The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company

by William Dalrymple

Nevertheless, for all its vast resources, to finance his six years of incessant warfare Wellesley had come close to bankrupting the Company, hugely increasing its annual deficits to around £2 millionk a year. The Company’s overall debt, which had stood at £17 million when Wellesley first arrived in India, was now rising towards £31.5 million.l Between 1800 and 1806, £3.9 million of silverm had to be shipped from London to Bengal to help begin repaying the enormous debts that Wellesley had run up.173 The news of the cost of the palatial new Government House in Calcutta, which Lord Wellesley had begun to build on a truly Mughal scale, was the final straw for the directors. Under Wellesley, the Government of India, they declared, had ‘simply been turned into a despotism’. On 6 November 1803 the Court of Directors wrote to the government’s Board of Control listing their objections to Wellesley. They accused him of making various inroads upon the constitution established for the governance of British India, and when they so far expressed their feelings in the hope of his effecting great promised retrenchments in the public expenditure … instead of answering their views he embarked, unnecessarily as they think, those extensive plans of foreign policy inevitably leading to wars which … have, in the opinion of the Court, been productive of many serious evils, have removed further than ever the prospect of reducing the debt and expenses of the country, and have exchanged the secure...