THE ANARCHY – THE RELENTLESS RISE OF THE EAST INDIA COMPANY; William Dalrymple; Bloomsbury; 2019; pp 522.
MELBOURNE: In childhood, I heard the words – company raj. I could not make out how a company could have a ‘raj’ (rule). How, for example, they became the colonial rulers of such vast and diverse territories? They had a postal system, coins, taxation, private army and traded as an international company in the British Colonial Empire. The East India Company (EIC) run by English merchants had all the trappings of a colonial power, reigned this region for 92 years (1765-1857).
William Dalrymple’s (WD) historical characters are the ones who chart this colonial endeavour disguised as traders exporting stuff and earning massive profits for its investors back in London. Much of them being members of the British Parliament. Incorporated by a royal charter on December 31, 1600, the EIC subsequently became the biggest trading company controlling half of the world trade.
The author, charts the step-by-step happenings from 1599 to 1857, when the EIC was removed from power by the British Parliament and the Crown took over its possessions in India. This made Queen Victoria the ruler of India, replacing the directors of the EIC. The rather unprecedented power shift ushered in the British Raj till 1947.
This hefty book’s 391 pages are nothing short of a thriller laced with imperial trappings, intrigue, misuse of corporate power, economic domination, violence and much more. WD’s massive factual tsunami, establishes the relationship between commercial and imperial power. Something, in today’s world, exists in different forms, is well known.
That the EIC, the ‘first global corporate power’, laid the foundation for today’s global multinationals or corporations, is a foregone conclusion. Only the modern variants of EIC do not need an army, thanks to new technologies that transcend the globe.
“Yet the East India Company – the first great multinational corporation, and the first to run amok – was the ultimate model and prototype for many of today’s joint stock corporations,” WD writes.
The subcontinent power sweep of the EIC has been detailed factually up to the time the Crown took power ushering in the British Raj.
“With the exception of a few months during the Great Uprising of 1857, for better or worse, India would remain in British hands for another 144 years, finally gaining independence only in August 1947,” the author says.
The important point WD discloses is how the EIC sustained the delicate balance that the Company was able to maintain with merchants and mercenaries, its allied nawabs and rajas, and above all, its tame bankers.
Their financial backers were the biggest firms of the period – the houses of Lala Kashmiri Mal, Ramchand-Gopalchand Shahu and Gopaldas-Monohardas – based in Patna and Benares, took care of the largest military remittances, taking charge of drawing bills of exchange in Bombay or Surat or Maysore, making large cash loans, all of which made possible the regular payment, maintenance, arming and provisioning of the Company’s troops.
In 1782 the EIC announced the house of Gopaldas as the government’s banker in place of the Jagat Seths.
Ultimately, it was the EIC, not the Marathas or the Sultans of Mysore, that the financiers across India decided to back.
The chapter ‘Racked by Famine’ needs mention. The Bengal famine, 1769 onwards killed an estimated 3 million people. The horror or near-genocide was reported in the London media and the company officials continued to send remittances to England. Despite all this the EIC went into financial crisis. Tragedy of sorts was emerging. Robert Clive (Governor of Bengal Presidency) accused of corruption, committed suicide on 22 November, 1774 at the age of forty-nine.
There is much more in this volume. The episodes of the Marathas, defeat of Tipu Sultan, Mughal decline, French involvement, Warren Hastings impeachment, the Rajput allies…
Keep reading and you realise, as the author says, “The East India Company remains today history’s most 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.
For as recent American adventures in Iraq have shown, our world is far from post-imperial, and quite probably never will be. Instead, Empire is transforming itself into forms of global power that use campaign contributions and commercial lobbying, multinational finance systems and global markets, corporate influence and the predictive data harvesting of the new surveillance-capitalism rather than – or sometimes alongside – overtly military conquest, occupation or direct economic domination to effect its ends.
Four Hundred and twenty-years after its founding, the story of the East India Company has never been so current”
William Dyrample’s interview by Neeraj Nanda 3, November 2019.
