Book Review- The Anarchy by William Dalrymple
A tale of corporate violence, corporate plunder, corporate lobbying, corporate state, corporate army
On 24 September 1599, while William Shakespeare was pondering over a draft of Hamlet, a few miles across Thames, a diverse group of merchants were gathering in a creeping building, to create a joint stock corporation named East India Company(EIC). Over the next few years, after several bruising encounters with Portuguese and Spanish merchants, and being forced to leave lucrative spice trade to their Dutch counterparts, EIC directors decided to focus on more promising sectors of trade of Asia: fine cotton, textiles, indigo, chintzes, saltpetre. The source of all these luxuries was India.
William Dalrymple, begins with this humble beginnings of EIC, presents a fascinating tale of a corporation, a for-profit run company, answerable only to its shareholders, with only thirty-five permanent employees in its head office, only five windows wide, was able to execute a corporate coup unparalleled in history, had the world’s largest private army in the world, almost completely employing inhabitants of the colony, the stories of its conquest, subjugation and plunder, which certainly remains the supreme act of corporate violence in world history.
William establishes the fact that all this was possible because of the support EIC enjoyed from the British Parliament, with several Members of Parliament(MPs) having shareholding in EIC stock, and slowly subverting the legislation of Parliament in its favour, and backing the Company with state power. EIC invented corporate lobbying, and was engaged in the first corporate scandal in the world, and with the help of unlimited reserves of credit through collaboration of Indian moneylenders and financiers, and not militarily superiority nor administrative prowess.
When first EIC commander, Captain William Hawkins, landed in Surat on 28 August 1608, India had a population of 150 million, was the world’s industrial powerhouse, leader in manufactured textiles, accounting for more than one-fourth of world’s GDP. The Mughal empire was the richest kingdom in the world, with Bengal being undoubtedly the richest region of the globe. But, first from attacks of Nadir Shah and Ahmad Shah Durrani, and later by EIC, this vast land was stripped of its assets, to an extent that the balance of trade was overturned, which from Roman times on had led to continual drain of Western bullion eastwards.
“Bengal, the sink into which foreign bullion disappeared before 1757, became after Plassey, the treasure trove from which vast amounts of wealth were drained without any prospect of return”
In words of Macaulay, the Company looked on Bengal
‘merely as a Buccaneer would look on a galleon’
My favourite parts of the book include the formation of cities like Bombay, Madras and Calcutta, with one gifted as a wedding present from Portuguese, another a small fishing village, and yet another a swampy ground between two villages, and tales of financing of Company’s military expeditions in India, by the Indian bankers, like Jagat Seths, Lala Kashmiri Mal among others was the most astonishing, yet crucial reasons for the huge success of EIC, over Indian rulers, simply because, EIC, being a corporation, spoke the language Indian financiers understood, and hence offered higher degree of security to Indian capital over their rivals.
The Battles of Plassey and Buxar, which set the stage for most extraordinary corporate takeover in history, the Carnatic wars, which erased any chances of French settlements in Indian soil, and Anglo-Maratha and Anglo-Mysore Wars, which consolidated and completed the conquest of EIC over much of the subcontinent, are presented in fascinating details, along with their after-effects.William brings the personal and professional accounts of Indian rulers like Shah Alam, Mir Jafar, Mir Qasim, Tipu Sultan, Manhadji Scindia, Afghan invaders like Nadir Shah, Ahmad Shah Durrani, Company officials like Robert Clive, Charles Cornwallis, Richard and Arthur Wellesley, impeachment of Warren Hastings, along with the astonishing accounts of battles and expeditions, they carried on Indian soil. William also presents the tale of history’s first mega-bailouts- an early example of nation state extracting, at its price for saving a failing corporation, something similar to what we witnessed in the Global Financial crisis of 2008, saving a large private bank by the Indian Government in 2020.
“Dalyrmple researches like a historian, thinks like an anthropologist, and writes like a novelist”-Maya Jasanoff
It is one of the most brilliant accounts of a corporation, and an ominous warning about the potential for the abuse of corporate power- and the insidious means by which the interests of shareholders can seemingly become those of the state. Today, our lives are still significantly governed by corporations. In the twenty-first century, a powerful and unregulated corporation can still overwhelm or subvert a state every bit as effectively as EIC did in Bengal in the eighteenth.
With today rising inequality and more monopolies in every sector, corporate influence and predictive data harvesting, tax avoidance through offshore companies, annual turnover of some big corporates more than the entire GDPs of developing countries, we are confronted with the question whether we had substituted the crony socialism of the past with crony capitalism.The story of East India Company has never been more current, even after four hundred and twenty years after its founding.
I can write forever, but I would have to rest my keyboard to let you explore this remarkable account of a corporate turning in a corporate state, written by William Dalyrmple. It’s one of those books, which will make you think, ponder, laugh sometimes, but will keep you on your toes always.
