Book Review - The Anarchy by William Dalrymple

A while ago I posted a book review - Book Review - Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not by P. Parthasarathi which was a history of British colonialism in India written from the Indian perspective. I found it both fascinating and frustrating, as it was heavily focused on the Indian cotton industry and didn't really have a convincing explanation for how the English were able to so easily conquer a continent which was explained as technologically on an equal footing.

So to try to understand the history better, I turned to The Anarchy by William Dalrymple. It's focus is on the growth of the East India Company, which is effectively the same as the British conquest of India.

Photo by me, of my copy of the book

The author of the book is one of the top British historians, but lives in India and his love of the country is clear in this book.

What I liked was that although he's very much from the socialist "European empires are bad" school of thought, he is fair and balanced with the failings of both the British and Indians, as well as their good points.

The book itself is a monster of a tome ! It's hardback and I'm so glad it comes with a cloth bookmark built in - my usual (and terrible) practice of tucking the fly of the dustcover in to mark my place would never work with a book this size.

The level of detail the book dives into is impressive. It should still be regarded as an overview if you want fine detail on battles and individual events, but for the scope of a two hundred year period of globally significant events it does well.

Although the book is structured as a fairly straightforward chronological narrative, it is thoroughly readable (hard to put down, actually...), and despite leaving the reader to draw their own conclusions as to why the British succeeded in taking over India, the argument is pretty obvious.

To outline the basic premise, British success was down to a number of factors.

First, the Anarchy of the title reflects the state of India at the time. The Mughal Empire was in the process of falling apart, it's dazzling surface impression of power and wealth masking deep internal splits and weaknesses, as well as damage from repeated incursions by Afghan/Persian warlords. India wasn't a single nation at the time, it was a patchwork of states and an even more fragmented patchwork of ethnic and commercial groups.

The East India Company took full advantage of the situation they found. I have to admit that in most cases, with one or two notable exceptions (Warren Hastings and Lord Cornwallis particularly) the English don't come out of this looking very good ! They started by coming in looking like any other trading corporation, but pushed boundaries at every opportunity. Their energy is admirable. They got permission to establish trading posts, but built them as forts. They also rapidly understood the importance of the financial side of things, building a reputation for repaying debts that made them the preferred customers of Indian bankers.

The great rivalry at the time was between England and France, both expanding colonial empires across the globe. In India, the French tended to work with local rulers to train parts of their armies in the European fashion as sepoys. The East India Company took a different approach, training their own small bands of local security staff as a company army with British officers. By the end of the period, the East India Company had an army almost twice the size of the official British one.

European warfare had a ruthlessness and efficiency that the Indians didn't appreciate until too late, and succeeded not because it was technologically superior, but because it was operationally and tactically more advanced.

With their own army of sepoys, backed on occasion by regular British army regiments, the East India Company exploited every division they could find to conquer individual Indian states, wielding diplomacy and gold as deftly as military force. Gold, it has to be said, that came from Indian exports to Europe, from treasure taken each time a war was won, and the exploitation of Indian territories under their control. It could be said that India paid for it's own conquest. The Indian rulers failed to see the threat and unite until it was far too late.

The book is also one filled with massive personalities - including Robert Clive, Warren Hastings and Richard Wellesley on the English side, Shah Alam, Mahadji Scindia and Tipu Sultan for the Indians, and so many more.

All in all, this book is a balanced and riveting account of the fall of one empire and it's replacement by the greatest corporation the world had seen up to that date. It's well worth a read !

Published in 2019 by Bloomsbury Publishing. 524 pages with 72 plates. ISBN 978-1-4088-6437-1