Book Review: The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company by William Dalrymple

in 1625 a Dutch fleet from the East was allowed to sail quietly past Dover in full view of the Royal Navy.

“The natives all look upon the King of Delhi as their rightful Lord, and so he is, I suppose.”33 As his coronation portrait described him, he was “His Divine Highness, Caliph of the Age, Padshah as Glorious as Jamshed, He who is Surrounded by Hosts of Angels, Shadow of God, Refuge of Islam, Protector of the Mohammedan Religion, Offspring of the Hou

The structure of the corporation is a telling case in point—and it is no coincidence that the first major joint-stock corporations in the world were the English and Dutch East India companies, ones that pursued that very same combination of exploration, conquest, and extraction as did the conquistadors. It is a structure designed to eliminate all m

Dundas had instructed Wellesley to ‘cleanse’ those pockets of Indian power that had been ‘contaminated’ by French influence: namely the courts of Tipu Sultan of Mysore, Nizam Ali Khan of Hyderabad, and those of that network of rival Hindu chiefs who ruled the great Maratha Confederacy – all of whom had raised sepoy armies trained by Francophone mer