Title: The Anarchy Pdf The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire
In August 1765, the East India Company defeated the young Mughal emperor and set up, in his place, a government run by English traders who collected taxes through means of a private army.
The creation of this new government marked the moment that the East India Company ceased to be a conventional company and became something much more unusual: an international corporation transformed into an aggressive colonial power. Over the course of the next 47 years, the company's reach grew until almost all of India south of Delhi was effectively ruled from a boardroom in the city of London.
The Anarchy tells one of history's most remarkable stories: how the Mughal Empire-which dominated world trade and manufacturing and possessed almost unlimited resources-fell apart and was replaced by a multinational corporation based thousands of miles overseas, and answerable to shareholders, most of whom had never even seen India and no idea about the country whose wealth was providing their dividends. Using previously untapped sources, Dalrymple tells the story of the East India Company as it has never been told before and provides a portrait of the devastating results from the abuse of corporate power.
Vividly written account of perhaps history's greatest corporate takeover In his characteristically vivid style, William Dalrymple describes the wholesale loot of the wealth of the Mughal Empire of India by a handful of directors sitting in a nondescript London building. The amount of wealth - to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars in today's amounts - that the East India Company pilfered through deceit, shrewd military support of warring local factions and downright pilfering was staggering, and so was the complete political takeover of India by the Company; today''s giant corporations are downright tame compared to it.At the center of the Company's early activities was Robert Clive, a greedy Company officer who enriched himself beyond measure by bribing the local general to desert the Nawab (lord) of Bengal during his hour of need. The Company was beyond the reach of any kind of regulation, and in fact it engineered the first corporate lobbying in modern history by bribing members of the British parliament and making sure they would not curb its power as well as the first corporate bailout by being "too big to fail". Tactics like insider trading (Clive bought shares of the Company right after defeating the Nawab of Bengal) and using military force to threaten businessmen and leaders were not just ignored but considered an essential part of enriching the Empire and making sure it stayed ahead of the Dutch, Portugese and French who had gotten a foothold in India and the East before the British did.Dalrymple also paints a vivid portrait of mid-18th century India and especially Bengal, giving us snapshots of everyday lives of rich and poor alike as well as gradually encroaching Company establishments. It was largely through trading that the sleepy villages of Madras, Bombay and Calcutta grew into great cities. There was unprecedented wealth in the form of jewels, spices and animal skins, but also great poverty and inequality. Dalrymple similarly has sharp character portraits of key British leaders like Clive and Warren Hastings and Indian political leaders like Shah Alam, Mahadji Scindia and Siraj Ud Daula. The East India Company came to India at the turn of the 16th century and bided its time before waiting for a fortunate (for them, unfortunate for India) confluence of factors, including the weakening of Delhi and its affluence by raids by the Persian Emperor Nader Shah from the North and the Maratha Empire from the South and internal squabbling and division among local nawabs and factions. The empire was now crumbling and the time was right to strike, and making the pretense of wanting to squelch French expansion, the British struck Bengal at the Battle of Plassey in 1757 and Buxar in 1764. They further weakened the two other ruling powers in India over the next hundred years - the Marathas and the Mysore Empire.It didn't help that India itself was divided among religious, linguistic, caste and regional lines, and many Indian local leaders foolishly enlisted the support of the Company in fighting local wars, not realizing that when it was was over they would be in the Company's pockets. Self-serving businessmen like the Jagat Seths also took the side of the British against their own people. One of the Peshwas (Maratha leaders) tried to reach out to his traditional rivals to form a unified coalition when he realized the existential threat the Company poses, but by then it was too late. When the dust had settled, the East India Company essentially ruled over most of the Indian subcontinent, had established a steady system of pillage shipping India's wealth over to England through taxation and downright theft and had made most local leaders puppets. At no other time has a single corporation wielded so much power and territory. There are no heroes here since all sides engaged in their own brands of atrocities and greedy pillage, but there does emerge one great villain. Ultimately, the Company's excesses - especially after a reign of sheer, unadulterated greed during a horrific famine in 1770 - became too much even for the British crown, and bitter denunciations started emerging from the intellectual strata of British society. Control of India finally passed to the crown after the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857.The valuable warning to take away from this story is simply that to give individual corporations unfettered power without regulation can lead to great injustice and unprecedented thievery. Another big lesson here which is perhaps even more relevant is that even if you are individually a relatively kind and decent man, as Clive's successor Warren Hastings who genuinely loved India was, you can still be on the wrong side of history because you work for the wrong institution. Corporations are an important part of modern capitalism, but without some form of regulation it is in their very nature to enrich themselves and their shareholders at the expense of others. Those are good lessons for future times, as Dalrymple reminds us in this superbly written history.
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