the anarchy the east india company corporate violence

In his most ambitious and riveting audiobook to date, William Dalrymple tells the story of the East India Company as it has never been told before, unfolding a timely cautionary tale of the first global corporate power. Osta kirja The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire William. Author William Dalrymple targets the British East India Company for its evil over two centuries in India. The Anarchy tells the remarkable story of how one of the world’s most magnificent empires disintegrated and came to be replaced by a dangerously unregulated private company, based thousands of miles overseas in one small office, five windows wide, and answerable only to its distant shareholders. In August 1765 the East India Company defeated and captured the young Mughal emperor and forced him to set up in his richest provinces a new government run. Bloomsburg Publishing, New York City 2019,Hardcover, 522 pgs, 35, ISBN: 978-1-63557-395-4.

The Company’s reach stretched until almost all of India south of the Himalayas was effectively ruled from a boardroom in London. In less than four decades it had trained up a security force of around 200,000 men – twice the size of the British army – and had subdued an entire subcontinent, conquering first Bengal and finally, in 1803, the Mughal capital of Delhi itself. But the creation of this new government marked the moment that the East India Company ceased to be a conventional international trading corporation dealing in silks and spices and became something much more unusual: an aggressive colonial power in the guise of a multinational business. The East India Company’s founding charter authorised it to ‘wage war’ and it had always used violence to gain its ends.

The anarchy the east india company corporate violence