Loot

On India and The East India Company

Unbekoming

Dec 05, 2023

In many ways the East India Company was a model of commercial efficiency: one hundred years into its history, it had only thirty-five permanent employees in its head office. Nevertheless, that skeleton staff executed a corporate coup unparalleled in history: the military conquest, subjugation and plunder of vast tracts of southern Asia. It almost certainly remains the supreme act of corporate violence in world history. – The Anarchy
In the last days of 1913, some half a year before the start of the First World War, writing in the major Vienna newspaper, "Freie Presse", Walter Rathenau wrote that "Europe (then meaning the world) is ruled by 200 men who all know each other and supplement their numbers from their own entourage". – The Struggle for World Power by George Knupffer

The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company

By William Dalrymple

Introduction

One of the very first Indian words to enter the English language was the Hindustani slang for plunder: loot. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, this word was rarely heard outside the plains of north India until the late eighteenth century, when it suddenly became a common term across Britain. To understand how and why it took root and flourished in so distant a landscape, one need only visit Powis Castle in the Welsh Marches.

The last hereditary Welsh prince, the memorably named Owain Gruffydd ap Gwenwynwyn, built Powis Castle as a craggy fort in the thirteenth century; the estate was his reward for abandoning Wales to the rule of the English monarchy. But its most spectacular treasures date from a much later period of English conquest and appropriation.

For Powis is simply awash with loot from India, room after room of imperial plunder, extracted by the East India Company (EIC) in the eighteenth century. There are more Mughal artefacts stacked in this private house in the Welsh countryside than are on display in any one place in India – even the National Museum in Delhi. The riches include hookahs of burnished gold inlaid with empurpled ebony; superbly inscribed Badakhshan spinels and jewelled daggers; gleaming rubies the colour of pigeon’s blood, and scatterings of lizard-green emeralds. There are tiger’s heads set with sapphires and yellow topaz; ornaments of jade and ivory; silken hangings embroidered with poppies and lotuses; statues of Hindu gods and coats of elephant armour. In pride of place stand two great war trophies taken after their owners had been defeated and killed: the palanquin Siraj ud-Daula3, the Nawab of Bengal, left behind when he fled the battlefield of Plassey, and the campaign tent of Tipu Sultan, the Tiger of Mysore.

Such is the dazzle of these treasures that, as a visitor last summer, I nearly missed the huge framed canvas that explains how all this loot came to be here. The picture hangs in the shadows over a doorway in a wooden chamber at the top of a dark, oak-panelled staircase. It is not a masterpiece, but it does repay close study. An effete Indian prince, wearing cloth of gold, sits high on his throne under a silken canopy. On his left stand scimitar- and spear-carrying officers from his own army; to his right, a group of powdered and periwigged Georgian gentlemen. The prince is eagerly thrusting a scroll into the hands of a slightly overweight Englishman in a red frock coat.

The painting shows a scene from August 1765, when the young Mughal emperor Shah Alam4, exiled from Delhi and defeated by East India Company troops, was forced into what we would now call an act of involuntary privatisation. The scroll is an order to dismiss his own Mughal revenue officials in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa and replace them with a set of English traders appointed by Robert Clive5 – the new governor of Bengal – and the directors of the Company, whom the document describes as ‘the high and mighty, the noblest of exalted nobles, the chief of illustrious warriors, our faithful servants and sincere well-wishers, worthy of our royal favours, the English Company’. The collecting of Mughal taxes was henceforth subcontracted to a powerful multinational corporation – whose revenue-collecting operations were protected by its own private army.

The Company had been authorised by its founding charter to ‘wage war’ and had been using violence to gain its ends since it boarded and captured a Portuguese vessel on its maiden voyage in 1602. Moreover, it had controlled small areas around its Indian settlements since the 1630s. Nevertheless, 1765 was really the moment that the East India Company ceased to be anything even distantly resembling a conventional trading corporation, dealing in silks and spices, and became something altogether much more unusual. Within a few months, 250 company clerks, backed by the military force of 20,000 locally recruited Indian soldiers, had become the effective rulers of the richest Mughal provinces. An international corporation was in the process of transforming itself into an aggressive colonial power.

We still talk about the British conquering India, but that phrase disguises a more sinister reality. It was not the British government that began seizing great chunks of India in the mid-eighteenth century, but a dangerously unregulated private company headquartered in one small office, five windows wide, in London, and managed in India by a violent, utterly ruthless and intermittently mentally unstable corporate predator – Clive. India’s transition to colonialism took place under a for-profit corporation, which existed entirely for the purpose of enriching its investors.

At the height of the Victorian period in the mid-nineteenth century there was a strong sense of embarrassment about the shady, brutal and mercantile way the British had founded the Raj. The Victorians thought the real stuff of history was the politics of the nation state. This, not the economics of corrupt corporations, they believed was the fundamental unit of study and the real driver of transformation in human affairs. Moreover, they liked to think of the empire as a mission civilisatrice: a benign national transfer of knowledge, railways and the arts of civilisation from West to East, and there was a calculated and deliberate amnesia about the corporate looting that opened British rule in India.

A second picture, this one commissioned from William Rothenstein to be painted onto the walls of the House of Commons, shows how successfully the official memory of this process was spun and subtly reworked by the Victorians. It can still be found in St Stephen’s Hall, the echoing reception area of the Westminster Parliament. The painting was part of a series of murals entitled The Building of Britain. It features what the Hanging Committee at the time regarded as the highlights and turning points of British history: King Alfred defeating the Danes in 877, the parliamentary union of England and Scotland in 1707, and so on.

The fresco in this series that deals with India shows another image of a Mughal prince sitting on a raised dais, under a canopy. Again, we are in a court setting, with bowing attendants on all sides and trumpets blowing, and again an Englishman is standing in front of the Mughal. But this time the balance of power is very different.

Sir Thomas Roe, the ambassador sent by James I to the Mughal court, is shown before the Emperor Jahangir in 1614 – at a time when the Mughal empire was still at its richest and most powerful. Jahangir inherited from his father Akbar one of the two wealthiest polities in the world, rivalled only by Ming China. His lands stretched through most of India, all of what is now Pakistan and Bangladesh, and most of Afghanistan. He ruled over five times the population commanded by the Ottomans – roughly 100 million people – and his subjects produced around a quarter of all global manufactures.

Jahangir’s father Akbar had flirted with a project to civilise India’s European immigrants, whom he described as ‘an assemblage of savages’, but later dropped the plan as unworkable. Jahangir, who had a taste for exotica and wild beasts, welcomed Sir Thomas Roe with the same enthusiasm he had shown for the arrival of the first turkey in India, and questioned Roe closely on the oddities of Europe. For the committee who planned the House of Commons paintings, this marked the beginning of British engagement with India: two nation states coming into direct contact for the first time. Yet, as the first chapter of this book shows, British relations with India actually began not with diplomacy and the meeting of royal envoys, but with a trade mission led by Captain William Hawkins, a bibulous Company sea dog who, on arrival in Agra, accepted a wife offered to him by the emperor and merrily brought her back to England. This was a version of history the House of Commons Hanging Committee chose to forget.

In many ways the East India Company was a model of commercial efficiency: one hundred years into its history, it had only thirty-five permanent employees in its head office. Nevertheless, that skeleton staff executed a corporate coup unparalleled in history: the military conquest, subjugation and plunder of vast tracts of southern Asia. It almost certainly remains the supreme act of corporate violence in world history.

Historians propose many reasons for the astonishing success of the Company: the fracturing of Mughal India into tiny, competing states; the military edge that Frederick the Great’s military innovations had given the European Companies; and particularly the innovations in European governance, taxation and banking that allowed the Company to raise vast sums of ready money at a moment’s notice. For behind the scarlet uniforms and the Palladian palaces, the tiger shoots and the polkas at Government House always lay the balance sheets of the Company’s accountants, with their ledgers laying out profit and loss, and the Company’s fluctuating share price on the London Stock Exchange.

Yet perhaps the most crucial factor of all was the support that the East India Company enjoyed from the British Parliament. The relationship between them grew steadily more symbiotic throughout the eighteenth century until eventually it turned into something we might today call a public–private partnership. Returned nabobs like Clive used their wealth to buy both MPs and parliamentary seats – the famous Rotten Boroughs. In turn, Parliament backed the Company with state power: the ships and soldiers that were needed when the French and British East India Companies trained their guns on each other.

For the Company always had two targets in its sights: one was the lands where its business was conducted; but the other was the country that gave it birth, as its lawyers and lobbyists and MP shareholders slowly and subtly worked to influence and subvert the legislation of Parliament in its favour. Indeed, the East India Company probably invented corporate lobbying. In 1693, less than a century after its foundation, the EIC was discovered for the first time to be using its own shares for buying parliamentarians, annually shelling out £1,200 a year to prominent MPs and ministers. The parliamentary investigation into this, the world’s first corporate lobbying scandal, found the EIC guilty of bribery and insider trading, and led to the impeachment of the Lord President of the Council, and the imprisonment of the Company’s Governor.

Although its total trading capital was permanently lent to the British state, when it suited, the East India Company made much of its legal separation from the government. It argued forcefully, and successfully, that the document signed by Shah Alam in 1765 – known as the Diwani – was the legal property of the Company, not the Crown, even though the government had spent an enormous sum on naval and military operations protecting the EIC’s Indian acquisitions. But the MPs who voted to uphold this legal distinction were not exactly neutral: nearly a quarter of them held Company stock, which would have plummeted in value had the Crown taken over. For the same reason, the need to protect the Company from foreign competition became a major aim of British foreign policy.

The transaction depicted in the painting was to have catastrophic consequences. As with all such corporations, then as now, the EIC was answerable only to its shareholders. With no stake in the just governance of the region, or its long-term well-being, the Company’s rule quickly turned into the straightforward pillage of Bengal, and the rapid transfer westwards of its wealth.

Before long the province, already devastated by war, was struck down by the famine of 1769, then further ruined by high taxation. Company tax collectors were guilty of what was then described as the ‘shaking of the pagoda tree’ – what today would be described as major human rights violations committed in the process of gathering taxes. Bengal’s wealth rapidly drained into Britain, while its prosperous weavers and artisans were coerced ‘like so many slaves’ by their new masters.

A good proportion of the loot of Bengal went directly into Clive’s pocket. He returned to Britain with a personal fortune, then valued at

£234,000, that made him the richest self-made man in Europe. After the Battle of Plassey in 1757 – a victory that owed as much to treachery, forged contracts, bankers and bribes as it did to military prowess – he transferred to the EIC treasury no less than £2.5 million6 seized from the defeated rulers of Bengal – unprecedented sums at the time. No great sophistication was required. The entire contents of the Bengal treasury were simply loaded into one hundred boats and floated down the Ganges from the Nawab of Bengal’s palace in Murshidabad to Fort William, the Company’s Calcutta headquarters. A portion of the proceeds was later spent rebuilding Powis.

The painting of Clive and Shah Alam at Powis is subtly deceptive: the painter, Benjamin West, had never been to India. Even at the time, a reviewer noted that the mosque in the background bore a suspiciously strong resemblance ‘to our venerable dome of St Paul’. In reality, there had been no grand public ceremony. The transfer took place privately, inside Clive’s tent, which had just been erected on the parade ground of the newly seized Mughal fort at Allahabad. As for Shah Alam’s silken throne, it was in fact Clive’s armchair, which for the occasion had been hoisted on to his dining-room table and covered with a chintz bedspread.

Later, the British dignified the document by calling it the Treaty of Allahabad, though Clive had dictated the terms and a terrified Shah Alam had simply waved them through. As the contemporary Mughal historian Ghulam Hussain Khan put it: ‘A business of such magnitude, and which at any other time would have required the sending of wise ambassadors and able negotiators, and much negotiation and contention with the ministers, was done and finished in less time than would usually have been taken up for the sale of a jack-ass, or a beast of burden, or a head of cattle.’³

To the West it shipped Chinese tea to Massachusetts, where its dumping in Boston harbour triggered the American War of Independence. Indeed, one of the principal fears of the American Patriots in the run-up to the war was that Parliament would unleash the East India Company in the Americas to loot there as it had done in India. In November 1773, the Patriot John Dickinson described EIC tea as ‘accursed Trash’, and compared the potential future regime of the East India Company in America to being ‘devoured by Rats’. This ‘almost bankrupt Company’, he said, having been occupied in wreaking ‘the most unparalleled Barbarities, Extortions and Monopolies’ in Bengal, had now ‘cast their Eyes on America, as a new Theatre, whereon to exercise their Talents of Rapine, Oppression and Cruelty’.

By 1803, when the EIC captured the Mughal capital of Delhi, and within it, the sightless monarch, Shah Alam, sitting blinded in his ruined palace, the Company had trained up a private security force of around 200,000 – twice the size of the British army – and marshalled more firepower than any nation state in Asia.

A mere handful of businessmen from a distant island on the rim of Europe now ruled dominions that stretched continuously across northern India from Delhi in the west to Assam in the east. Almost the entire east coast was in the Company’s hands, together with all the most strategic points on the west coast between Gujarat and Cape Comorin. In just over forty years they had made themselves masters of almost all the subcontinent, whose inhabitants numbered 50 to 60 million, succeeding an empire where even minor provincial nawabs and governors ruled over vast areas, larger in both size and population than the biggest countries of Europe.

The EIC was, as one of its directors admitted, ‘an empire within an empire’, with the power to make war or peace anywhere in the East. It had also by this stage created a vast and sophisticated administration and civil service, built much of London’s Docklands and come close to generating nearly half of Britain’s trade. No wonder that the EIC now referred to itself as ‘the grandest society of merchants in the Universe’.

Yet, like more recent mega-corporations, the EIC proved at once hugely powerful and oddly vulnerable to economic uncertainty. Only seven years after the granting of the Diwani, when the Company’s share price had doubled overnight after it acquired the wealth of the treasury of Bengal, the East India bubble burst after plunder and famine in Bengal led to massive shortfalls in expected land revenues. The EIC was left with debts of £1.5 million and a bill of £1 million7 in unpaid tax owed to the Crown. When knowledge of this became public, thirty banks collapsed like dominoes across Europe, bringing trade to a standstill.

In a scene that seems horribly familiar to us today, this corporation had to come clean and ask for a massive government bailout. On 15 July 1772, the directors of the East India Company applied to the Bank of England for a loan of £400,000. A fortnight later, they returned, asking for an additional £300,000. The bank raised only £200,0008. By August, the directors were whispering to the government that they would actually need an unprecedented sum of a further £1 million. The official report the following year, written by Edmund Burke, foresaw that the EIC’s financial problems could, potentially, ‘like a mill-stone, drag [the government] down into an unfathomable abyss … This cursed Company would, at last, like a viper, be the destruction of the country which fostered it at its bosom.’

But the East India Company really was too big to fail. So it was that the following year, in 1773, the world’s first aggressive multinational corporation was saved by one of history’s first mega- bailouts – the first example of a nation state extracting, as its price for saving a failing corporation, the right to regulate and severely rein it in.

This book does not aim to provide a complete history of the East India Company, still less an economic analysis of its business operations. Instead it is an attempt to answer the question of how a single business operation, based in one London office complex, managed to replace the mighty Mughal Empire as masters of the vast subcontinent between the years 1756 and 1803.

It tells the story of how the Company defeated its principal rivals – the nawabs of Bengal and Avadh, Tipu Sultan’s Mysore Sultanate and the great Maratha Confederacy – to take under its own wing the Emperor Shah Alam, a man whose fate it was to witness the entire story of the Company’s fifty-year-long assault on India and its rise from a humble trading company to a fully fledged imperial power. Indeed, the life of Shah Alam forms a spine of the narrative which follows.

It is now the established view that, contrary to the writings of earlier generations of historians, the eighteenth century was not a ‘Dark Age’ in India. The political decline of the Mughal imperium resulted, rather, in an economic resurgence in other parts of the subcontinent, and much recent academic research has been dedicated to deepening our understanding of that proposition.⁵ All this brilliant work on regional resurgence does not, however, alter the reality of the Anarchy, which undoubtedly did disrupt the Mughal heartlands, especially around Delhi and Agra, for most of the eighteenth century. As Fakir Khair ud-Din Illahabadi put it, ‘disorder and corruption no longer sought to hide themselves and the once peaceful realm of India became the abode of Anarchy (dâr al-amn-i Hindûstân dâr al-fitan gasht). In time, there was no real substance to the Mughal monarchy, it had faded to a mere name or shadow.’⁶

Given the reality of the Anarchy is something recorded not just by

a few disconsolate Mughal gentlemen like Fakir Khair ud-Din and Ghulam Hussain Khan, but by every single traveller in the period, I believe that the process of revisionism may have gone a little too far. From Law and Modave to Pollier and Franklin, almost all eyewitnesses of late eighteenth-century India remark, over and over again, on the endless bloodshed and chaos of the period, and the difficulty of travelling safely through much of the country without a heavily armed escort. Indeed, it was these eyewitnesses who first gave currency to the notion of a Great Anarchy.

The Company’s many wars and its looting of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, particularly between the 1750s and 1770s, hugely added to this disruption, and in regions very far from Delhi. This is the reason I have given this book its title. There is clearly a difficult balance to be struck between the fraught, chaotic and very violent military history of the period, and the long-term consolidation of new political, economic and social formations of the kind that Richard Barnett and my old Cambridge professor Chris Bayly did so much to illuminate. I am not sure anyone has yet worked out how these different levels of action and analysis fit together, but this book is an attempt to square that circle.

The Anarchy is based mainly on the Company’s own voluminous miles of records. The documents from its head office, and the despatches of its Indian operatives to the directors in Leadenhall Street, now fill the vaults of the British Library in London. The often fuller and more revealing records of the Company’s Indian headquarters in Government House and Fort William, Calcutta, can today be found in the National Archives of India (NAI) in New Delhi, and it is there that I have concentrated my research.

The eighteenth-century records in the NAI are, however, much more elusive than those of their well-catalogued nineteenth-century collections, and for the first weeks I struggled even to locate most of the indexes, something that was eventually cracked by the NAI’s brilliant and ever-patient Jaya Ravindran and Anumita Bannerjee, who between them scoured the back rooms and stores until they succeeded in finding them. The rewards were remarkable. Within weeks I was holding in my hands the original intelligence report from Port Lorient that led to the Company ordering the Governor, Roger Drake, to rebuild the walls of Calcutta, the casus belli that first provoked Siraj ud-Daula, as well as Clive’s initial despatch from the battlefield of Plassey.

These English-language Company records I have used alongside the excellent Persian-language histories produced by highly educated Mughal historians, noblemen, munishis and scribes throughout the eighteenth century. The best of these, the Seir Mutaqherin, or Review of Modern Times by the brilliant young Mughal historian Ghulam Hussain Khan, is by far the most perceptive Indian source for the period, and has been available in English since the 1790s. But many other equally revealing Persian- language histories of the time remain both untranslated and unpublished.

These I have used extensively with the assistance of my long-term collaborator Bruce Wannell, whose superb translations of more obscure sources such as the Ibrat Nama, or Book of Admonition of Fakir Khair ud-Din Illahabadi, or the Tarikh-i Muzaffari of Mohammad Ali Khan Ansari of Panipat, produced over many months while staying in his tent in the garden of my Mehrauli goat farm, have been transformative for this project, as has been his unrivalled knowledge of both eighteenth-century India and the wider Islamic world. I am particularly grateful to Bruce for the time he spent in the MAAPRI Research Institute in Tonk, Rajasthan, translating a previously unused biography of Shah Alam, the Shah Alam Nama of Munshi Munna Lal, and for his discussions in Pondicherry with Jean Deloche, which ultimately resulted in his exquisite renderings of several previously untranslated and largely unused eighteenth-century French sources, such as the memoirs of Gentil, Madec, Law and especially the wonderful Voyages of the Comte de Modave, an urbane friend and neighbour of Voltaire from Grenoble, who casts a sophisticated, sardonic and perceptive eye on the eighteenth-century scene, from the wide boulevards of Company Calcutta to the ruins of Shah Alam’s decaying capital in Delhi.

Over six years of work on the Company I have accumulated many debts. Firstly, my thanks are also due to Lily Tekseng for her months of slog, typing out the manuscripts I dug up in the Indian National Archives, and my sister-in-law Katy Rowan and Harpavan Manku, who performed a similar task in London, both battling successfully with the copperplate of the Company’s official records and the private correspondence of Clive, Hastings9, Cornwallis10 and Wellesley11. I am also thankful to Aliya Naqvi and Katherine Butler Schofield for their beautiful renderings of Shah Alam’s own verse.

Many friends read through successive drafts of this book and to them I am particularly grateful: Peter Marshall, Rajat Datta, Robert Travers, Najaf Haider, Lakshmi Subramanian, Jean-Marie Lafont, Nonica Datta, Sonal Singh, Vijay Pinch, Mahmood Farooqui, Yashashwini Chandra, Narayani Basu, Katherine Butler Schofield, Mala Singh, Rory Fraser, Sam Miller, Gianni Dubbini, Jeremy Parkinson, Riya Sarkar, Chiki Sarkar, Jayanta Sengupta, Adam Dalrymple and Nandini Mehta.

Many others have given invaluable assistance. In India, B. N. Goswamy, Ebba Koch, Momin Latif, John Fritz, George Michel, Shashi Tharoor, Chander Shekhar, Jagdish Mittal, Diana Rose Haobijam, Navtej Sarna, Tanya Kuruvilla, S. Gautam, Tanya Banon and Basharat Peer. Particular thanks are due to Lucy Davison of Banyan – by far the best travel agency in India, who ably organised logistics for research trips along the Carnatic coast, to Srirangapatnam, to Tonk, through the Deccan to Pune, and perhaps most memorably of all to Calcutta and Murshidabad during Durga Puja.

In Pakistan: Fakir Aijazuddin, Ali Sethi, Hussain and Aliya Naqvi and Abbas of the Punjab Archives who generously got me access to Persian and Urdu sources.

In the US: Muzaffar Alam, Maya Jasanoff, Ayesha Jalal, Ben Hopkins, Nile Green, Sanjay Subramanyam, Durba Ghosh, Elbrun Kimmelman and Navina Haidar.

In Britain: Nick Robbins, Saqib Baburi, Ursula Sims-Williams, Jon Wilson, Malini Roy, Jerry Losty, John Falconer, Andrew Topsfield, Linda Colley, David Cannadine, Susan Stronge, Amin Jaffer, Anita Anand, Ian Trueger, Robert Macfarlane, Michael Axworthy, David Gilmour, Rory Stewart, Charles Allen, John Keay, Tommy Wide, Monisha Rajesh, Aarathi Prasad, Farrukh Husain, Charles Grieg, Rosie Llewellyn-Jones, Richard Blurton, Anne Buddle, Sam Murphy, Henry Noltie, Robert Skelton, Francesca Galloway, Sam Miller, Shireen Vakil, Zareer Masani, Tirthankar Roy, Brigid Waddams, Barnaby and Rose Rogerson, Anthony and Sylvie Sattin, Hew, Jock and Rob Dalrymple and the late, and much missed, Chris Bayly whose Cambridge lectures more than thirty years ago first got me interested in the complexities of eighteenth-century India.

I have been lucky as ever to have as my agent the incomparable David Godwin, and my brilliant publishers at Bloomsbury: Alexandra Pringle, Trâm-Anh Doan, Lilidh Kendrick, Emma Bal, Richard Charkin, Yogesh Sharma, Meenakshi Singh, Faiza Khan, Ben Hyman and especially my editor for over thirty years, Mike Fishwick. I should also like to thank Vera Michalski at Buchet Chastel and in Italy the incomparable Roberto Calasso at Adelphi. My lovely family, Olivia, Ibby, Sam and Adam have kept me sane and happy during the long six years it took to bring this book into being. Olive in particular has been a rock, both emotionally and as guiding force behind this project, my first and best editor as well as my ever- patient, ever-generous, ever-loving partner in life. To them, and to my beloved parents, both of whom died during the writing of this book, I owe my greatest debt. My father in particular was convinced I would never finish this book and indeed he never lived to see the final full stop, dying the day after Christmas when I was still two chapters from its completion. But it was he who taught me to love history, as well as how to live life, and I dedicate this book to his memory.

William Dalrymple North Berwick–Chiswick–Mehrauli,

March 2013–June 2019

Stripping away the veneer: William Dalrymple has done a masterful job of recasting the period of British Empire in India and showing its true origins and impacts. It is a profound and riveting work, which dispelled any remaining positive notions I may have had of the legacy of the British and the East India Company in India.

The attention to detail, and the deep knowledge of Mughul culture reflect the author’s intimacy with his subject.

I went to private school in England and was fed all the vainglorious propaganda about the brilliance of the Empire and its protagonists, especially Clive. This book felt like closure on that and washed out any dregs of that brainwashing (every country uses history in education to brainwash its citizens).

I think the epilogue needs refreshing, as we have veered into a new politicised era, where Empire is being re-interpreted (e.g. by the PRC, the US, etc), and corporations are having to abide by new geopolitical dynamics.

We also have a more assertive India itself, whose actions and policies over the next decades will be fascinating to witness. The contrast with the period of decline in power told in this book will not be lost on the reader. - Amazon Review by James Carter

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Amazon Review by dmiguer - A State Disguised As Merchants: William Dalrymple tells how a single business operation replaced the Mughal empire to rule the Indian subcontinent. The East India Company was a first major multi-national corporation, and an early example of a joint stock enterprise. Most events occur between 1756-1803, around the time of the American and French revolutions. The story begins in 1599 with the charter of the Company, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and the lifetime of Shakespeare.

The Company was preceded by Walter Raleigh and Francis Drake and included veteran Carribean privateers, state sponsored pirates who attacked the Spanish armada for gold and silver. The first Company voyage brought back spice from Indonesia by robbing a Portuguese ship. Outdone by the Dutch in the spice trade, the Company began trade in India with the benefits of a British monopoly, license to raise an army and seize territory, all endorsed by the Crown.

At the time of the Company's expansion of power the Mughal Empire had been weakened by a series of invasions and internal conflicts. Increasing intolerance had pushed Maratha rebels under Shivaji to strike north from the Deccan plateau in the late 17th century. Sikhs struck south from the Punjab. Prince fought against prince. In 1739 the Persian warlord Nader Shah sacked Delhi, and made off with the spoils of an empire. The period is known as the Anarchy.

Construction of fortifications at a British port in Bengal provoked the local Nawab and Mughal army to destroy the trading post in 1756. Captured British were thrown into the so-called 'Black Hole of Calcutta' where a significant number died from trampling and suffocation. Robert Clive, a violent and ruthless soldier of fortune hired by the Company, would defeat and plunder the Mughals and oust the French from Bengal, returning home the richest man in Europe.

In 1764 the Company put down a Mughal rebellion and replaced the empire as tax collectors of the wealthiest lands on the subcontinent. The Company amassed a private army twice the size of Britain's. Draught, famine and Company hoarding caused a massive bailout in 1773 by the Crown. Tea shipped west triggered the American revolution, and opium shipped east resulted in war with China. At it's height the Company accounted for half of the world's trade.

Much is covered during forty years. Warren Hastings, Clive’s successor as governor of Bengal, attempted to reform the worst excesses of Company rule, and was put on trial by his rival countrymen. His successor would be Cornwallis, the general who surrendered the American colonies to Washington. Tipu Sultan, ‘Tiger of Mysore’, was sought as an ally by Napoleon, until he was foiled by Nelson at the Nile. Tipu was defeated by Wellington of future Waterloo fame.

Dalrymple doesn’t mince words about events that occurred, nor do eyewitnesses of the period. On British incursions before the battle of Plassey: ‘What honor is left us when we take orders from a handful of traders?’. On the handover of the Mughal empire after the battle of Buxar: ‘The entire transaction took less time than the sale of a jackass’. All was realized under withering fire of artillery, executed by Indians armed and trained by the Company.

Dalrymple's unifying narrative source is the Mughal court historian Ghulam Hussain Khan's epic 'Review of Modern Times'. He also scoured the India Office collection in London and National Archives in Delhi. As noted in the introduction 'English and Mughal records of the period are extensive'. Primarily a military account, his contribution is gathering and presenting it all in an entertaining and edifying manner. His talent for storytelling is clearly shown.

For a look at what corporate capitalism can be, this is a fascinating case. The Company thrived more than 200 years ago. Some things have changed, others have not. Territorial takeover is frowned upon, but economic conquest is far from over. Corporations, lobbyists and politicians can effectively do the same work. The will to profit, avoid regulation and taxes, is intrinsic. Dalrymple does not state this explicitly in the text, but the parallels are evident.

The East India Company (EIC) played a pivotal role in the early establishment of Singapore. In 1819, Sir Stamford Raffles, an agent of the EIC, established a trading post on the island of Singapore. Raffles, who was then the Lieutenant-Governor of Bencoolen (now Bengkulu in Indonesia), saw the strategic location of Singapore at the tip of the Malay Peninsula and its potential as a trading port.

Raffles negotiated a treaty with the local rulers, the Sultan of Johor and the Temenggong, to establish a British trading post on the island. This move was part of the broader strategy of the East India Company to counter Dutch influence in the region and to secure a key position on the Strait of Malacca, a major maritime route.

The establishment of Singapore under the auspices of the East India Company marked a significant moment in the history of the region. It quickly grew into an important commercial and military hub, attracting traders from various parts of Asia and beyond. The EIC's influence in Singapore lasted until the mid-19th century when the administration of the British colonies in Southeast Asia was transferred from the company to the British Crown. This change marked the end of the company's political and commercial control in the region, but its initial establishment of Singapore laid the foundations for the city's development into a major global port.

Yes, Singapore was strategically located on the maritime route from India to China and became a significant part of the opium trade in the 19th century. Its location at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, at the entrance to the Strait of Malacca, made it an ideal stopover and trading hub for ships traveling between India, Southeast Asia, and China.

The East India Company, which established and administered Singapore in its early years, was heavily involved in the opium trade. The company exported opium from India to China, where it was traded for Chinese goods like tea and silk, which were then highly demanded in Europe and America. The trade in opium was extremely lucrative, but it had devastating social and health impacts in China.

Singapore, under British control, became a crucial port in this trade network. It served as a transshipment point where opium would be stored and then re-exported to other parts of Asia, including China. The trade contributed significantly to Singapore's prosperity and growth during the 19th century, as the port city facilitated the movement of a wide range of goods, including opium.

The opium trade was a highly controversial aspect of British and European colonial activities in Asia. It led to significant social and health issues in China and was a central issue in the Opium Wars between Britain and China, which eventually led to the imposition of unequal treaties and significant territorial concessions by the Chinese to the British.

Siraj ud-Daula, Nawab of Bengal

1733–57

Grandson of Aliverdi Khan and the man whose attack on the East India Company factories in Kasimbazar and Calcutta began the Company’s conquest of Bengal. Not one of the many sources for the period – Persian, Bengali, Mughal, French, Dutch or English – has a good word to say about Siraj: according to Jean Law, who was his political ally, ‘His reputation was the worst imaginable.’ The most damning portrait of him, however, was painted by his own cousin, Ghulam Hussain Khan, who had been part of his staff and was profoundly shocked by the man he depicts as a serial bisexual rapist and psychopath: ‘His character was a mix of ignorance and profligacy,’ he wrote.

Aliverdi Khan, Nawab of Bengal

1671–1756

Aliverdi Khan, who was of mixed Arab and Afshar Turkman stock, came to power in 1740 in Bengal, the richest province of the Mughal Empire, in a military coup financed and masterminded by the immensely powerful Jagat Seth bankers. A cat-loving epicure who loved to fill his evenings with good food, books and stories, after defeating the Marathas he created in Murshidabad a strong and dazzling Shia court culture, and a stable political, economic and political centre which was a rare island of calm and prosperity amid the anarchy of Mughal decline.

Shah Alam

1728–1806

Handsome and talented Mughal prince whose life was dogged by defeat and bad luck but who showed an extraordinary determination through horrific trials. As a boy he had seen Nadir Shah ride into Delhi and loot it. He later escaped Imad ul-Mulk’s attempt to assassinate him and survived repeated battles with Clive. He fought the Company at Patna and Buxar, awarded the Diwani to Clive at Allahabad and defied Warren Hastings by his cross-country trek back to Delhi. There, with Mirza Najaf Khan, against all the odds he nearly succeeded in rebuilding the empire of his ancestors; only to see it vanish like a mirage after the premature death of that last great Mughal general. Finally, at his lowest point, the Emperor was assaulted and blinded by his psychotic former favourite, Ghulam Qadir. Despite these trials he never gave up, and only briefly – after the rape of his family and his blinding by the Rohillas – did he allow himself to give way to despair. In the most adverse circumstances imaginable, that of the Great Anarchy, he ruled over a court of high culture, and as well as writing fine verse himself he was a generous patron to poets, scholars and artists.

Robert Clive, 1st Baron Clive

1725–74

East India Company accountant who rose through his remarkable military talents to be Governor of Bengal. Thickset, laconic, but fiercely ambitious and unusually forceful, he proved to be a violent and ruthless but extremely capable leader of the Company and its military forces in India. He had a streetfighter’s eye for sizing up an opponent, a talent at seizing the opportunities presented by happenchance, a willingness to take great risks and a breathtaking, aggressive audacity. It was he who established the political and military supremacy of the East India Company in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, and laid the foundations for British rule in India.

£262.5 million today.

£157.5 million and £105 million today.

£400,000 = £42 million; £300,000 = £31.5 million; £200,000 = £21 million today.

Warren Hastings

1732–1818

Scholar and linguist who was the first Governor of the Presidency of Fort William, the head of the Supreme Council of Bengal and the de facto first Governor General of India from 1773 to 1785. Plain-living, scholarly, diligent and austerely workaholic, he was a noted Indophile who in his youth fought hard against the looting of Bengal by his colleagues. However his feud with Philip Francis led to him being accused of corruption and he was impeached by Parliament. After a long and very public trial he was finally acquitted in 1795.

Philip Francis

1740–1818

Irish-born politician and scheming polemicist, thought to be the author of The Letters of Junius, and the chief opponent and antagonist of Warren Hastings. Wrongly convinced that Hastings was the source of all corruption in Bengal, and ambitious to replace him as Governor General, he pursued Hastings from 1774 until his death. Having failed to kill Hastings in a duel, and instead receiving a pistol ball in his own ribs, he returned to London where his accusations eventually led to the impeachment of both Hastings and his Chief Justice, Elijah Impey. Both were ultimately acquitted.

Charles Cornwallis, 1st Marquess Cornwallis

1738–1805

Having surrendered British forces in North America to a combined American and French force at the Siege of Yorktown in 1781, Cornwallis was recruited as Governor General of India by the East India Company to stop the same happening there. A surprisingly energetic administrator, he introduced the Permanent Settlement, which increased Company land revenues in Bengal, and defeated Tipu Sultan in the 1782 Third Anglo-Mysore War.

Richard Colley Wellesley, 1st Marquess Wellesley

1760–1842

Governor General of India who conquered more of India than Napoleon did of Europe. Despising the mercantile spirit of the East India Company, and answering instead to the dictates of his Francophobe friend Dundas, President of the Board of Trade, he used the East India Company’s armies and resources successfully to wage the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War, which ended with the killing of Tipu Sultan and the destruction of his capital in 1799, then the Second Anglo-Maratha War, which led to the defeat of the armies of both Scindia and Holkar in 1803. By this time he had expelled the last French units from India and given the East India Company control of most of the subcontinent south of the Punjab.

The BarefootHealer

Dec 5, 2023

It's an oruboric problem- if history is written by the winners, and we are doomed to repeat it unless we learn from it, yet can we "learn" from biased information?🤔😐🤦‍♀️

Nice piece and while I was familiar with sociopathic Clive and his ilk amongst the EIC, this looks to be a very good book.🙏😊

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1 reply by Unbekoming

Dan...

This story nicely shows that the history we are taught in schools is not the history we are experiencing live. We have here a saga of a business enterprise that spans over multiple generations. It has certain objectives, follows certain rules, does things, makes arrangements, advances and retreats, like any business. The difference is that this one was created to last across centuries. The founders were deliberately forming a lasting impact, and they knew that their company would live longer than themselves.

Think about it. What level of self-determination you need to sacrifice your temporary benefits (like being an employee) and to pursue a goal the achievement of which you would never witness? This is the inner power of the founders. The positive generation factor, the energy behind their actions. They didn’t go wide, building hundreds of franchise establishments, scattering their power. They must have had a vision which is almost extinct these days.

Now compare it with your own business, a family-run small thing or a corporation listed worldwide. How far into the future your creative power reaches? How do you measure the value of this business? You have a company merely to survive and be (self)employed (with false security), or you have something to offer others that will live long after you are gone?

If you draft business plans, how far do they reach? 5 years? 10 years? Or 200 years? Do you ever assess and reassess what you do? Have you ever tried even primitive self-checks like SWOT? Do you learn from these analyses?

The phenomena like the EIC are here to show us what we rarely think about. It’s not about money. The ruling caste know it and live it. No wonder they are THE leaders. And they are certain of it to the degree that they can openly say: “…when we are successful… and we will be…”

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