With The Anarchy, Dalrymple has produced an invaluable trilogy dealing with the history of India under the Company, reconstructing not only events in their larger sense but also the intimate lives of British officials and the aristocracy they socialised with in the course of their duties.Īkshaya Tritiya 2023: History and interesting facts of the occasion 'Eradicating Fascist Symbols': Spain reburying fascist Falange leader José Antonio Primo de RiveraĪlthough he is relying on another author (writing on Shakespeare) it shows that his preference, while being true to key facts, is partly colourful invention, but it is so vividly drawn that we actually visualise history enacted. The Last Mughal, The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857 (2006) dealt with the Mutiny of 1857 and the life of Bahadur Shah Zafar, for which Dalrymple was able to access records in Rangoon where the last Mughal Emperor was confined as a prisoner until his death.

His new book The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence and the Pillage of an Empire deals primarily with the East India Company, its history and doings in India, concluding with its final triumph when it defeated the Marathas and directly or indirectly controlled all of India under Richard Wellesley.ĭalrymple began as a travel writer but moved to Indian history with White Mughals (2002), primarily taken up with inter-ethnic romances between British officers and Indian women.

In his most ambitious and riveting book to date, William Dalrymple tells the story of the East India Company as it has never been told before, unfolding a timely cautionary tale of the first global corporate power.Any new book by William Dalrymple going into Indian history in the past few centuries is nothing less than a treat - so well-written, vivid and engaging is his writing. 0'The Anarchy' tells the remarkable story of how one of the world's most magnificent empires disintegrated and came to be replaced by a dangerously unregulated private company, based thousands of miles overseas and answerable only to its shareholders. The Company's reach stretched relentlessly until almost all of India south of the Himalayas was effectively ruled from a boardroom in London.

In less than half a century it had trained up a private security force of around 260,000 men - twice the size of the British army - and had subdued an entire subcontinent, conquering first Bengal and finally, in 1803, the Mughal capital of Delhi itself. In August 1765 the East India Company defeated and captured the young Mughal emperor and forced him to set up in his richest provinces a new government run by English traders who collected taxes through means of a vast and ruthless private army.0The creation of this new government marked the moment that the East India Company ceased to be a conventional international trading corporation, dealing in silks and spices, and became something much more unusual: an aggressive colonial power in the guise of a multinational business.

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