The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company by William Dalrymple

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company by William Dalrymple Meghna Sapui (bio) The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company by William Dalrymple; p. 522. Bloomsbury, 2019. $35.43 cloth. in the infamous impeachment of Warren Hastings, the then Governor-General of Bengal, Edmund Burke's four-day long address emphasized Hastings's "geographical morality … as if when you have crossed the equatorial line all the virtues die" (qtd. in Dalrymple 310). Hastings's lengthy impeachment trial was an indictment not just of him but also of the increasingly corrupt and despotic activities of the British East India Company (EIC). William Dalrymple's book is a compulsively readable and accessible history of the rise and rise of the East India Company through its deployment of, what Burke suggestively calls, its "geographical morality." Dalrymple shows how the EIC went from a gathering of a motley crew of merchants in a rundown building in London to become "the grandest society of merchants in the Universe," with armies larger than those of almost all nation states, power that encircled the globe, and shares that were, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, a kind of global reserve currency (388). The Anarchy is also, however, a compelling critique of this rise that carries with it a warning for the contemporary state of big corporations. [End Page 159] Dalrymple's chapters chart the EIC's systematic impoverishment of both the Indian nobility and peasantry in its quest to surpass its status in India as a mere trading house to become a territorial and sovereign power. Chapter 1 introduces the less-than-humble origins of the British East India Company and its rise in India against all other trading and political outfits. It demonstrates how the various competing political interests in India—such as the Mughals and, later, other regional empires, as well as trading Companies, including those of the Portuguese, Dutch, and French—folded over time as British interests gradually unfolded across the subcontinent. Chapter 2, in Dalrymple's characteristic narrative fashion, tells the stories of Robert Clive, the first British governor of Bengal; Aliverdi Khan, the Nawab of Bengal; Siraj ud-Daula, Aliverdi's grandson; and Shah Alam, the Mughal emperor. Through these figures, Dalrymple sets up the major players involved in the final struggle between existing subcontinental authority and the newly minted foreign trading power, the British EIC. Chapter 3 describes the rivalry between Siraj ud-Daula, now the Nawab of Bengal, and Robert Clive. The eventual English victory in the Battle of Plassey in 1757 made the thirty-three-year-old Clive "one of the wealthiest men in Europe" (131). Dalrymple calls this "one of the largest windfalls in history" (133). More importantly, this victory permanently undermined the authority of the Nawabs, and the Company was no longer just a trading interest, "rather, it found that it had become a kingmaker and an autonomous power in its own right" (135). Chapter 4 documents the fragile nature of the relationship between the EIC and the subsequent Nawabs of Bengal. The EIC gave precedence to their commercial profitability and bulldozed any political authority that stood in the way of this, thus also acquiring substantial political power in the region. The Nawabs, on the other hand, formed alliances with the Company, recognizing in particular its superior military capabilities but, at the same time, detested its rapacious and violent ways. The Company, hitherto incomprehensive of "the different world" (139) of Indian authority, gradually came to comprehend the minute workings of a different kind of power—one based on moral authority rather than military or economic dominance. In chapter 5, Dalrymple shows how by defeating the united armies of India's Mughal rulers, "a trading corporation had become both colonial proprietor and corporate state, legally free, for the first time, to do all the things that governments do: control the law, administer justice, assess taxes, mint coins, provide protection, impose punishments, make peace and wage war" (209). The Company negotiated to win the financial rights to the entire northeast of India and benefited greatly from this. The EIC so thoroughly plundered and impoverished Bengal for profitability by exporting its...