Plot Summary
The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire
William Dalrymple
The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2019
Plot Summary
In the late eighteenth century, a private London trading corporation operating from a small office managed, in less than 50 years, to seize control of almost the entire Indian subcontinent. William Dalrymple traces how the East India Company (EIC), a joint stock corporation founded in 1599, transformed from a struggling merchant venture into a militarized colonial power that replaced the Mughal Empire as ruler of India. The life of the Mughal Emperor Shah Alam, who witnessed the Company's entire 50-year rise, forms the narrative spine.
Dalrymple opens at Powis Castle in Wales, where rooms overflow with Mughal artifacts looted by the EIC, and a painting depicts the 1765 moment when Shah Alam was compelled to grant the Company the Diwani, the right to collect taxes across Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa, three of the empire's richest provinces. Yet when the Company first arrived in India in 1608, the Mughal Empire dwarfed England in wealth, population, and power; Emperor Jahangir barely deigned to notice the English traders at his court.
The Company's fortunes shifted because the Mughal Empire fractured. Emperor Aurangzeb's death in 1707, following decades of religious intolerance, reckless expansion, and guerrilla resistance from the Maratha Confederacy, a loose alliance of Hindu warrior chieftains controlling much of central and western India, shattered Mughal authority. In 1739, the Persian warlord Nader Shah invaded, massacred an estimated 100,000 people in Delhi, and departed with the Peacock Throne and treasure worth tens of millions of pounds. Meanwhile, the French East India Company pioneered the training of locally recruited Indian soldiers, called sepoys, in European infantry tactics. At the Battle of Adyar River in 1746, a small French force scattered a vastly larger Mughal army, and both Companies began selling military services to Indian rulers in exchange for land and revenue.
The decisive turn came in Bengal. In 1756, Siraj ud-Daula, the young Nawab, or provincial ruler, of Bengal, attacked Calcutta after the EIC rebuilt its fortifications without permission. Robert Clive, a former Company accountant turned battlefield hero of the Carnatic Wars against the French, led a relief force that retook Calcutta and destroyed the French trading post at Chandernagar. When Bengal's powerful Jagat Seth banking dynasty conspired with the veteran general Mir Jafar to overthrow Siraj, Clive joined the plot. At the Battle of Plassey on 23 June 1757, Clive's 3,000 troops faced Siraj's 50,000. A monsoon storm disabled the Mughal guns while the Company kept its powder dry; Mir Jafar withdrew his forces as agreed; and Siraj fled. Clive installed Mir Jafar as puppet Nawab, collected prize money worth almost £25 million in modern terms, and loaded the Bengal treasury onto boats bound for Calcutta.
Plassey initiated a period of systematic plunder. Mir Jafar proved incompetent, and unregulated English traders fanned out across Bengal, refusing to pay taxes and coercing local merchants. Warren Hastings, a Company official stationed at Murshidabad, was among the first to denounce these abuses. The Company replaced Mir Jafar with his son-in-law Mir Qasim, who reformed Bengal's administration, but when Mir Qasim abolished customs duties to resist Company encroachments, war broke out. His forces were defeated, and he ordered the massacre of approximately 45 Company prisoners at Patna.
Meanwhile, Shah Alam, a talented poet and Sufi mystic who had fled Delhi to escape assassination, wandered the Ganges plains trying to rebuild imperial authority. After repeated defeats by Company forces, he pragmatically allied with the EIC, which found his nominal authority useful for legitimizing its conquests. Mir Qasim then proposed a grand alliance with Shah Alam and Shuja ud-Daula, Nawab of Avadh. Their combined army of 150,000 faced the Company at Buxar on 22 October 1764. Company discipline prevailed, and Buxar proved more decisive than Plassey: The three greatest Mughal armies had been defeated together.
Clive returned and staged the ceremony at Allahabad where Shah Alam signed over the Diwani. Indian tax revenues replaced bullion imports as the Company's purchasing power, and Bengal was treated as a vast estate to be drained. The Mughal historian Ghulam Hussain Khan articulated the consequences: the ruin of an entire social class and a fundamental difference between Mughal conquerors who settled and intermarried and British colonizers who extracted wealth and departed.
When the monsoon failed in 1769, the resulting famine killed approximately 1.2 million Bengalis, one in five, while the Company rigorously enforced tax collection. In 1772, the EIC's financial bubble burst: Plunder and famine had produced revenue shortfalls, 30 banks collapsed across Europe, and the Company requested a government bailout. Parliament passed the Regulating Act of 1773, beginning state oversight of the Company. Clive, tormented by parliamentary investigation, died by suicide in 1774.
Hastings, appointed the first Governor General, undertook reforms but was hamstrung by hostile Crown councillors led by Philip Francis. Meanwhile, Haidar Ali and his son Tipu Sultan of Mysore, using French-trained infantry and rocket technology, annihilated a Company column at the Battle of Pollilur in 1780, the worst British defeat in India. Hastings broke the coalition arrayed against the Company through a separate peace with Mahadji Scindia, a powerful Maratha chieftain, at the Treaty of Salbai in 1782.
Shah Alam, weary of Company neglect, departed for Delhi in 1771 under Maratha protection. His commander Mirza Najaf Khan spent a decade reconquering major Mughal strongholds, but Najaf Khan died in 1782, and his gains were immediately lost. In 1788, Ghulam Qadir, a chieftain of the Rohillas, an Afghan military clan active around Delhi, stormed the Red Fort. Although Shah Alam had raised Ghulam Qadir as an adopted son, the chieftain subjected the imperial family to nine weeks of terror before blinding the Emperor. Scindia's Maratha forces eventually rescued Shah Alam.
Edmund Burke, a prominent politician, orchestrated Hastings's 1788 impeachment in Parliament. Though built partly on Francis's distortions, the trial established that Company misdeeds were answerable to Parliament. Hastings was acquitted after seven years. Lord Cornwallis, who succeeded Hastings as Governor General, reformed Bengal's finances and defeated Tipu Sultan in the Third Anglo-Mysore War of 1792, stripping him of half his kingdom. The Company's access to Bengal's revenue surplus now gave it a decisive financial advantage over all Indian rivals.
Governor General Richard Wellesley arrived in 1798 determined to crush French influence and establish British supremacy. He launched the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War in 1799; Tipu fought to the death defending his capital of Srirangapatnam, and approximately £2 million in treasure was seized. Wellesley then exploited divisions among the Marathas. After Peshwa Baji Rao II, the Confederacy's chief minister, signed the Treaty of Bassein in 1802 accepting Company protection, war erupted. Arthur Wellesley, the Governor General's brother, defeated Daulat Rao Scindia's French-trained army at Assaye on 23 September 1803, while Lord Lake, the Company's northern commander, stormed Aligarh and won the Battle of Delhi, ending French military presence in India.
On 16 September 1803, Lake entered the Red Fort and found the blind, aged Shah Alam seated under a tattered canopy. Lake bowed at the Emperor's feet and was invested with Mughal titles, while Shah Alam accepted Company protection and a pension. The Company now controlled most of the subcontinent, administered by 600 civil servants and 155,000 sepoys. Wellesley's wars, however, nearly bankrupted the Company, and the directors recalled him. Parliament stripped away Company power, abolishing its trade monopoly in 1813 and its trading rights in 1833. After the Company's army rose in revolt during the Great Uprising of 1857, Parliament removed the Company from power altogether. It quietly closed in 1874.
Dalrymple argues that the Company's conquest remains the supreme act of corporate violence in world history, and that the question of how nation states can protect themselves from corporate excess remains unanswered.
Dalrymple opens at Powis Castle in Wales, where rooms overflow with Mughal artifacts looted by the EIC, and a painting depicts the 1765 moment when Shah Alam was compelled to grant the Company the Diwani, the right to collect taxes across Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa, three of the empire's richest provinces. Yet when the Company first arrived in India in 1608, the Mughal Empire dwarfed England in wealth, population, and power; Emperor Jahangir barely deigned to notice the English traders at his court.
The Company's fortunes shifted because the Mughal Empire fractured. Emperor Aurangzeb's death in 1707, following decades of religious intolerance, reckless expansion, and guerrilla resistance from the Maratha Confederacy, a loose alliance of Hindu warrior chieftains controlling much of central and western India, shattered Mughal authority. In 1739, the Persian warlord Nader Shah invaded, massacred an estimated 100,000 people in Delhi, and departed with the Peacock Throne and treasure worth tens of millions of pounds. Meanwhile, the French East India Company pioneered the training of locally recruited Indian soldiers, called sepoys, in European infantry tactics. At the Battle of Adyar River in 1746, a small French force scattered a vastly larger Mughal army, and both Companies began selling military services to Indian rulers in exchange for land and revenue.
The decisive turn came in Bengal. In 1756, Siraj ud-Daula, the young Nawab, or provincial ruler, of Bengal, attacked Calcutta after the EIC rebuilt its fortifications without permission. Robert Clive, a former Company accountant turned battlefield hero of the Carnatic Wars against the French, led a relief force that retook Calcutta and destroyed the French trading post at Chandernagar. When Bengal's powerful Jagat Seth banking dynasty conspired with the veteran general Mir Jafar to overthrow Siraj, Clive joined the plot. At the Battle of Plassey on 23 June 1757, Clive's 3,000 troops faced Siraj's 50,000. A monsoon storm disabled the Mughal guns while the Company kept its powder dry; Mir Jafar withdrew his forces as agreed; and Siraj fled. Clive installed Mir Jafar as puppet Nawab, collected prize money worth almost £25 million in modern terms, and loaded the Bengal treasury onto boats bound for Calcutta.
Plassey initiated a period of systematic plunder. Mir Jafar proved incompetent, and unregulated English traders fanned out across Bengal, refusing to pay taxes and coercing local merchants. Warren Hastings, a Company official stationed at Murshidabad, was among the first to denounce these abuses. The Company replaced Mir Jafar with his son-in-law Mir Qasim, who reformed Bengal's administration, but when Mir Qasim abolished customs duties to resist Company encroachments, war broke out. His forces were defeated, and he ordered the massacre of approximately 45 Company prisoners at Patna.
Meanwhile, Shah Alam, a talented poet and Sufi mystic who had fled Delhi to escape assassination, wandered the Ganges plains trying to rebuild imperial authority. After repeated defeats by Company forces, he pragmatically allied with the EIC, which found his nominal authority useful for legitimizing its conquests. Mir Qasim then proposed a grand alliance with Shah Alam and Shuja ud-Daula, Nawab of Avadh. Their combined army of 150,000 faced the Company at Buxar on 22 October 1764. Company discipline prevailed, and Buxar proved more decisive than Plassey: The three greatest Mughal armies had been defeated together.
Clive returned and staged the ceremony at Allahabad where Shah Alam signed over the Diwani. Indian tax revenues replaced bullion imports as the Company's purchasing power, and Bengal was treated as a vast estate to be drained. The Mughal historian Ghulam Hussain Khan articulated the consequences: the ruin of an entire social class and a fundamental difference between Mughal conquerors who settled and intermarried and British colonizers who extracted wealth and departed.
When the monsoon failed in 1769, the resulting famine killed approximately 1.2 million Bengalis, one in five, while the Company rigorously enforced tax collection. In 1772, the EIC's financial bubble burst: Plunder and famine had produced revenue shortfalls, 30 banks collapsed across Europe, and the Company requested a government bailout. Parliament passed the Regulating Act of 1773, beginning state oversight of the Company. Clive, tormented by parliamentary investigation, died by suicide in 1774.
Hastings, appointed the first Governor General, undertook reforms but was hamstrung by hostile Crown councillors led by Philip Francis. Meanwhile, Haidar Ali and his son Tipu Sultan of Mysore, using French-trained infantry and rocket technology, annihilated a Company column at the Battle of Pollilur in 1780, the worst British defeat in India. Hastings broke the coalition arrayed against the Company through a separate peace with Mahadji Scindia, a powerful Maratha chieftain, at the Treaty of Salbai in 1782.
Shah Alam, weary of Company neglect, departed for Delhi in 1771 under Maratha protection. His commander Mirza Najaf Khan spent a decade reconquering major Mughal strongholds, but Najaf Khan died in 1782, and his gains were immediately lost. In 1788, Ghulam Qadir, a chieftain of the Rohillas, an Afghan military clan active around Delhi, stormed the Red Fort. Although Shah Alam had raised Ghulam Qadir as an adopted son, the chieftain subjected the imperial family to nine weeks of terror before blinding the Emperor. Scindia's Maratha forces eventually rescued Shah Alam.
Edmund Burke, a prominent politician, orchestrated Hastings's 1788 impeachment in Parliament. Though built partly on Francis's distortions, the trial established that Company misdeeds were answerable to Parliament. Hastings was acquitted after seven years. Lord Cornwallis, who succeeded Hastings as Governor General, reformed Bengal's finances and defeated Tipu Sultan in the Third Anglo-Mysore War of 1792, stripping him of half his kingdom. The Company's access to Bengal's revenue surplus now gave it a decisive financial advantage over all Indian rivals.
Governor General Richard Wellesley arrived in 1798 determined to crush French influence and establish British supremacy. He launched the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War in 1799; Tipu fought to the death defending his capital of Srirangapatnam, and approximately £2 million in treasure was seized. Wellesley then exploited divisions among the Marathas. After Peshwa Baji Rao II, the Confederacy's chief minister, signed the Treaty of Bassein in 1802 accepting Company protection, war erupted. Arthur Wellesley, the Governor General's brother, defeated Daulat Rao Scindia's French-trained army at Assaye on 23 September 1803, while Lord Lake, the Company's northern commander, stormed Aligarh and won the Battle of Delhi, ending French military presence in India.
On 16 September 1803, Lake entered the Red Fort and found the blind, aged Shah Alam seated under a tattered canopy. Lake bowed at the Emperor's feet and was invested with Mughal titles, while Shah Alam accepted Company protection and a pension. The Company now controlled most of the subcontinent, administered by 600 civil servants and 155,000 sepoys. Wellesley's wars, however, nearly bankrupted the Company, and the directors recalled him. Parliament stripped away Company power, abolishing its trade monopoly in 1813 and its trading rights in 1833. After the Company's army rose in revolt during the Great Uprising of 1857, Parliament removed the Company from power altogether. It quietly closed in 1874.
Dalrymple argues that the Company's conquest remains the supreme act of corporate violence in world history, and that the question of how nation states can protect themselves from corporate excess remains unanswered.
We’re just getting started
Add this title to our list of requested Study Guides!