In 1739 the mango was plucked by the Persian warlord Nader Shah.

As the Empire fell apart around it, it hung like an overripe mango, huge and inviting, yet clearly in decay, ready to fall and disintegrate” (pp. Larger than London and Paris combined, it was still the most prosperous and magnificent city between Ottoman Istanbul and Imperial Edo (Tokyo). “Delhi in 1737 had around 2 million inhabitants. The result was more warfare and a decline in trade as banditry made it unsafe to travel. Seeing the chaos at the top, local rulers stopped paying tribute and tried to establish their own power bases. According to the Mughal historian Khair ud-Din Illahabadi … ‘Disorder and corruption no longer sought to hide themselves and the once peaceful realm of India became a lair of Anarchy’” (pp.

In the worst year of all, 1719, four different Emperors occupied the Peacock Throne in rapid succession. “Mughal succession disputes and a string of weak and powerless emperors exacerbated the sense of imperial crisis: three emperors were murdered (one was, in addition, first blinded with a hot needle) the mother of one ruler was strangled and the father of another forced off a precipice on his elephant. At Aurangzeb’s death in 1707, a power struggle ensued but none could command. It was a classic case of the eventual fall of a great power through military over-extension. Under Aurangzeb, the fanatic and ruthless Mughal emperor (1658-1707), the empire grew to its largest geographic extent but only because of decades of continuous warfare and attendant taxing, pillaging, famine, misery and mass death. The Anarchy refers not to the period of British rule but to the period before that time. So how was a humble group of British merchants able to take over one of the great empires of history? The answer is found in the title. After the Company’s charter is approved in 1600 the merchant adventures scout for ships to undertake the India voyage: “They have been to Deptford to ‘view severall shippes,’ one of which, the May Flowre, was later famous for a voyage heading in the opposite direction” (p. Dalrymple has a wonderful eye for detail. It’s an amazing story and Dalrymple tells it with verve and style drawing, as in his previous books, on underused Indian, Persian and French sources. In The Anarchy, historian William Dalrymple recounts the remarkable rise of the East India Company from its founding in 1599 to 1803 when it commanded an army twice the size of the British Army and ruled over the Indian subcontinent. Reviewed for EH.Net by Alex Tabarrok, Department of Economics, George Mason University.

William Dalrymple, The Anarchy: 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 Author(s):

The anarchy by william