One MP remarked that the power and influence of the Company were so great that ‘were it not, indeed, that the locality of its wealth is at so remote a distance, the very existence of such a body would be dangerous, not merely to the liberty of the subject, but to the stability of the state’. Five years later another MP raged against politicians allowing ‘a gigantic power to exist in opposition to the welfare of the kingdom, and over which Parliament has a most feeble and indirect control’.177 In Parliament, James Silk Buckingham went even further: ‘The idea of consigning over to a joint stock association … the political administration of an Empire peopled with 100 million souls were so preposterous that if it were now for the first time to be proposed it would be deemed not merely an absurdity, but an insult to the meanest understanding of the realm.’178 In 1833, Parliament finally took action. They passed the East India Company Charter Bill, which removed the East India Company’s right to trade and so turned it into a sort of governing corporation. The Company, which had once presided over a vast empire of business – and which even at this stage was annually making £1 millionn from the tea trade alone – entered its final phase devoted exclusively to the business of Empire.179 Finally, on 10 May 1857, the EIC’s own private army rose up in revolt against its empl...