In the latter perspective, the East India Company (EIC) emerges as one and, eventually, the most successful of the successor powers. 1658-1707), the focus should be on decline and chaos or, instead, on the development of a tier of powers within the sub-continent, for example Hyderabad. This debate focuses on the question of whether, after the death in 1707 of the mighty Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb (r. There is an established scholarly debate to which Dalrymple makes no contribution. Secondly, let us look at India as a whole. Was Portuguese India, where the state had a larger role, ‘better’? Indeed, Dalrymple offers no real evidence for his view. To assume from the modern perspective of state authority that this was necessarily inadequate is misleading as well as teleological. Delegated authority in this form or shared state/private activities were a major part of governance. Moreover, for Britain, there was the Hudson Bay Company, the Royal African Company, and the chartered companies involved in North America, as well, for example, as the Bank of England. Thus, the East India Company was one of a series of ‘national’ East India companies, including those of France, the Netherlands and Sweden. That, however, is an approach that tells us very little about the general tendency in eighteenth-century imperial activity, and particularly that of the British. There is an established scholarly debate to which Dalrymple makes no contribution The profits that arose and the disruption that resulted attract repeated attention. The focus is on the East India Company and its rise to prominence and territorial position. So what do we have? Dalrymple, who writes popular, accessible works on Indian history, cuts another slice from his cheese for this work, with his usual mixture of gore and criticism of the British. But, it is appropriate to focus on the book, and not its packaging.
The encomia offered on Dalrymple and his works are generally by writers who know nothing about the subject and have certainly read none of the relevant archival material, for example Max Hastings. The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company, by William Dalrymple, Bloomsbury, 2019, £30. The book has been extensively and largely favourably reviewed, has been selected as a book of the year, and will clearly be much cited. William Dalrymple’s latest is published by Bloomsbury at a very reasonable price, which betokens the pricing economics of confidence, advertising, and a large print run. ‘A timely cautionary tale of the first global corporate power,’ the apparent selling point of this much- reviewed book, raises the interesting question of what makes for a successful book these days.
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