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. In August 1765 the East India Company defeated the young Mughal emperor and forced him to establish in his richest provinces a new administration run by English merchants who collected taxes through means of a ruthless private army – what we would now call an act of involuntary privatisation. Longlisted for The Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction 2019.Ī Financial Times, Observer, Daily Telegraph, Wall Street Journal and Times book of the year. One of Barack Obama's best books of 2019. Bloomsbury presents The Anarchy by William Dalrymple, read by Sid Sagar.
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