The Anarchy¶
Metadata¶
- Author: [[William Dalrymple]]
- ASIN: B07W952J1F
- Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07W952J1F
- Kindle link
Highlights¶
By 1803, when its private army had grown to nearly 200,000 men, it had swiftly subdued or directly seized an entire subcontinent. Astonishingly, this took less than half a century. — location: 271 ^ref-6683
reality. It was not the British government that began seizing great chunks of India in the mid-eighteenth century, but a dangerously unregulated private company headquartered in one small office, five windows wide, in London, and managed in India by a violent, utterly ruthless and intermittently mentally unstable corporate predator — location: 277 ^ref-15304
India’s transition to colonialism took place under a for-profit corporation, which existed entirely for the purpose of enriching its investors. — location: 280 ^ref-59129
In many ways the East India Company was a model of commercial efficiency: one hundred years into its history, it had only thirty-five permanent employees in its head office. Nevertheless, that skeleton staff executed a corporate coup unparalleled in history: the military conquest, subjugation and plunder of vast tracts of southern Asia. It almost certainly remains the supreme act of corporate violence in world history. — location: 305 ^ref-25251
For the Company always had two targets in its sights: one was the lands where its business was conducted; but the other was the country that gave it birth, as its lawyers and lobbyists and MP shareholders slowly and subtly worked to influence and subvert the legislation of Parliament in its favour. Indeed, the East India Company probably invented corporate lobbying. — location: 318 ^ref-32969
the MPs who voted to uphold this legal distinction were not exactly neutral: nearly a quarter of them held Company stock, which would have plummeted in value had the Crown taken over. — location: 328 ^ref-59833
The entire contents of the Bengal treasury were simply loaded into one hundred boats and floated down the Ganges from the Nawab of Bengal’s palace in Murshidabad to Fort William, the Company’s Calcutta headquarters. — location: 341 ^ref-3122
Indeed, one of the principal fears of the American Patriots in the run-up to the war was that Parliament would unleash the East India Company in the Americas to loot there as it had done in India. — location: 357 ^ref-30482
November 1773, the Patriot John Dickinson described EIC tea as ‘accursed Trash’, and compared the potential future regime of the East India Company in America to being ‘devoured by Rats’. This ‘almost bankrupt Company’, he said, having been occupied in wreaking ‘the most unparalleled Barbarities, Extortions and Monopolies’ in Bengal, had now ‘cast their Eyes on America, — location: 358 ^ref-14544
the EIC proved at once hugely powerful and oddly vulnerable to economic uncertainty. — location: 374 ^ref-3760
the East India bubble burst after plunder and famine in Bengal led to massive shortfalls in expected land revenues. — location: 375 ^ref-669
EIC was left with debts of £1.5 million and a bill of £1 million* in unpaid tax owed to the Crown. When knowledge of this became public, thirty banks collapsed like dominoes across Europe, bringing trade to a standstill. — location: 376 ^ref-25382
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. — location: 390 ^ref-6574
It is always a mistake to read history backwards. — location: 505 ^ref-39196
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. — location: 522 ^ref-53587
the only rival of the Iberians, gallingly for the English, was the tiny and newly independent republic of Holland, whose population was less than half that of England, and which had thrown off the rule of Spain only twenty years earlier, in 1579. It was the recent astonishing success of the Dutch that had brought this diverse group of Londoners together. — location: 565 ^ref-59942
This turned out to offer far wider powers than the petitioners had perhaps expected or even hoped for. As well as freedom from all customs duties for their first six voyages, it gave them a British monopoly for fifteen years over ‘trade to the East Indies’, a vaguely defined area that was soon taken to encompass all trade and traffic between the Cape of Good Hope and the Strait of Magellan, as well as granting semi-sovereign privileges to rule territories and raise armies. — location: 633 ^ref-25020