This is an account of a very turbulent period of Indian history. Written by William Dalrymple, and published in 2019, it was read, in my audio-version, by Sid Sagar.

I really like Dalrymple's work; he meticulously burrows for varied and interesting sources, and he is an excellent communicator, who brings boatloads of atmosphere to the material he presents. 

Which was a good thing in this case, as I'm now aware that history, like biography, does not really work in audio format... You can't keep checking back to remind yourself who's who; you can't always tell where the author's voice ends and a quoted source begins; and whereas you just have to glance at a footnote to see the modern equivalents of sums of money, in an audio-version, they have to be tediously read out.

Nevertheless, it was an informative listen.

The subtitle is The Relentless Rise of the East India Company (EIC), which is the inglorious entity that we follow through these pages. Contrary to the way we often carelessly talk, India was not initially subjugated by the British crown but by a private company. In Dalrymple's words, this was "the supreme act of corporate violence in world history".

And, of course, the story in many ways has a very modern ring. Commercial rapacity, which drives corporate lobbying, which inextricably ties governments to big companies, which then become "too big to fail" and need bail-out packages from the public purse... This is not a concatenation of events that is entirely strange to our ears. In the Epilogue, Dalrymple writes: "The East India Company remains today history’s most ominous warning about the potential for the abuse of corporate power."



The Qutub Minar, Delhi, as we saw it in 2011. On 1 September 1803, a major earthquake damaged the upper part of the tower (which dates back to the early 13th century). Just two weeks later, General Gerard Lake captured Delhi during the Second Anglo-Maratha War (between the EIC and the Maratha Empire)

The EIC was founded in 1599. At that point, England was small and poor; India's population was a fifth of the world's total, and the Mughal Emperor was the richest monarch in the world.

By the time the EIC conquered Delhi, it controlled a private army that was twice the size of Britain's. It not only waged war, but collected taxes and doled out justice.

And, as is the way of these things, the decline in the fortunes of the Mughals, which made possible the rise of the EIC, was helped along by various local groups who stood to gain from helping the interlopers. "The extraordinary audacity of the British," Dalrymple says in an interview, "was to borrow Indian money, train Indian soldiers, and take on other Indian states. But this is exactly what they did... If only the Triple Alliance created by Nana Phadnavis between Hyderabad, the Marathas and Tipu Sultan had held together -- had these three pushed at the same time, there was absolutely no question that the Company would have been defeated."

But they didn't.







The account is hard to listen to, despite the interest of the sources and the beauty of many of the descriptions. We hear of a massive amount of cruelty, at the hands of pretty much everyone. Torture, rape, and disfigurement; sickness, famine, and battle gore; ruthless greed and sickening complacency -- these human sins and miseries run like so many bright red threads through the narrative.

But it is indubitably a compelling tale.

If The Anarchy is a good story, is it also a good history?

Well, many history scholars think it is. For John West, it's "a very important book... essential reading". Ellen Frost rates Dalrymple's descriptions, and his empathetic treatment of the Mughal rulers. Maya Jasanoff argues: "[This story] needs to be read to beat back the wilfully ignorant imperial nostalgia gaining ground in Britain and the poisonously distorted histories trafficked by Hindu nationalists in India." Thomas Gidney regrets that the book's focus on the EIC distracts attention from the other South Asian powers that were rising to fill the vacuum the Mughal decline was creating, but still sees it as "another fine addition to Dalrymple's histories of the rise of British rule in India".





But there are a couple of significant dissenters.

Jeremy Black is definitely not a fan, aiming some snarky sniping at the "selling machine" of the world of publishing, and faulting the author for insufficient "contextualization". Dalrymple, Black says, does not provide enough context on the "delegated" form that 18th-century imperial activity generally took; or on the "established scholarly debate" that takes different views on the era that followed the death of Mughal emperor Aurangzeb in 1707 (chaos, or just a new configuration of powers, one of them the EIC?); or on the other forms of violence afoot in 18th-century Asia (the EIC, he argues, "was less destructive than the Manchu conquest of Xinjiang in the 1750s, or, indeed, the Afghan destruction of Safavid rule in Persia in the early 1720s"); or on the pre-EIC conditions in Bengal, which predisposed so many local interests to ally with the British. Maybe... You can always ask for more context, and books can't be endless...

I found Priya Satia's critique particularly interesting. She feels Dalrymple's focus on the EIC stops him "from grappling fully with the realities of colonialism", and she may have a point.

She identifies a couple of areas of apparent contradiction. Was the EIC's progress actually fast or quite slow? And like Black, she wonders how anarchic the post-Aurangzeb era actually was. But here she adds an interesting bit of context: "Why is disunity among the Marathas more of a historical failure than, say, Jacobite rebellion in England? The key difference between the two subcontinental stories is perhaps simply that groups of armed traders were not poised at Europe's coasts to exploit tectonic shifts there, because Europe offered little seduction in the way of riches..."

In places, I feel she is a little unfair. Dalrymple's account didn't come across to me as deterministic. There are many points at which things could have turned out differently.

This comment, too, is a little unjust, I think: "In a narrative headed to an endpoint of British dominance, the moral flaws of the British come across as having served historic purpose, while Indian flaws appear fatal... In a narrative in which great men determine outcomes, and the outcome is British dominance, Indian rulers can only have been wrong in different ways." I don't think Dalrymple is at all saying this. He's pointing to the flaws on both sides that ultimately led to the tragedy of the British take-over.

And here again: "Dalrymple's preoccupation with the reputations [of Clive and Hastings] follows in a long line of attempts at rehabilitation by British historians." I really didn't get the impression he was trying to rehabilitate these figures...

But this bit is right, I think: "However different [Hastings] and Clive were in deeds and temperament, surely what is most germane is their shared presumption that the British should rule India."

And this gets to the heart of the problem, I think.







Dalrymple argues that there is "no question" that the role of the EIC has been downplayed or too closely tied to that of the British government. In support of this view he cites British (cultural and parliamentary) resistance to the activities of the EIC: "This [mood of criticism] was a very live issue at the time, but the Victorians spun it as a story of national glory and imperialism. And Indian nationalists bought that line but reversed it into a story of national oppression followed by liberation. The corporate violence got forgotten in this mix somehow."

But, aside from the degree to which contemporary criticism was driven by resentment of those who had returned from India obscenely rich, it is also true that quite powerful strands of critical opposition might be discernible within the political and social establishment -- and yet ultimately come to nothing. Defying them all -- then as now -- is an entrenched power-seeking, rent-seeking impetus that never questions its own sense of right or entitlement, and easily steam-rollers all dissent. This is the irresistible force that still runs amok in the shape of neo-imperialism.

That being the case, I wonder whether Dalrymple is overestimating the distinction between the country and the company.

Here's Satia on the role of the key British figures involved: "An understanding of history as the work of great men shaped the actions of many figures under scrutiny here... To narrate it as the work of actual great men is to miss this larger cultural reality... Apart from a concluding nod at the way commerce and colonization walk in 'lock-step,' the book’s central problematic -- how a 'single London corporation' conquered the magnificently strong Mughal Empire -- is premised on the distinction between the Company and the rest of Britain. But the outlook of the great men that Dalrymple casts as the drivers of events shows that something more than corporate greed was at play; certain national or regional cultural traits and values fueled the corporate adventure."

Similarly, on the role of the EIC: "[Dalrymple underestimates] the motivating power of collective cultural commitment to empire... The Company was not a rogue entity, then, but represented the interests and cultural outlook of the British national elite... It was never 'just' a company but a hybrid entity presuming political power... Its men emerged from a particular social and cultural milieu and acted on the authority of the British state...

"By scapegoating the Company, Dalrymple corners himself into arguing that the end of Company rule in 1858 was some sort of fix for whatever was wrong with colonialism... The reality is that racism, exploitation, violence, and extraction were not merely corporate liabilities but continued to mark the history of colonialism...

"Dalrymple shows us the devastating impact of British colonialism in India, the massive scale of death and impoverishment, but absolves all but a few bad men of responsibility, as if empire was the unintended consequence of corporate greed rather than the very presumption guiding Company activities."

Whatever the emphases of the story, it's a debate that's not going to go away, especially as events in Afghanistan are currently offering a bleak testimony -- yet again -- to the ongoing baleful impacts of colonialism.