The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company

by William Dalrymple

With various instances of extortion and other deeds of maladministration … With impoverishing and depopulating the whole country … with a wanton, and unjust, and pernicious, exercise of his powers … in overturning the ancient establishments of the country … With cruelties unheard of and devastations almost without name … Crimes which have their rise in the wicked dispositions of men – in avarice, rapacity, pride, cruelty, malignity, haughtiness, insolence, ferocity, treachery, cruelty, malignity of temper – in short, nothing that does not argue a total extinction of all moral principle, that does not manifest an inveterate blackness of heart, a heart blackened to the very blackest, a heart corrupted, gangrened to the core … We have brought before you the head, the Captain General of Iniquity – one in whom all the frauds, all the peculations, all the violence, all the tyranny in India are embodied.

Edmund Burke at Warren Hasting's impeachment trial

‘When the Tartars entered China and into Hindoostan, when all the Goths and Vandals entered Europe, when the Normans came into England, they did so as a Nation.’ The Company in India does not exist as a Nation. Nobody can go there that does not go in its service … They are a Nation of Placemen. They are a Republic, a Commonwealth, without a people … The consequence of which is that there are no people to control, to watch, to balance against the power of office … Out of this has issued a species of abuse, at the head of which Mr Hastings has put himself against the authority of the East India Company at home and every authority in the Country … He has corrupted his hands and sullied his government with bribes. He has used oppression and tyranny in place of legal government; and instead of endeavouring to find honest, honourable and adequate rewards for the persons who served the public, he has left them to prey upon it without the slightest degree of control.

Ibid

‘Every rupee of profit made by an Englishman is lost to India for ever. Every other conqueror … has left some monument behind him. Were we to be driven out of India this day, nothing would remain to tell that it had been possessed, during the inglorious period of our domination, by anything better than an ouran-outang or the tiger … [The Company appears] more like an army going to pillage the people under the pretence of commerce than anything else … [Their business is] more like robbery than trade.’

Ibid

‘they were dragged out, naked and exposed to the public view, and scourged before all the people … they put the nipples of the women into the sharp edges of split bamboos and tore them from their bodies’

Ibid

Forty years earlier, in 1750, the Company had been a trading corporation with a small security force and a few crumbling forts; by 1790 it had effectively transformed its Indian holdings into a tightly run fiscal-military state guarded by the most powerful army in Asia.

The transformation of EIC into the most powerful army in Asia.

Tipu, despite being a devout Muslim and viewing himself as a champion of Islam, thoroughly embraced the syncretic culture of his time and believed strongly in the power of Hindu gods.

Tipu's view of Hinduism

He routinely circumcised and brutally converted to Islam captive enemy combatants and internal rebels, both Hindu and Christians, Indian and British. More often than not he destroyed the temples and churches of those he conquered.

Tipu's treatment of adversaries

Christian Portuguese missionaries wrote that ‘he tied naked Christians and Hindus to the legs of elephants and made the elephants move around till the bodies of the helpless victims were torn to pieces’.

Ibid

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ said Lord Wellesley, raising a glass, when the news of Tipu’s death was brought to him, ‘I drink to the corpse of India.’

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.

Most importantly, the Battle of Delhi decided the future fate of India. The Marathas were the last indigenous Indian power that was militarily capable of defeating the Company and driving it out of South Asia. There were other battles still to be fought against both Scindia and Holkar before they surrendered, but after Assaye and Delhi the outcome of the war was quite clear. The last power who could have ousted the Company had been humbled and was about to be conquered.

The Company’s conquest of India almost certainly remains the supreme act of corporate violence in world history. For all the power wielded today by the world’s largest corporations – whether ExxonMobil, Walmart or Google – they are tame beasts compared with the ravaging territorial appetites of the militarised East India Company. Yet if history shows anything, it is that in the intimate dance between the power of the state and that of the corporation, while the latter can be regulated, the corporation will use all the resources in its power to resist.