The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire

by William Dalrymple

  In a scene that seems horribly familiar to us today, this corporation had to come clean and ask for a massive government bailout. On 15 July 1772, the directors of the East India Company applied to the Bank of England for a loan of £400,000. A fortnight later, they returned, asking for an additional £300,000. The bank raised only £200,000.** By August, the directors were whispering to the government that they would actually need an unprecedented sum of a further £1 million. The official report the following year, written by Edmund Burke, foresaw that the EIC’s financial problems could, potentially, ‘like a mill-stone, drag [the government] down into an unfathomable abyss … This cursed Company would, at last, like a viper, be the destruction of the country which fostered it at its bosom.’

  But the East India Company really was too big to fail. So it was that the following year, in 1773, the world’s first aggressive multinational corporation was saved by one of history’s first mega-bailouts – the first example of a nation state extracting, as its price for saving a failing corporation, the right to regulate and severely rein it in.

  This book does not aim to provide a complete history of the East India Company, still less an economic analysis of its business operations. Instead it is an attempt to answer the question of how a single business operation, based in one London office complex, managed to replace the mighty Mughal Empire as masters of the vast subcontinent between the years 1756 and 1803.

  It tells the story of how the Company defeated its principal rivals – the nawabs of Bengal and Avadh, Tipu Sultan’s Mysore Sultanate and the great Maratha Confederacy – to take under its own wing the Emperor Shah Alam, a man whose fate it was to witness the entire story of the Company’s fifty-year-long assault on India and its rise from a humble trading company to a fully fledged imperial power. Indeed, the life of Shah Alam forms a spine of the narrative which follows.

  It is now the established view that, contrary to the writings of earlier generations of historians, the eighteenth century was not a ‘Dark Age’ in India. The political decline of the Mughal imperium resulted, rather, in an economic resurgence in other parts of the subcontinent, and much recent academic research has been dedicated to deepening our understanding of that proposition.5 All this brilliant work on regional resurgence does not, however, alter the reality of the Anarchy, which undoubtedly did disrupt the Mughal heartlands, especially around Delhi and Agra, for most of the eighteenth century. As Fakir Khair ud-Din Illahabadi put it, ‘disorder and corruption no longer sought to hide themselves and the once peaceful realm of India became the abode of Anarchy (dâr al-amn-i Hindûstân dâr al-fitan gasht). In time, there was no real substance to the Mughal monarchy, it had faded to a mere name or shadow.’6

  Given the reality of the Anarchy is something recorded not just by a few disconsolate Mughal gentlemen like Fakir Khair ud-Din and Ghulam Hussain Khan, but by every single traveller in the period, I believe that the process of revisionism may have gone a little too far. From Law and Modave to Pollier and Franklin, almost all eyewitnesses of late eighteenth-century India remark, over and over again, on the endless bloodshed and chaos of the period, and the difficulty of travelling safely through much of the country without a heavily armed escort. Indeed, it was these eyewitnesses who first gave currency to the notion of a Great Anarchy.

  The Company’s many wars and its looting of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, particularly between the 1750s and 1770s, hugely added to this disruption, and in regions very far from Delhi. This is the reason I have given this book its title. There is clearly a difficult balance to be struck between the fraught, chaotic and very violent military history of the period, and the long-term consolidation of new political, economic and social formations of the kind that Richard Barnett and my old Cambridge professor Chris Bayly did so much to illuminate. I am not sure anyone has yet worked out how these different levels of action and analysis fit together, but this book is an attempt to square that circle.

  The Anarchy is based mainly on the Company’s own voluminous miles of records. The documents from its head office, and the despatches of its Indian operatives to the directors in Leadenhall Street, now fill the vaults of the British Library in London. The often fuller and more revealing records of the Company’s Indian headquarters in Government House and Fort William, Calcutta, can today be found in the National Archives of India (NAI) in New Delhi, and it is there that I have concentrated my research.

  The eighteenth-century records in the NAI are, however, much more elusive than those of their well-catalogued nineteenth-century collections, and for the first weeks I struggled even to locate most of the indexes, something that was eventually cracked by the NAI’s brilliant and ever-patient Jaya Ravindran and Anumita Bannerjee, who between them scoured the back rooms and stores until they succeeded in finding them. The rewards were remarkable. Within weeks I was holding in my hands the original intelligence report from Port Lorient that led to the Company ordering the Governor, Roger Drake, to rebuild the walls of Calcutta, the casus belli that first provoked Siraj ud-Daula, as well as Clive’s initial despatch from the battlefield of Plassey.

  These English-language Company records I have used alongside the excellent Persian-language histories produced by highly educated Mughal historians, noblemen, munishis and scribes throughout the eighteenth century. The best of these, the Seir Mutaqherin, or Review of Modern Times by the brilliant young Mughal historian Ghulam Hussain Khan, is by far the most perceptive Indian source for the period, and has been available in English since the 1790s. But many other equally revealing Persian-language histories of the time remain both untranslated and unpublished.

  These I have used extensively with the assistance of my long-term collaborator Bruce Wannell, whose superb translations of more obscure sources such as the Ibrat Nama, or Book of Admonition of Fakir Khair ud-Din Illahabadi, or the Tarikh-i Muzaffari of Mohammad Ali Khan Ansari of Panipat, produced over many months while staying in his tent in the garden of my Mehrauli goat farm, have been transformative for this project, as has been his unrivalled knowledge of both eighteenth-century India and the wider Islamic world. I am particularly grateful to Bruce for the time he spent in the MAAPRI Research Institute in Tonk, Rajasthan, translating a previously unused biography of Shah Alam, the Shah Alam Nama of Munshi Munna Lal, and for his discussions in Pondicherry with Jean Deloche, which ultimately resulted in his exquisite renderings of several previously untranslated and largely unused eighteenth-century French sources, such as the memoirs of Gentil, Madec, Law and especially the wonderful Voyages of the Comte de Modave, an urbane friend and neighbour of Voltaire from Grenoble, who casts a sophisticated, sardonic and perceptive eye on the eighteenth-century scene, from the wide boulevards of Company Calcutta to the ruins of Shah Alam’s decaying capital in Delhi.

  Over six years of work on the Company I have accumulated many debts. Firstly, my thanks are also due to Lily Tekseng for her months of slog, typing out the manuscripts I dug up in the Indian National Archives, and my sister-in-law Katy Rowan and Harpavan Manku, who performed a similar task in London, both battling successfully with the copperplate of the Company’s official records and the private correspondence of Clive, Hastings, Cornwallis and Wellesley. I am also thankful to Aliya Naqvi and Katherine Butler Schofield for their beautiful renderings of Shah Alam’s own verse.

  Many friends read through successive drafts of this book and to them I am particularly grateful: Peter Marshall, Rajat Datta, Robert Travers, Najaf Haider, Lakshmi Subramanian, Jean-Marie Lafont, Nonica Datta, Sonal Singh, Vijay Pinch, Mahmood Farooqui, Yashashwini Chandra, Narayani Basu, Katherine Butler Schofield, Mala Singh, Rory Fraser, Sam Miller, Gianni Dubbini, Jeremy Parkinson, Riya Sarkar, Chiki Sarkar, Jayanta Sengupta, Adam Dalrymple and Nandini Mehta.

  Many others have given invaluable assistance. In India, B. N. Goswamy, Ebba Koch, Momin Latif, John Fritz, George Michel, Shashi Tharoor, Chander Shekhar, Jagdish Mittal, Diana Rose Haobijam, Navtej Sarna, Tanya Kuruvilla, S. Gautam, Tanya Banon and Basharat
Peer. Particular thanks are due to Lucy Davison of Banyan – by far the best travel agency in India, who ably organised logistics for research trips along the Carnatic coast, to Srirangapatnam, to Tonk, through the Deccan to Pune, and perhaps most memorably of all to Calcutta and Murshidabad during Durga Puja.

  In Pakistan: Fakir Aijazuddin, Ali Sethi, Hussain and Aliya Naqvi and Abbas of the Punjab Archives who generously got me access to Persian and Urdu sources.

  In the US: Muzaffar Alam, Maya Jasanoff, Ayesha Jalal, Ben Hopkins, Nile Green, Sanjay Subramanyam, Durba Ghosh, Elbrun Kimmelman and Navina Haidar.

  In Britain: Nick Robbins, Saqib Baburi, Ursula Sims-Williams, Jon Wilson, Malini Roy, Jerry Losty, John Falconer, Andrew Topsfield, Linda Colley, David Cannadine, Susan Stronge, Amin Jaffer, Anita Anand, Ian Trueger, Robert Macfarlane, Michael Axworthy, David Gilmour, Rory Stewart, Charles Allen, John Keay, Tommy Wide, Monisha Rajesh, Aarathi Prasad, Farrukh Husain, Charles Grieg, Rosie Llewellyn-Jones, Richard Blurton, Anne Buddle, Sam Murphy, Henry Noltie, Robert Skelton, Francesca Galloway, Sam Miller, Shireen Vakil, Zareer Masani, Tirthankar Roy, Brigid Waddams, Barnaby and Rose Rogerson, Anthony and Sylvie Sattin, Hew, Jock and Rob Dalrymple and the late, and much missed, Chris Bayly whose Cambridge lectures more than thirty years ago first got me interested in the complexities of eighteenth-century India.

  I have been lucky as ever to have as my agent the incomparable David Godwin, and my brilliant publishers at Bloomsbury: Alexandra Pringle, Trâm-Anh Doan, Lilidh Kendrick, Emma Bal, Richard Charkin, Yogesh Sharma, Meenakshi Singh, Faiza Khan, Ben Hyman and especially my editor for over thirty years, Mike Fishwick. I should also like to thank Vera Michalski at Buchet Chastel and in Italy the incomparable Roberto Calasso at Adelphi. My lovely family, Olivia, Ibby, Sam and Adam have kept me sane and happy during the long six years it took to bring this book into being. Olive in particular has been a rock, both emotionally and as guiding force behind this project, my first and best editor as well as my ever-patient, ever-generous, ever-loving partner in life. To them, and to my beloved parents, both of whom died during the writing of this book, I owe my greatest debt. My father in particular was convinced I would never finish this book and indeed he never lived to see the final full stop, dying the day after Christmas when I was still two chapters from its completion. But it was he who taught me to love history, as well as how to live life, and I dedicate this book to his memory.

  William Dalrymple

  North Berwick–Chiswick–Mehrauli,

  March 2013–June 2019

  * £262.5 million today.

  * £157.5 million and £105 million today.

  ** £400,000 = £42 million; £300,000 = £31.5 million; £200,000 = £21 million today.

  1

  1599

  On 24 September 1599, while William Shakespeare was pondering a draft of Hamlet in his house downriver from the Globe in Southwark, a mile to the north, barely twenty minutes’ walk across the Thames, a motley group of Londoners was gathering in a rambling, half-timbered building lit by many-mullioned Tudor windows.1

  Even at the time the meeting was recognised as historic, and notaries were present with ink and quill to keep a record of the unusually diverse cross section of Elizabethan London that came that day to the Founders’ Hall, off Moorgate Fields.2 At the top of the social scale, hung with his golden chain of office, there was the stout figure of the Lord Mayor himself, Sir Stephen Soame, robed in scarlet fustian. He was accompanied by two of his predecessors in office and several senior Aldermen of the City – buttery Elizabethan burghers, their white-bearded faces nestling in a feathery tangle of cambric ruffs.3 The most powerful of these was the gravely goateed, ermine-trimmed and stovepipe-hatted figure of Sir Thomas Smythe, Auditor of the City of London, who had made a fortune importing currants from the Greek islands and spices from Aleppo. A few years earlier ‘Auditor Smythe’ had helped form the Levant Company as a vehicle for his trading voyages; this meeting was his initiative.4

  Besides these portly pillars of the City of London were many less exalted merchants hopeful of increasing their fortunes, as well as a scattering of ambitious and upwardly mobile men of more humble estate, whose professions the notaries dutifully noted down: grocers, drapers and haberdashers, a ‘clotheworker’, a ‘vintener’, a ‘letherseller’ and a ‘skinner’.5 There were a few scarred soldiers, mariners and bearded adventurers from the docks at Woolwich and Deptford, surf-battered sea dogs, some of whom had fought against the Spanish Armada a decade earlier, all doublets and gold earrings, with their sea dirks tucked discreetly into their belts. Several of these deckhands and mizzen-masters had seen action with Drake and Raleigh against Spanish treasure ships in the warmer waters of the Caribbean, and now described themselves to the notaries, in the polite Elizabethan euphemism, as ‘privateers’. There was also a clutch of explorers and travellers who had ventured further afield: the Arctic explorer William Baffin, for example, after whom the polar bay was named. Finally, also taking careful notes, was the self-described ‘historiographer of the voyages of the East Indies’, the young Richard Hakluyt, who had been paid £11 10s* by the adventurers for compiling all that was then known in England about the Spice Routes.6

  Such a varied group would rarely be seen under one roof, but all had gathered with one purpose: to petition the ageing Queen Elizabeth I, then a bewigged and painted woman of sixty-six, to start up a company ‘to venter in the pretended voiage to ye Est Indies and other Ilands and Cuntries thereabouts there to make trade … by buying or bartering of suche goodes, wares, jewelles or merchaundize as those Ilands or Cuntries may yeld or afforthe … (the whiche it maie please the Lorde to prosper)’.7

  Smythe had gathered 101 of the richer merchants two days earlier and pressed them to commit to individual subscriptions ranging from £100 to £3,000 – considerable sums in those days. In all Smythe raised £30,133 6s. 8d.** This the investors did by drawing up a contract and adding their contribution in the subscription book ‘written with there owne hands’, so they declared, ‘for the honour of our native country and for the advancement of trade and merchandise within this realm of England’.

  It is always a mistake to read history backwards. We know that the East India Company (EIC) eventually grew to control almost half the world’s trade and become the most powerful corporation in history, as Edmund Burke famously put it, ‘a state in the guise of a merchant’. In retrospect, the rise of the Company seems almost inevitable. But that was not how it looked in 1599, for at its founding few enterprises could have seemed less sure of success.

  At that time England was a relatively impoverished, largely agricultural country, which had spent almost a century at war with itself over the most divisive subject of the time: religion.8 In the course of this, in what seemed to many of its wisest minds an act of wilful self-harm, the English had unilaterally cut themselves off from the most powerful institution in Europe, so turning themselves in the eyes of many Europeans into something of a pariah nation. As a result, isolated from their baffled neighbours, the English were forced to scour the globe for new markets and commercial openings further afield. This they did with a piratical enthusiasm.

  Sir Francis Drake set the tone. Drake had made his name in the early 1560s as a buccaneer raiding Spanish mule trains laden with silver on their way from mine to port along the Panama isthmus. With some of the profits of these raids, Drake had set off in 1577 on his three-year circumnavigation of the globe in the Golden Hinde. This was only the third time a global voyage had ever been attempted, and it was made possible by developments in compasses and astrolabes – as well as by worsening relations with Spain and Portugal.9

  Drake had set sail in ‘great hope of gold [and] silver … spices drugs, cochineal’, and his voyage was sustained throughout by intermittent raids on Iberian shipping. Following his capture of a particularly well-laden Portuguese carrack, Drake returned home with a cargo ‘very richly fraught with gold, silver, pearls and precious stones’, valued at over £100,00
0,* one of the most profitable of all the voyages of discovery. This harrying and scavenging off the earlier and richer Iberian empires that then controlled South and Central America was licensed by the Crown and was essentially a form of Elizabethan state-sanctioned organised crime controlled by the oligarchs of Whitehall and Charing Cross. When Drake’s rival, Sir Walter Raleigh, and his crew returned from a similar raid, they were immediately denounced by the Spanish ambassador as ‘Pirates, pirates, pirates’.10

  Many of those the Spanish ambassador would also have considered pirates were present that day in the Founders’ Hall. The Company’s potential investors knew that this group of mariners and adventurers, whatever their talents as freebooters, had to date shown little success in the more demanding skills of long-distance trade or in the art of planting and patiently sustaining viable colonies. Indeed, compared to many of their European neighbours, the English were rank amateurs at both endeavours.

  Their search for the legendary North West Passage to the Spice Islands had ended disastrously, not in the Moluccas, as planned, but instead on the edge of the Arctic Circle, with their galleons stuck fast in pack ice, their battered hulls punctured by icebergs and their pike-wielding crew mauled by polar bears.11 They had also failed at protecting their infant Protestant plantations in Ireland which were under severe attack in 1599. English attempts to bully their way into the Caribbean slave trade had come to nothing, while attempts to plant an English colony in North America had ended in outright disaster.

  In 1584 Sir Walter Raleigh had founded the first British settlement on Roanoke Island, south of Chesapeake Bay, in an area he named Virginia, after his monarch. But the colony survived barely a year and was abandoned by June 1586 when the relief fleet arrived to find the settlement deserted. A shipload of eager new colonists jumped ashore to find both the stockade and the houses within completely dismantled and nothing to indicate the fate of the settlers except a single skeleton – and the name of the local Indian tribe, CROATOAN, carved in capital letters into a tree. There was simply no sign of the 90 men, 17 women and 11 children whom Raleigh had left there only two years earlier. It was as if the settlers had vanished into thin air.12