Insights

 I’ve browsed Dalrymple’s other books in many Indian bookshops across Rajasthan and down in Central India: even hawkers in Old Delhi’s Sunday book market sold copies of his books. He is clearly a popular and beloved author in the vast country. Dalrymple is the co-founder of Jaipur Literature Festival which has been virtually streaming inspired panel discussions during COVID-19 featuring such bestselling authors as Margaret Atwood, Peter Frankopan and the Dalai Lama.

 I looked for Dalrymple’s latest work, The Anarchy, in the Philippines after Prof. Surya Deva, a member of the UN Working Group on Business and Human Rights, mentioned it during the 2020 Virtual Course on BHR conducted by Oxfam India and HURBA. I was curious how the history of East India Company, about which I’ve heard but knew little about, provides examples of human rights violations that may be committed by companies.

The author explains this theme of how this first modern multinational company became a for-profit model for the plunder of communities and countries through collaboration, cooptation, and horrifying use of force in his Introduction:

 The Company had been authorised by its founding charter to ‘wage war’ and had been using violence to gain its ends since it boarded and captured a Portuguese vessel on its maiden voyage in 1602. Moreover, it had controlled small areas around its Indian settlements since the 1630s. Nevertheless, 1765 was really the moment that the East India Company ceased to be anything even distantly resembling a conventional trading corporation, dealing in silks and spices, and became something altogether much more unusual. Within a few months, 250 company clerks, backed by a military force of 20,000 locally recruited Indian soldiers, had become the effective rulers of the richest Mughal provinces. An international corporation was in the process of transforming itself into an aggressive colonial power.

By 1830, when its private army had grown to 200,000 men, it had swiftly subdued or directly seized an entire subcontinent. Astonishingly, this took less than half a century…

Dalrymple is a gifted storyteller who uses a third-person voice to describe the actions and stratagems of actors in both the Indian Subcontinent and the United Kingdom. And the historical figures indeed look like actors in Dalrymple’s “creative history”: after preliminary pages featuring ink-and-pen maps showing the major warring powers – the Rajputs, Marathas, Mughals, and others – of eighteenth century India (it did not yet have the relatively fixed borders of the 20th c. post-Partition nation-state of India that we see on contemporary maps) and before the Introduction, the historian presents a ten-page list of Dramatis Personae as in a play. I didn’t appreciate this list until I was in the middle of reading the book, when it became challenging to keep track of the political, mercantile and military players vying for wealth, power or survival.

This wasn’t a chess game of two powers pitting officials or courtiers and soldiers against each other – a colonising corporation versus a state defending itself – but a much more dynamic theatre of stratagems, flattery, and treachery. This was Game of Thrones in real life. The book features three sets of coloured reproductions of paintings and Indian miniatures, mostly portraits of the heroes and villains (or rather a complex mix of these two types, as Dalrymple often gave justified assessments of both good and bad features of all characters). 

Indeed, I wondered if Dalrymple even empathised with the tragic and often bloody end of many of the people his magical pen brought to pitiful life, such was his tone of breathtaking excitement and colourful descriptions of bloody battles and glittering loot:

 It was a hugely significant moment: with one stroke of the pen, in return for a relatively modest payment of Rs2.6 million, and Clive’s cynical promise on behalf of the Company to govern ‘agreeably to the rules of Mahomed and the law of the Empire,’ the Emperor agreed to recognise all the Company’s conquests and hand over to it financial control of all north-eastern India. Henceforth, 250 East India Company clerks backed by the military force of 20,000 Indian sepoys [soldiers] would now run the finances of India’s three richest provinces, effectively ending independent government in Bengal for 200 years. For a stock market-listed company with profit as its main raison d’etre, this was a transformative, revolutionary moment…

But for the people of Bengal, the granting of the Diwani [in Mughal legalese, the economic management of Mughal provinces] was an unmitigated catastrophe. The Nawab [in Hindustani, literally “deputy,” the title given by the Mughal Emperors to their regional governors and viceroys]

was no longer able to provide even a modicum of protection for his people: tax collectors and farmers of revenue plundere

d the peasantry to raise funds from the land, and no one felt the least bit responsible for the well-being of the ordinary cultivator. Merchants and weavers were forced to work for the Company at far below market rates; they also seized by force textiles made by their French and Dutch rivals. Merchants who refused to sign papers agreeing to the Company’s harsh terms were caned or jailed or publicly humiliated by being made to rub their noses to the ground. (pp. 208-210)

The plot of this drama rises and falls, as in many famous histories on the growth and decline of Rome and other civilisations. On this narrative act, Dalrymple summarises also in his Introduction:

Before long the EIC was straddling the globe. Almost single-handedly it reversed the balance of trade, which from Roman times on had led to a continual drain of Western bullion eastwards. The EIC ferried opium east to China, and in due course fought the Opium Wars in order to seize an offshore base at Hong Kong and safeguard its profitable monopoly in narcotics…

 Yet, like more recent mega-corporations, the EIC proved at once hugely powerful and oddly vulnerable to economic uncertainty. Only seven years after the granting of the Diwani, when the Company’s share price had doubled overnight after it acquired the wealth of the treasury of Bengal, the East India bubble burst after plunder and famine in Bengal led to massive shortfalls in expected land revenues. The EIC was left with debts of 1.5 million pounds and a bill of 1 million pounds in paid tax owed to the Crown. When knowledge of this became public, thirty banks collapsed like dominoes across Europe, bringing trade to a standstill…

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. (pp. xxx-xxxi)

Afterwards, Dalrymple explains his purpose for writing The Anarchy:

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 Empires masters of the vast subcontinent between the years 1756 and 1803. (p. xxxi)

In this aim, the author succeeds:

Historians propose many reasons for the astonishing success of the Company: the fracturing of Mughal India into tiny, competing states; the military edge that  Frederick the Great’s military innovations had given the European Companies; and particularly the innovations in European governance, taxation and banking that allowed the Company to raise vast sums of ready money at a moment’s notice. For behind the scarlet uniforms and the Palladian palaces, the tiger shoots and the polkas at Government House always lay the balance sheets of the Company’s accountants, with their ledgers laying out profit and loss, and the Company’s fluctuating share price on the London Stock Exchange.

Yet perhaps the most crucial factor of all was the support the East India Company enjoyed from the British Parliament. The relationship between them steadily grew more symbiotic throughout the eighteenth century until eventually it turned into something we might today call a public-private partnership. Returned nabobs [“old India hands”] like Clive used their wealth buy both MPs and parliamentary seats – the famous Rotten Boroughs. In turn, Parliament backed the Company with state power: the ships and soldiers that were needed when the French and British East India Companies trained their guns on each other. (p. xxvii)

What makes Dalrymple’s case persuasive is his use and extensive citation of the Company’s voluminous records that are kept in the British Library in London and the National Archives of India (NAI) in New Delhi (just outside of which, in a Mehrauli goat farm, the author now lives with his family). In his nearly 100-page Notes and Bibliography after the Epilogue of the book, one can also see his use of Persian-language histories by Mughal historians and other writers from the eighteenth century (translated into English) and obscure works translated by his “longtime collaborator” Bruce Wannell.

 I highly recommend The Anarchy to those who are interested or advocating for Business and Human Rights because it shows actual harms to millions of people caused by a private company, and a government’s eventual decision to regulate it in part to put a stop to those harms and in part because the company’s actions threatened its very economy and power. This is page-turning history that serves as a mirror to the problems involving Business and Human Rights we see today.