THE ANARCHY: THE EAST INDIA COMPANY, CORPORATE VIOLENCE, AND THE PILLAGE OF AN EMPIRE - WILLIAM DALRYMPLE

A beast of a book that I noticed a few months ago in a bookstore and felt like I needed to tackle. Honestly, I should have read this thing years ago (tho, it came out in 2019, so I’m speaking metaphorically), before I lived in Kolkata, where much of the action of this book takes place. This 500+ page monster tells the tale of how Britain conquered India, or, more specifically and interestingly, how the East India Company, which was a one of the world’s first joint-stock corporations, a type of entity invented in the 16th century, came to dominate the entire subcontinent, not to rule in the traditional, empiric sense, but rather as a business venture to extract money for shareholders. The book is almost all rise, it basically ends in 1803 when the EIC has eliminated all other major contenders in what will become India, we get a half-chapter of explanation w/r/t the revolutions to unseat them in the 19th century and then the dissolvement of the EIC into British colonial rule. Which is fine, the book is already so dense and long that another half century of history would have been too much. If anything, more about Mughal India before the EIC, since this stuff isn’t taught in American schools, would have been helpful for more context. Dalrymple zeros in on the ways in which the EIC was a new sort of entity in the world. As I said, the EIC was separate from the government proper of England. The idea of holding territory not to grow your empire and add to your glory, in the abstract sense, but to make as much money as possible for your stockholders (not even your country writ-large) was a new idea, and one that persisted through classic colonialism, which India later became, and lives on now through neo-colonialism. I’m writing this in Africa where you can see foreign companies extracting without returning anything real of value everywhere you look, a set-up pioneered by the EIC. It’s amazing to see the ways that the EIC plays the various leaders and factions of India against one another, time and time again. It was fascinating to read about the way these developments were perceived in Britain. The EIC was the subject of the first corporate bribery scandal, and the first major parliamentary hearings w/r/t a corporation. There were plays satirizing their brutality and greed and concern in the American colonies that they’d be treated like the Indians. It was interesting to chew on the idea that the British, unlike in the USA, didn’t really stay and intermarry in large numbers in India. Young men would go there to seek their fortune then return to England to buy political influence and live out their lives in comfort. I can’t help but consider the ways this must have added to their brutality. Without having women and children and family that you care about around, or even a sense that where you are is a place you care about and are invested in beyond extraction, you’re free to operate in a way that Indian leaders were not. Likewise, it was always extra interesting to hear about the larger world-political implications of the English presence in India, like Napoleon’s attempts to take his army there or the ways in which the 7 Years’ War connects Canada to India. It’s also a great reminder of how brutal and awful colonialism was, how much raw money and life was stolen from the subcontinent and how we live with this terrible theft to this day. Finally, it was somewhat disappointing, but perhaps to be expected, given a writer with the last name Dalrymple, to see him try to both spit hairs and not really investigate the idea of a “good colonialist”. The author bemoans the fact that Warren Hastings is almost impeached for Company rule in India but the much worse Clive is not. He goes out of his way to tell us how much Hastings loved India and spoke the languages and knew the people and whatnot without, really, to my mind, wrestling with the idea that this might have, in fact, made things worse for the people of India. Perhaps made the brutality of the robbery going on more obscure. Probably a moral question that deserves its own book but the idea of a Colonialists who “love” India versus the openly racist and contemptuous ones pops up a few times and could have used more ink. Anyway, as well fall deeper and deeper into corporate rule in the present, especially if they ever achieve their dreams of expanding into space, it would behoove us to look back at where this nightmare began. 1774 Sepoys.