The Anarchy by William Dalrymple

This is the unmasking of what the East India Company was all about. I must say I didn't really understand the in's and out's of it, and I think that was a deliberate masking of the truth on the part of the Brits themselves. This is an attempt to set the record straight. The British company arrived on the scene in the early 1600's at a time when the Mughals were in charge--they had the largest standing army in the world and it wasn't until there was a waning of that power that there was any chance of taking charge. The tide starts to turn with Robert Clive, once celebrated as “Clive of India”, who 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. At the Battle of Plassey of 1757, which won the company control of Bengal and which generations of British schoolchildren would memorize as a glorious imperial victory, the real story was substantially more complicated. 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. The Jagat Seths offered the company substantial amounts of money to unseat Siraj ud-Daula and install a compliant collaborator in his stead. Clive, who stood to make an immense personal fortune, gladly accepted. Plassey was in truth a “palace coup”, executed by a greedy opportunist, won by bribery and betrayal. The rest is a very violent and bloody history, where the East India Company committed hundreds of atrocities and plundered the wealth of a nation--all as a corporation, not as a government . There was an attempt to hold the East India Company responsible for their actions, with the trial of Warren Hastings, which through court testimony brought the practices of the company to light--and while he was eventually acquitted, his reputation, and that of the company, were tarnished. It is a tale of corporate greed, no accountability, and while the British control of India became a government run operation, it did not start out that way. It is a fascinating, if grim, read.