The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company

by William Dalrymple

Now with Hyderabad secured, Wellesley was ready to move directly against his principal adversary, Tipu Sultan.

These were a group of French officers led by Louis Guillaume François Drugeon, a Savoyard aristocrat who was given charge of the Emperor’s person and command of the Emperor’s bodyguard, and Louis Bourquien, a French mercenary of humble origins, who one historian of the Marathas has described as a ‘pastry cook, pyrotechnic and poltroon’.

Scindia. Daulat Rao may not have realised the value of controlling the elderly Mughal Emperor, but Lord Wellesley certainly did. He understood the vital distinction that, while Shah Alam may not have commanded any significant military power, he still held substantial symbolic authority, and that his decisions instantly conferred legality.

The Company’s army had expanded very quickly under Wellesley’s rule and within a few years its muster roll had gone up by nearly half from 115,000 to 155,000 men; in the next decade its numbers would rise again to 195,000, making it one of the largest standing European-style armies in the world, and around twice the size of the British army.

This was only the first in a whole series of surprises in a battle that Arthur Wellesley would later remember as one of the hardest he had ever fought, and altogether tougher than his later confrontation with Napoleon at Waterloo.

Terrible as it was, the Battle of Delhi was the last time British troops faced French officers in South Asia, ending more than a century of rivalry which had caused so much bloodshed, mostly of non-Europeans, across the subcontinent.

Around 600 well-trained Company civil servants, guarded by 155,000 Indian sepoys, were to administer most of peninsular India.

The Company conquest of Delhi was, by any standards, a hugely significant moment. For the sightless and powerless Shah Alam, described by the poet Azad as ‘only a chessboard king’, it represented a final resolution to the conundrum that had been haunting him all his life: how to rule the Empire of his Timurid ancestors, from where, and under whose protection.

Moreover, he had guided his dynasty through its lowest moments and managed to keep the Mughal flame alive through the worst of the Great Anarchy. He also succeeded in creating a new model of Mughal rule, where the absence of real power lay well disguised beneath the aura of divinely appointed kingship and the gilt screen of high culture and courtly manners, both of which were derived from his Timurid ancestors.

In 1813, Parliament abolished the Company’s monopoly of trade with the East, allowing other, merchants and agency houses to set up shop in Bombay and Calcutta.176

In both India and Britain, people still talk about the British conquering India, but, as this book has attempted to show, that phrase disguises a much more ominous and complex reality. Because it was not the British government that seized India in the middle of the eighteenth century, but a private company. India’s transition to colonialism took place through the mechanism of a for-profit corporation, which existed entirely for the purpose of enriching its investors.

What Burke feared the East India Company would do to England in 1772 – potentially drag the government ‘down into an unfathomable abyss’ – actually happened to Iceland in 2008–11, when the systemic collapse of all three of the country’s major privately owned commercial banks brought the country to the brink of complete bankruptcy.