The volatile, widely disliked Nawab of Bengal, Siraj ud-Daula, had made an intractable enemy of Bengal’s Marwari bankers, the Jagat Seths, who saw better prospects in investing with the East India Company than supporting him. Photograph: The Picture Art Collection/AlamyĪs to the Battle of Plassey of 1757, which won the company control of Bengal and which generations of British schoolchildren would memorise as a glorious imperial victory, the real story was substantially more complicated. Miniature of Jahangir, with James I in white, below. Thus Robert Clive, once celebrated as “Clive of India”, enters here as a juvenile delinquent from Shropshire who arrived in Madras in 1744 as an 18-year-old clerk, but found his vocation as a thuggish fighter in the company’s small security force. Building on foundational research by CA Bayly, KN Chaudhuri and PJ Marshall among others, a new cohort of scholars writing in the wake of the financial crisis (Emily Erikson, Rupali Mishra, Philip Stern, James Vaughn) have studied the company as a forerunner of modern multinationals, intertwined with the modern state and “too big to fail”.ĭalrymple’s first achievement in The Anarchy is to render this history an energetic pageturner that marches from the counting house on to the battlefield, exploding patriotic myths along the way. The company’s transition from trade to conquest has preoccupied historians ever since Edmund Burke famously attacked it as a “state in the disguise of a merchant”.

The difference between these two images is the distance travelled by William Dalrymple’s The Anarchy, a graphic retelling of the East India Company’s “relentless rise” from provincial trading company to the pre-eminent military and political power in all of India.

He hands a Qur’an to a white-bearded Sufi, a pious gesture that doubles as a majestic snub: pressed into a lower corner is none other than James I, an overlooked supplicant, depicted in three-quarter profile, “an angle reserved in Mughal miniatures for the minor characters”. A contemporary painting by the Mughal master miniaturist Bichitr shows a supersized Jahangir on his throne, bathed in a halo of blinding magnificence. But the arrival of the British in India in the early 1600s looked very different at the time – and from the other side. The penultimate scene travels to India in 1614, where the Mughal emperor Jahangir receives an ambassador from King James I, on a mission to promote trade with the newly chartered English East India Company.įrom the hindsight of the 1920s, this embassy looked like a key step in the building of a British imperium that would end with Britain’s monarchs as India’s emperors.

A bout a century ago, a series of giant murals was unveiled in the Palace of Westminster depicting the “ Building of Britain”, which bounded in eight set-pieces from King Alfred’s long-ships beating back the Danes in 877 to bewigged parliamentarians presenting Queen Anne with the articles of Union in 1707.

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