India For Sale

William Dalrymple’s latest book details how the British East India Company employed corporate violence to conquer India

- Mandira Nayar

William Dalrymple is in his last week of holiday in Provence, France, before he sets out to promote his latest book, The Anarchy—The East India Company, Corporate Violence and the Pillage of an Empire. He describes it as “a fatty”. And, it truly is. The book accounts detailed wrongs of the British East India Company, once the most powerful corporate in the world, that sponsored “corporate murder”, and conquered a country.

“There is no pretence of it being anything else but profit,” says Dalrymple. “They had a lot of terrible stuff about them. But the one good thing was [that] they were not hypocrites. They made no bones about why they were there. They were there for personal profit.”

Despite the overwhelmingness of the historical content, Dalrymple still sniff s out a good story and the drama. There are characters—vain, corrupt, brilliant, eccentric and cruel—that shine their way, to transform a horrific account of loot and plunder into an engaging, horrifying and cautionary tale.

Gulping down a cup of coffee and munching his breakfast, Dalrymple talks about the corporate lobbying that the East India Company did successfully. “This was the first corporation which had large scale political interference abroad. They sponsored corporate murder,” he says. “The first corporate scandal [was] in the 1690s, when they were caught bribing the exchequer and the Lord Chancellor.”