The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire.

• Author: Dorschner, Jon P.

The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire

The Anarchy (The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire) by William Dalrymple

William Dalrymple's deep and abiding connection to India permeates his work as an historian. I still recall with great fondness the evening I spent with him and other prominent Anglo-Indian literati sitting on carpets conversing and listening avidly to Hindustani music. Dalrymple never fails to stimulate. He makes the complexity of Indian history timely and readable by emphasizing the many colorful personalities, both Indian and European, that populate the South Asian story. Dalrymple also spares us the ideological meandering that renders so many books on South Asia impenetrable for the layman reader. He instead paints a vivid portrait of a time and place totally foreign to most Western readers.

The Anarchy is part of a contemporary subgenre of writing on India by both Indian and Western authors that corrects the many and varied myths imposed on Westerners by ethnocentric historiography. Other notable books in this subgenre include Inglorious Empire (What the British Did to India) by ShashiTharoor, and The Chaos of Empire (The British Raj and the Conquest of India) by Jon Wilson.

American views on the British imperialist adventure in India were largely shaped by British apologists, who romanticized and obfuscated British imperialism. In the popular vein, books, and films have long romanticized the British Raj, while overlooking or de-emphasizing its essential racism and rapacity. It was not that long ago that purportedly historical works on British India were permeated with racism and xenophobia. They often constructed a false narrative, impugning Indian culture and institutions and describing British imperialism as a "civilizing" force carried out with the best intentions by well-meaning Britishers infused with a spirit of noblesse oblige.

As part of this distorted civilizational narrative, some Western historians argued that Indian civilization was inherently decadent and lacked a commitment to progress, and that Indians would have proven incapable of establishing a modern state without British colonial intervention. Dalrymple conclusively puts these erroneous suppositions to rest, pointing out that when the British East Indian Company was founded in 1599, India's Mughul Empire was the most powerful and sophisticated in the world, while England was an...