Name: The Anarchy
ISBN: 9781526618504

The Anarchy

author of Return of a King, the story of how the East India Company took over large swaths of Asia, and the devastating results of the corporation running a country. In August 1765, the East India Company defeated the young Mughal emperor and set up, in his place, a government run by English traders who collected taxes through means of a private army. The creation of this new government marked the moment that the East India Company ceased to be a conventional company and became something much more unusual: an international corporation transformed into an aggressive colonial power. Over the course of the next 47 years, the company's reach grew until almost all of India south of Delhi was effectively ruled from a boardroom in the city of London. The Anarchy tells one of history's most remarkable stories: how the Mughal Empire-which dominated world trade and manufacturing and possessed almost unlimited resources-fell apart and was replaced by a multinational corporation based thousands of miles overseas, and answerable to shareholders, most of whom had never even seen India and no idea about the country whose wealth was providing their dividends. Using previously untapped sources, Dalrymple tells the story of the East India Company as it has never been told before and provides a portrait of the devastating results from the abuse of corporate power.

What Hacker News says

chimprichApr 2026

I enjoyed "The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company" by Dalrymple, which has a specific focus, but conveys a fascinating history of British involvement with India.

thread

oblioOct 2024

India for sure wasn't conquered that way. Yes, there was a lot of "divide et impera" going on, but just one simple example, the population of Bengal was about 40 million in 1800 while that of the UK was only around 10 million.

Britain didn't actually "overpower" India as much as gain traction by presenting themselves as a less bad alternative than some of the existing ones, for several major regions they conquered. They were even financed by major Bengali bankers for their conquest.

India was possibly the big outlier in this regard, ergo the whole "crown jewel of the empire" angle.

Read this: https://a.co/d/7r25CnA - The Anarchy by William Dalrymple.

thread

dartharvaSep 2024

Dalrymple has a uniquely addictive style of writing that very few history writers do. I can't recall any other nonfiction book becoming such a page-turner for me as his "Anarchy" did. Terrific writer.

thread

veekayjiMar 2024

Bengali cuisine today is a living testament to these times. We have dishes that use jute leaves (a waste product from the jute being produced), tree barks, mango/jackfruit seeds, even just water leftover from cooking rice (people would beg at the doors of richer houses for the rice water). We have separate dishes for ripe/unripe/overripe fruits and vegetables. Nothing could be wasted. My friends would joke in school that “God you bengalis eat everything,” but there is a grim history behind it. — source, am bengali, grew up listening to grandparents’ stories.

A number of reasons but primarily British Colonia policy.

When the Japanese invaded Burma in 1942 there was a huge influx of refugees into Bengal, approximately 500,000 people which strained the local economy. Additionally the British Raj government had laws which forced local suppliers of goods such as food and textiles to sell to the military at a fixed low price but no price controls for the civilian market so any goods making it to the civilian market were already hugely inflated in price.

What really kicked off the famine that killed over 3 million people though was the British decision to enact a scorched earth policy in bengal in anticipation of a Japanese invasion, burning crops in the fields and destroying stockpiled food supplies.

Several members of the British government in India did in fact plead to Churchills cabinet during this period for relief shipments of food to stave off the growing famine from 1942-1943 including Viceroy Linlithgow, Secretary of State for India Leo Amery, supreme commander of Southeast Asia Admiral Louis Mountbatten, Commander in-Chief of British forces in India Claude Auchinleck, and Viceroy Archibald Wavell (Linlithgow’s replacement), but all of them were rejected. Churchill’s cabinet also refused offers of relief shipments from several other nations leading to speculation the the famine was deliberately engineered by Churchill and his government as a punitive response to the Quit India movement which is likely true.

I should also add that when asked about it Churchill apparently laughed and said the Indians deserved it for ‘breeding like rabbits’.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2019/...

aside from the policies of colonial regime mentioned above ,

there was also wartime money printing by colonial regime to finance the war effort, which I'm pretty sure you all know does what to food prices....

______

Capitalist British colonialism killed more people than even the highest estimates for all of communism... India alone... Over 40 years.

TL;DR Best guess, India had about 165 million excess mortalities from 1880-1920.

"It is widely recognized that famine became more regular and deadly under British colonialism than in the Mughal period (Davis, 2002; Tharoor, 2017). There is evidence of a particularly severe mortality crisis in the late 19th century. Demographers have used India’s censuses to reconstruct life expectancy and the crude death rate between 1881 and 1920 (Dyson, 2018, p. 126, p. 279-280). Table 3 reports this evidence. As Allen has suggested that India’s welfare standards in the 16th century were similar to Western Europe’s, for comparison we also include average figures for England in the 16th- and 17th-century (data from Wrigley & Schofield, 1981). Both the English and Indian figures are the results of modern demographic reconstructions, so changes in the mortality rate are not affected by changes in the rate of registration. We see that in the 1870s India’s crude mortality rate had already risen considerably higher than early modern England. The situation deteriorated thereafter, with mortality rising by 19%, and life expectancy plummeting to 22 years. If we estimate excess mortality from 1891 to 1920, with the average death rate of the 1880s as normal mortality, we find some 50 million people lost their lives under the aegis of British capitalism (see Appendix V for a full discussion).16 But this estimate must be considered conservative. India’s 1880s death rate was already very high by international standards. If we measure excess mortality over England’s 16th- and 17th-century average death rate, we find 165 million excess deaths in India between 1880 and 1920 (Appendix V). This figure is larger than the combined number of deaths from both World Wars, including the Nazi holocaust."

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X2...

Basically read up on the east India trading company, a capitalist corporation. They kept putting taxes up even during the numerous famines that happened. It lead to forced labour being used to attempt to keep up with the ever increasing taxation on the land, once taxes failed the company would seize your land. You should pick up The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company by William Dalrymple. Really good overview.

They also destroyed the cotton industry of India so less competition for uk based cotton industry. That’s how Manchester cotton boomed.

It was all done for maximum profit for the shareholders by a corporation with state backing to commit crimes against humanity.

This is different as the corporation has the power to do whatever it wants, which non capitalist colonialism are you referring to?

I’m not arguing they do exist today although the social club they set up in London does and the wealth generated is still held by a small number of British people never mind all the cultural artefacts stolen during company rule now held in museums or the millions of people starved to death still have impacts to name a few things.

I’m just stating that these early international corporations did operate in a capitalist way which lead to more deaths than any other event I’m aware of in such a short time.

100 million in 40 years for profit.

Source - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X2...

Firms compete by interacting with each other in the market.

Getting cheaper workers and resources makes for higher profits so corporations constantly look for savings to be made in this way.

Hope that helps, I’ve got some book recommendations on how corps operate if you want them?

Also see this documentary on the offshore wealth hidden in British colonies [The Spider’s Web: Britain’s Second Empire](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=np_ylvc8Zj8&vl=en)

thread

dfmooreqqqFeb 2023

A bit off topic, but William Dalrymple's book "The Anarchy" does an excellent job tracking the development of the East India Company from "the king gives you a right to establish trade with India" to the "the purpose of [all of India] is to... increase the wealth of the [EIC shareholders]."

thread

sklarghOct 2022

Encourage persons interested in these letters to read The Anarchy by William Dalrymple. Summarizes establishment of East India Co. and subsequent financial outcomes and violence.

thread