Of course, 18th century historians knew about the Company. The corporate violence got forgotten in this mix somehow. And Indian nationalists bought that line but reversed it into a story of national oppression followed by liberation. This was a very live issue at the time, but the Victorians spun it as story of national glory and imperialism. There was continuous questioning in Parliament about how a commercial company run by merchants could control this vast empire and why it isn’t the Crown. There were plays in London where Clive was parodied as ‘Lord Vulture’ presiding over the Bengal Famine. That they at least had the excuse of faith, but that we had done it for profit.’ ‘That we had outdone the Spanish in brutality, for instance. But a lot of it read very much like a modern Some of it was because they didn’t like the new nabobs coming back to Britain with fortunes and buying up country houses and parliamentary seats. One of the biggest surprises in my research was the amount of resistance in the British press to what was going on. It was extremely well known in the 18th century that it was a company that was running India, and this was a cause of some scandal. Has the role of this private company, whose representatives often acted on their own, been downplayed or gotten too muddled up with that of the British government? Similarly, you suggest that when people talk of British rule, they forget that until the middle of the 19 century, it was run by the East India Company, a joint stock company.

But after the Battle of Plassey (1757), all they consolidated their hold over was a part of Bengal. One of the fictions many of us have come to believe is that the British ruled India for almost two centuries. In his first interview to an Indian newspaper after the publication of the book, he declares that it is all too often forgotten that the conquest of India was an act of corporate violence. In his familiar passionate manner, Dalrymple cuts through the stodge that pervades a lot of writing on history to serve up a book that has it all - the compulsive pull of a thriller, the erudition of a significant piece of non-fiction, and the loveliness of a piece of literature.

In what is easily his most ambitious and arguably his most engrossing work, the Scottish historian and writer makes a case that the empire was won not on the strength of military superiority, but as a result of the cunning of a corporate house that was helped along by amoral Indian bankers who financed its operations.

The Anarchy, a story of how a “dangerously unregulated” private joint stock company, housed in a nondescript London building, raised an enormous army and went on to ravage the Indian subcontinent. One of the first words to enter the English language from India was ‘loot’, writes William Dalrymple, setting the stage for

The anarchy india