The Anarchy Quotes

“Corporations have neither bodies to be punished, nor souls to be condemned, they therefore do as they like. Edward, First Baron Thurlow”
― William Dalrymple, The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire

“Ultimately it was the East India Company, not the Marathas or the Sultans of Mysore, that the financiers across India decided to back.”
― William Dalrymple, The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire

“The Bengali poet Ganga Ram in his Maharashta Purana gave a fuller picture of the terror they inspired. ‘The people on earth were filled with sin,’ he wrote, ‘and there was no worship of Rama and Krishna. Day and night people took their pleasure with the wives of others.’ Finally, he wrote, Shiva ordered Nandi to enter the body of the Maratha king Shahu. ‘Let him send his agents, that sinners and evil doers be punished.’29 Soon after: The Bargis [Marathas] began to plunder the villages and all the people fled in terror. Brahmin pandits fled, taking with them loads of manuscripts; goldsmiths fled with the scales and weights; and fishermen with their nets and lines – all fled. The people fled in all directions; who could count their numbers? All who lived in villages fled when they heard the name of the Bargis. Ladies of good family, who had never before set a foot on a road fled from the Bargis with baskets on their heads. And land owning Rajputs, who had gained their wealth with the sword, threw down their swords and fled. And sadhus and monks fled, riding on litters, their bearers carrying their baggage on their shoulders; and many farmers fled, their seed for next year’s crops on the backs of their bullocks, and ploughs on their shoulders. And pregnant women, all but unable to walk, began their labour on the road and were delivered there. There were some people who stood in the road and asked of all who passed where the Bargis were. Everyone replied – I have not seen them with my own eyes. But seeing everyone flees, I flee also. Then suddenly the Bargis swept down with a great shout and surrounded the people in their fields. They snatched away gold and silver, rejecting everything else. Of some people they cut off the hand, of some the nose and ears; some they killed outright. They dragged away the most beautiful women, who tried to flee, and tied ropes to their fingers and necks. When one had finished with a woman, another took her, while the raped women screamed for help. The Bargis after committing all foul, sinful and bestial acts, let these women go.”
― William Dalrymple, The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company

“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.”
― William Dalrymple, The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire

“India’s transition to colonialism took place under a for-profit corporation, which existed entirely for the purpose of enriching its investors.”
― William Dalrymple, The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company

“The bankers and merchants of Bengal who sustained Siraj ud-Daula’s regime had finally turned against him and united with the disaffected parts of his own military; now they sought to bring in the mercenary troops of the East India Company to help depose him. This was something quite new in Indian history: a group of Indian financiers plotting with an international trading corporation to use its own private security force to overthrow a regime they saw threatening the income they earned from trade.60 This was not part of any imperial masterplan. In fact, the EIC men on the ground were ignoring their strict instructions from London, which were only to repulse French attacks and avoid potentially ruinous wars with their Mughal hosts. But seeing opportunities for personal enrichment as well as political and economic gain for the Company, they dressed up the conspiracy in colours that they knew would appeal to their masters and presented the coup as if it were primarily aimed at excluding the French from Bengal for ever.*”
― William Dalrymple, The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company

“His words were echoed in the House of Lords by the former Prime Minister. William Pitt, Lord Chatham, came from a dynasty whose fortunes were made in India: his father, ‘Diamond Pitt’, brought back from his governorship of Madras the fortune that had made possible Pitt’s career. Pitt did not, however, like to be reminded of this, and now raised the alarm that the EIC was bringing its corrupt practices back from India and into the very benches of the Mother of Parliaments. ‘The riches of Asia have been poured in upon us,’ he declared at the despatch box, ‘and have brought with them not only Asiatic luxury, but, I fear, Asiatic principles of government. Without connections, without any natural interest in the soil, the importers of foreign gold have forced their way into Parliament by such a torrent of private corruptions as no private hereditary fortune could resist.’31”
― William Dalrymple, The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire

“The reforms Cornwallis initiated on his return to Calcutta further consolidated this position. In America, Britain had lost its colonies not to Native Americans, but to the descendants of European settlers. Cornwallis was determined to make sure that a settled colonial class never emerged in India to undermine British rule as it had done, to his own humiliation, in America. By this period one in three British men in India were cohabiting with Indian women, and there were believed to be more than 11,000 Anglo-Indians in the three Presidency towns.”
― William Dalrymple, The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire

“I came alone and I go as a stranger. The instant which has passed in power has left only sorrow behind it. I have not been the guardian and protector of the Empire. Life, so valuable, has been squandered in vain. God was in my heart but I could not see him. Life is transient. The past is gone and there is no hope for the future. The whole imperial army is like me: bewildered, perturbed, separated from God, quaking like quicksilver.”
― William Dalrymple, The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire

“Clive and his colleagues had intended to do little more than re-establish British trade on a favourable footing and to ensure the accession of a more friendly Nawab. But what they had in fact done was fatally and permanently to undermine the authority of the Nawabs, bringing chaos to what had been up to that point the most peaceful and profitable part of the old Mughal Empire.”
― William Dalrymple, The Anarchy

“Up to now, gold bullion had represented 75 per cent of the EIC’s imports to Bengal, and was the source for much of the ‘prodigious ancient riches of the province’. But now the Company no longer had to ship anything from Britain in order to pay for the textiles, spices and saltpetre it wished to buy and export: Indian tax revenues were now being used to provide the finance for all such purchases. India would henceforth be treated as if it were a vast plantation to be milked and exploited, with all its profits shipped overseas to London”
― William Dalrymple, The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire

“Enough was enough. The Victorian state, alerted to the dangers posed by corporate greed and incompetence, successfully tamed history’s most voracious corporation. The Company’s navy was disbanded and its army passed to the Crown. In 1859, it was within the walls of Allahabad Fort – the same space where Clive had first turned the Company into an imperial power by signing the Diwani – that the Governor General, Lord Canning, formally announced that the Company’s Indian possessions would be nationalised and”
― William Dalrymple, The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company

“It was a hugely significant moment: with one stroke of the pen, in return for a relatively modest payment of Rs2.6 million,* and Clive’s cynical promise on behalf of the Company to govern ‘agreeably to the rules of Mahomed and the law of the Empire’, the Emperor agreed to recognise all the Company’s conquests and hand over to it financial control of all north-eastern India. Henceforth, 250 East India Company clerks backed by the military force of 20,000 Indian sepoys would now run the finances of India’s three richest provinces, effectively ending independent government in Bengal for 200 years. For a stock market-listed company with profit as its main raison d’être, this was a transformative, revolutionary moment.”
― William Dalrymple, The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company

“Meanwhile, in London, the Company directors were beginning to realise for the first time how powerful they were. In 1693, less than a century after its foundation, the Company was discovered to be using its own shares for buying the favours of parliamentarians, as it annually shelled out £1,200 a year to prominent MPs and ministers. The bribery, it turned out, went as high as the Solicitor General, who received £218, and the Attorney General, who received £545.** The parliamentary investigation into this, the world’s first corporate lobbying scandal, found the EIC guilty of bribery and insider trading and led to the impeachment of the Lord President of the Council and the imprisonment of the Company’s Governor.”
― William Dalrymple, The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company

“Yet, like more recent mega-corporations, the EIC proved at once hugely powerful and oddly vulnerable to economic uncertainty. Only seven years after the granting of the Diwani, when the Company’s share price had doubled overnight after it acquired the wealth of the treasury of Bengal, the East India bubble burst after plunder and famine in Bengal led to massive shortfalls in expected land revenues. The EIC was left with debts of £1.5 million and a bill of £1 million* in unpaid tax owed to the Crown. When knowledge of this became public, thirty banks collapsed like dominoes across Europe, bringing trade to a standstill.”
― William Dalrymple, The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire

“The EIC was, as one of its directors admitted, ‘an empire within an empire’, with the power to make war or peace anywhere in the East.”
― William Dalrymple, The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire

“Her conclusion was that the Mughal state was unusually extractive and appropriated 56.7 per cent of the total produce. Her research focused on five north Indian provinces: Agra, Delhi, Lahore, Allahabad and Avadh. The total”
― William Dalrymple, The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company

“In the 1520s the Spanish had swept away the vast armies of the mighty Aztec Empire in a matter of”
― William Dalrymple, The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company

“The East India Company has, thankfully, no exact modern equivalent. Walmart, which is the world’s largest corporation in revenue terms, does not number among its assets a fleet of nuclear submarines; neither Facebook nor Shell possesses regiments of infantry. Yet the East India Company – the first great multinational corporation, and the first to run amok – was the ultimate model and prototype for many of today’s joint stock corporations. The most powerful among them do not need their own armies: they can rely on governments to protect their interests and bail them out.”
― William Dalrymple, The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company

“In the political settlement that followed, Tipu’s sons were despatched to exile in the fort of Vellore and most of the best lands of the state of Mysore were divided between the Company and the Nizam of Hyderabad. The rump was returned to the Hindu Wadyar dynasty whose throne Haidar and Tipu had usurped. A five-year-old child from the dynasty was found living ‘in a state of misery … in kind of stable with sheds attached to”
― William Dalrymple, The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company

“Here Tipu was laid to rest next to his father, ‘immediately consecrated by his Mahomedan followers as a Shahid, or Martyr of the Faith … with the full military honours due to his exalted rank’.58 The British, all of whom had during the campaign been force-fed on Wellesley’s propaganda that Tipu was a brutal tyrant, were surprised to discover how much his people, both Hindu and Muslim, clearly loved him, just as they had been surprised to see how prosperous his kingdom was – ‘well-cultivated, populous with industrious inhabitants,”
― William Dalrymple, The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company

“For the arrow of fate cannot be parried by the shield of effort once God’s decree has already passed another way.”
― William Dalrymple, The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company

“The Company’s ever-growing Indian empire could not have been achieved without the political and economic support of regional power groups and local communities. The”
― William Dalrymple, The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company

“The treaty was finally signed, and the two young princes – Abdul Khaliq, who was eight, and Muizuddin, aged five – handed over to Cornwallis on 18 March 1792. The boys were taken off by elephant to Madras, which they appeared in general to like, though they clearly did not enjoy being made to sit through entire performances of Handel’s Messiah and Judas Maccabaeus.58 Having created a sensation in Madras society with their dignity, intelligence and politeness, they were sent back two years later when Tipu delivered the final tranche of his indemnity payment.”
― William Dalrymple, The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company

“But it was the great temple of Sringeri that always received his most generous patronage, as a stash of correspondence discovered within the temple in the 1950s bears witness. Tipu put on record his horror at the damage done to the temple by a Maratha Pindari raiding party during a Maratha invasion of Mysore: ‘People who have sinned against such a holy place are sure to suffer the consequences of their misdeeds,’ wrote Tipu. ‘Those”
― William Dalrymple, The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company

“Tipu even asked his ambassadors to Ottoman Istanbul to secure for him the ijara – farm – of Basra so that, like the Europeans, he could establish an overseas settlement which would be a base for his vessels.”
― William Dalrymple, The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company

“The master of Delhi, they knew, was always the master of Hindustan.”
― William Dalrymple, The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company

“The first to go hungry were the landless ‘labourers, the workmen, the manufacturers and people employed in the river [boatmen]’ as they ‘were without the same means of laying by stores of grain as the husbandmen’.5 These, the rural artisans and the urban poor, unprotected and with no safety net, were the first to sicken from malnutrition, then, one by one, to begin dying from starvation or disease. By February 1770, when around 70 per cent of the usual rice crop had been lost, and the price of rice was ten times its normal rate, the hunger started to become much more widespread.”
― William Dalrymple, The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company

“Clive determined to add a final political flourish of his own. He decided that a small portion of Shuja’s former dominions around Allahabad and Kora would be turned over to support Shah Alam as an imperial demesne. Vague promises would be made about supporting the Emperor’s long-dreamed-of return to Delhi, while taking in return the offer of financially managing the three rich eastern provinces of the Emperor dominions – Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. This was the granting of what in Mughal legalese was known as the Diwani – the office of economic management of Mughal provinces.”
― William Dalrymple, The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company

“The three great armies of the Mughal world had come together to defeat the Company and expel it from India. When instead it was the Mughals that were defeated, the Company was left the dominant military force in north-east India. Buxar confirmed the Company’s control of Bengal and the coast and opened the way for them to extend their influence far inland to the west.”
― William Dalrymple, The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company