The ‘anarchy’, Dalrymple tells us, was wrought upon Mughal India by the East India Company as both corporate plunderer and founder of the British Empire. So what is new about the East India Company’s life and misdeeds in India that Dalrymple wants to tell us? Instead, he seeks to understand 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. Dalrymple’s elegiac evocations of the tragic vicissitudes of Shah Alam’s life temper his hard-nosed narrative of the East India Company’s depredations. The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire by William Dalrymple, Bloomsbury, Rs 699

Source: The Telegraph October 11, 2019 12:22 UTC