The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company

Author: William Dalrymple | Published: 2019

Summary

The Anarchy tells the story of the East India Company’s rise from a small trading operation founded in 1599 to the ruler of virtually the entire Indian subcontinent by 1803—a corporate conquest that Dalrymple argues is the most extraordinary act of corporate aggrandizement in history. The narrative centers on the collapse of Mughal power after the death of Aurangzeb in 1707, the resulting “anarchy” of competing successor states—the Marathas, Hyderabad, Mysore under Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan, the Nawabs of Bengal—and the EIC’s systematic exploitation of these divisions to accumulate territory, revenue, and military power. The book is structured as narrative history: richly documented, populated with vivid individual characters on all sides, and explicitly comparative in its political argument about private corporate power.

Dalrymple draws on Persian and Urdu sources that the Anglophone historical tradition has largely ignored, giving the Indian side of the story a presence and complexity rarely found in accounts of the same period written primarily from British archival sources. Figures like Siraj ud-Daulah, Mir Jafar, the Marathas’ Nana Fadnavis, and Hyder Ali are rendered as complex political actors rather than as backdrop to British ambition. The battle of Plassey (1757)—the EIC’s decisive victory over the Nawab of Bengal—is narrated in detail, and Dalrymple makes clear that the British victory was partly military and partly the result of Mir Jafar’s betrayal, paid for by EIC bribes.

The book’s political argument is explicit and contemporary: the EIC was the world’s first joint-stock corporation to combine massive military power with commercial objectives, and the history of its conduct—corruption, opium trade, deliberate use of famine as a revenue strategy—raises direct questions about corporate accountability that Dalrymple applies to modern multinational corporations. The story of how a private company came to levy taxes from 200 million people, maintain a larger army than most European states, and imprison and execute those who resisted is a story about the relationship between commercial power and political power that has not become less relevant.

Critical Takeaways

  • Corporate power as historical subject: Dalrymple’s framing of the EIC as the world’s first multinational corporation that achieved state-like power—and as a cautionary tale for contemporary corporate accountability—is the book’s central contribution to public discourse.
  • Persian and Urdu sources: The use of non-anglophone sources gives the book an unusual perspectival breadth for a popular history of this period; it does not resolve the question of whose history this is, but it asks it more seriously than most.
  • Plassey and Bengal: The detailed account of the Bengal famine of 1770 (in which perhaps 10 million people died under EIC misgovernance) connects the company’s revenue extraction directly to human catastrophe in a way that earlier popular histories had softened.
  • Comparison with Bhyrappa’s AvaraNa: Reading Dalrymple alongside Bhyrappa’s engagement with the historiography of medieval Islamic rule in India reveals different aspects of the same broader question: what gets remembered, how, and why.
  • Tipu Sultan: The treatment of Tipu Sultan—as a complex political and military figure rather than either a villain (as British accounts rendered him) or a simple hero (as some nationalist accounts render him)—is among the most balanced in popular historical writing.

My Takeaways

  1. The central image—a private company with shareholders in London operating a sovereign state in South Asia—is more disturbing the more carefully you examine it. The EIC is not an early version of a modern corporation; it is a specific historical form of power that raises questions about corporate accountability that remain unresolved.
  2. The Plassey chapter—the Company’s first great conquest, achieved through bribery of the opposing general—permanently complicated the idea of military victory as straightforwardly decisive. The battlefield is one arena; the counting house is another.
  3. The Bengal famine material—10 million deaths under a regime of revenue extraction that continued regardless of crop failure—is among the most disturbing accounts of institutional indifference to human life I have encountered in narrative history.
  4. Dalrymple’s comparative conclusion—invoking modern corporations with private security forces, tax avoidance strategies, and political influence—felt not like an overreach but like an obvious inference from the historical record.

Footnotes