The Anarchy: A New Book by William Dalrymple

so the first word or was certainly one of the very first words of any Indian languages to end up in English was the word loot loot is of course a Hindustani and odoo verb leutner to plunder and to understand how this word rarely heard outside the plains of North India ended up in very common usage in 18th century India you could do no better than to visit the stark battlements of Powis Castle on the anglo-welsh marches for in this magnificent castle now a National Trust Monument that anyone can pay a ticket and visit the seat of the descendants of robert clive learned still in england described of india there lie more magnificent mogul treasures than in any public collection in india in this private house in the Welsh borders there is room after room of gold elephant Armour jewels this in the foreground is the palanquin of Sir Roger Darla's than a wob of Bengal abandoned on the battlefields of Plassey in 1757 if you go down the corridor and turn left you can find the campaign tent to tipu sultan sultan of mysore surrounded in fact the tiger of myself finally cornered in his lair in 1799 and in order to understand how all this loot ended up in a private house in the world borders you have to look on the way in at this picture and this is optically good picture but it is very revealing one this image by the artist Benjamin West shows an effete Mughal emperor in cloth-of-gold bending down and handing to a portly portly perry wigged and powdered Georgian gentleman in a red coat and this is Shah aalam giving to Robert Clive the Diwani now the word Donnie doesn't mean anything to anyone today what it means in modern English is what we would probably call an act of involuntary privatization because Clive had just defeated Shah aalam along with two of his main allies on the battlefields of Buxar and forced Shah Alam to hand over to a private corporation the East India Company the tax-collecting minting and financial rights to the three richest and most productive provinces of the Mughal Empire Bengal Bihar and Orissa and this was the first step in the whole series of actions which would ultimately mean that the Mughal Empire and the subcontinent of India until very recently at that time the rich a single richest country in the world generating roughly about 42% of world GDP for the first time in history in 18th century India overtook China as the world's largest and most productive organ of business and center of Industry what Manchester would be in the 19th century Bengal was in the 18th and in Britain today the conquest of India is still remembered as a national event that nation Great Britain seizing India in India it is also remembered as a national event though in Reverse as one of oppression resistance and ultimately of liberation what is forgotten in both countries is the central truth that it wasn't a national event at all it was a corporate one because India was not calm could by the British government by the British Army's coming out of the orders of Downing Street but in a mana the most bizarre moments in world history this hugely wealthy culturally incredibly rich ancient civilization fell into the hands of one of the world's first multinational corporations the East India Company and as soon as you realize that everything begins to look slightly different and it allows you to look again at the 18th century through quite different eyes the story begins in this incidentally is the office is there a point to Hitler than the point of it the office out of which this entire transaction took place five windows wide narrower than the Asia Society and also a lot smaller it doesn't go up eight stories this modest office block which hundred years into the history of the company still only had 35 people working at the head office rather less than teamwork even has running the Jaipur Literature Festival and as many other splendid enterprises this skeleton staff performed the greatest corporate takeover in history out of this building so the story begins on the 24th of September 15 99 when this man for Thomas Smythe known at the time as custom as my though auditors might because he was the former customs man who'd become the auditor of the City of London called a public meeting at the founders Hall in Moore Gate Fields this was about 20 minutes walk north of the small house in Southwark on the south bank of the Thames where William Shakespeare was then writing the play Hamlet so 20 minutes walk to the north you go to moor gate fields and there as you walk here this half-timbered tudor building there are notaries at the door recording the names of everyone who walks in and the amount of money that they're prepared to give to the enterprise which is being founded by customer Smythe and even if you can't read Jude a secretary hand you can still see the figures running down the right-hand column 200 pounds a thousand pounds 200 pounds 200 pounds one thousand one thousand two hundred three hundred and this was part of customer Smith's brilliant new project to raise an enormous capital sum for the very small world of the City of London and the financial district of London and the day just to give you the other side of the coin while India was controlling 42% of world gross domestic product at this time Britain was generating nearly 3 percent so all these merchants come together but what is interesting about this document and it goes on for about 20 pages is it isn't just the big merchants the big tough dealers the the ship owners and so on it is men who described themselves as vintners leather workers grocers haberdashers Skinner's and these are ordinary men small businessman with a little bit of spare cash and customers ride was inviting them to give that spare cash in a new type of business enterprise called a joint stock company and the joint stock company was one of Cheeta England's most important possibly its most important legacy to the modern world throughout history throughout the globe most business enterprises were family enterprises in India indeed they still are and so when the Medici bank operates it is a matter of nephews uncles and cousins when Marco Polo goes to China he's with his uncle he's with his father and they are involved in a family trading business - to China in the Middle Ages you then begin to get the rise of the guilds which is a different sort of business notion where different producers often of a certain level of well gather their capital together so for example a group of Suffolk wool merchants might decide to go off and make her business expedition to the Low Countries or to Bruges to sell their goods and to buy other goods but the joint stock company was something quite different what the genius of this idea was that not only did it involve people like those wool merchants who invested their business capital in the business that they were involved in it also invited the leather workers vintners and haberdashers to contribute what capital they had though they would play no executive part in the running of the business and this obviously opened the floodgates for investment from a far wider group of people which if a business gathered momentum and became a famous generator of money could attract vast sums of capital the first joint stock company was invented about fifty years before this Inn by a bunch of merchants in London trying to trade with Moscow and they founded the Muscovy company this was probably the fifth such ever fifth such enterprise in world history and it was by far the most successful up until the 20th century because the East India Company not only come to the full achievements lease in the company in a few minutes but it's initially it was a modest and enterprise partly because they were trying to take on the Dutch and the Dutch had far more advanced financial instruments far bigger ships far better sailed and even better artillery at this period of history although Holland was a new nation - just declared its independence from Spain they were nonetheless much much richer this is the age of the Golden Age of Holland and so the East India Company with its relatively modest investments can't compete its first voyage is a great success however and Sir James Manchester first of all goes out and tries to buy a ship in London and he rejects a creaky old vessel called the a flower which is lying around in a dock and instead by the pirate ship called the scourge of malice and at last minute before they set sail for India someone points out this may not be giving the right message and the scourge of metal it matters has renamed the red dragon as if it's a country pub in Wales and off they sail and because most of Manchester's men have described themselves in that list I said earlier as privateers which is a Elizabethan euphemisms what we today would simply called pirates when they arrived in the East Indies they managed to secure a very large quantity of cloves and spices not by trading for them as was the pointed expedition but by simply capturing a Portuguese Carrick and seizing all its goods and they bring those goods back and they sell them in London for 1 million pounds this in Tudor times is an unprecedented fortune and it ensures the wealth of every single employee and every investor in the company for the next generation or so it also kick-starts this business but the initial plan which was to trade spices with from these Cyndi's to London sinks under the bow the gun barrels of Dutch competition in the end the easterly company basically surrenders and hands over the spice trade to the Dutch as part of the swap however and it's not a bad deal all things considered they swap the Spice Island of rub for a muddy little island in the middle of the Hudson River called Manhattan which proved to be rather better investment anyway beaten out of the spice trade they concentrate their tension on the textile trade which first may sound on promising but at this point the late Moghul Empire particularly in Bengal drought in Bengal 1 million Weaver's there are looms and every village and they make everything from silk mass-produced cotton to the finest and most refined textiles called buffed our woven there and these the Brit the British is in the can be quickly realizes that this is the the source of future riches and it becomes the means by which Indian textiles flood the world market so much so that even in Mexico there is deindustrialization as the Mexican textile industry goes into decline due to cheap Indian at imports and in this way the East India Company manages to grow and grow and then something happens very unexpected something which no one has guessed will happen which turns the tables very quickly this is the early first headquarters of East India Company it looks rather like a sort of Jacobi and pub with a balcony and some pictures of some galleons up on there on the top here's the the company's own shipyard and Deptford building all these galleons early on so what happens is that the Mughal Empire here is akbar in one of his multi-faith discussion groups in fact a post seeker you can see some Portuguese from Jesuits on the left there are Sunni shears vase knives shaivites Jane's all discussing their rival ideas religion and trying in the words that power to distinguish the firm ground of reason from the marshy land of tradition so the Mughal Empire tolerant rich sophisticated goes into decline when this old bigoted or and ZEB over stretches the empire by trying to conquer the the Deccan II settlements of golconda and B Jaipur and by falling out with his own Rajput army by reimposing the jizya the Muslim head tax on Hindus and by the end of his reign at the end of his reign at his death the empire which has reached its greatest extent shatters and begins to fragment under first of all Shivaji in the morass and later the the in incoming forces this is the glories of mogul Delhi of this man nadir Shah of Persia and Nadia Shah this grim old man is painting at incidentally came here to this building in an exhibition we had 10 years ago called princes and painters this is Nadia Shah who was the son of a furrier and Persian who rises up to in a military coup to take over Persia and then goes off as he says to pluck some golden feathers from the Mogul peacocks tail and he brings with him an army armed with the latest gizmo which is something called the swivel gun which is a very heavy Giselle propped up on a horse's bridle by a sort of tripod system he lures a massive mughal army of 1.5 million about half of them fighting men out of their entrenchments and at the last minute says the Mogul army goes into this hobby charge all these mass cavalry with heavy heavy horse armor elephants the whole lot at the last minute the light Persian cavalry part like a curtain and they're facing them is a wall of these swivel guns and five minutes later it's all over the cream of Mughal chivalry lie dead on the fields of canal that evening Nadia Shah on the right invites Mohammed Shah of the mogul Emperor to dinner Mohammed Shah who is going to compute a lovely sort of artistic man who'd have loved coming to the Asia Society for literary and musical events but who was no man to be left running an empire accepts an invitation to dinner from Nadia char and of course at the end of dinner his bodyguard is simply disarmed and he's then escorted as Nadia showers guests into his own capital six weeks later Nadia Shah leaves Delhi with the peacock thrown in which is embedded the Kohinoor with the great mogul diamond with Darian or an 8000 wagons of mogul loot everything the moguls have looted from the rest of India goes with Nadia Shah off to Afghanistan never to return and without that capital without that money the Mughal Empire just burns out like the boilers go dry as if all the coal has suddenly disappeared from the engine rooms of the Mughal Empire and it shatters and fragments like a mirror cast out of a second-floor window whose shutters on the ground and the guys who Hoover up those glittering fragments of Mughal Empire are the two rival East India Company's the British and the French now the French of the first to realize that India is as vulnerable to new Western military technology as it does turn out to be in this period in the early years of the 18th century there have been a whole series of major pan-european Wars the Wars of the Austrian succession followed by the Wars of the Spanish Succession and what has happened in the course of these Wars is that European military technology has gone as it did in the first and second world war into sort of hyper advanced and the particularly Frederick the Great of Prussia has developed quite simple innovations that revolutionized warfare the flintlock musket with a socket bandit an elevating screw on the back of cannon which means that the barrel to be very simply raised up or lowered which gives it much greater accuracy Horse Artillery which means that the cannon can be moved very quickly around a battlefield the use of the infantry square and file firing one not on their knees firing from a kneeling position where then they go back reload and the next lock come forward and fire from a standing position none of this is rocket science it's quite simple innovations but it means that no army in mogul India can resist this technique so when the French begin to train up local Telugu speaking warriors from the coast in rather naughty outfits and and rather swanky shorts as you can see here the these comic looking gentlemen actually turned out to be the most deadly fighting force that India has ever seen and there is a battle in 1742 called the Battle of the Adyar River when 500 of these guys defeat 3000 was it 15000 I can't remember I do a huge mogul army scattered on the banks of the Adyar River and this is the moment everyone realizes that Europeans have developed technology that can defeat any army in India and for about 20 years these two rival East India Company's have the run of the the playground they can defeat anyone it doesn't last long by the 1760s and 70s Indian forces are catching up and by the 1780s you get two massive defeats of the British East India Company first by the Marathas then by typical ton because it's not complicated technology there's it's not like the atom bomb or something you don't need scientists to build this but for that brief time period of two decades the the British and the French are poised no one knows whether it's going to be which of the two it's going to be who will cease most of India in the event it turns out to be the British East India Company partly because the French East India Company is more of a royal concern run out of Versailles it's less responsive to trading to capitalism it's it's it's it's a heavy state run thing rather than nimble capitalists ruthless operation and by this stage now people have made money in the East India Company to begin filling the benches of parliament with return nabobs as they're known nabob being a corruption of the word Nawab governor and also the origin of the English diminutive knob as in a tough a posh person and the MPs are already voting for the East India Company in trust persuade the government to send out a Royal Navy fleet a government expense to protect the British interests in Bengal and it's generated by as soap as more recent Wars were by dodgy intelligence document is produced in Leadenhall Street the East India Company headquarters where the said that a huge French fleet is leaving Brittany to attack Calcutta and using this intelligence the British persuade the Navy to send the fleet under Robert Clive to go and and fend off the French and when they arrive in Madras they discover that they have something quite unexpected has happened this man Sir Roger Dowland the wild Bengal who's this sort of punk oday Hussein of mogul India he's a horrible piece of work everyone everyone dislikes him he is his hobby in the weekend is to sink fairies on the Ganges to watch people to watch people drag his own cousin who's a wonderful historian called Ghulam Hussain Khan says he's a serial bisexual rapist and there's whole litany of sort of colorful stories of walling girlfriends up and this sort of stuff anyway when he comes to power he discovers that the British not actually aiming at him but aiming at the French had begun wreaths fortifying Calcutta without his permission so he just marches in takes the town and he shoves some of the British survivors into a prison called the black hole where a lot of them are smothered now there's a huge long-running saga about whether the black hole happened or not it did happen but the numbers were hugely exaggerated by the British probably about 40 people died in it nonetheless this was a a casus belli and when the news arrives in Madras that Kolkata has been taken and in the lurid reports 40 British or more smothered by evil Suraj Donna in the black hole of Calcutta it's very easy for Clive who again is is this sort of perfect match for Suraj Italian that he's this or a delinquent from Shropshire who'd run sort of village protection rackets and when he was mad and threatened to through window through stones through the windows of shopkeepers unless it was paid that sort of thing Robert Clive persuades the the Royal Navy fleet which has come to fight the French as there are no French that they should go to Calcutta and and liberate Calcutta so this fleet sails up the coast of India sails into the Hubli recaptures Calcutta reduces the French capital of Chandan Nagar to ruins and at that point something very important happens a message is received by Robert Clive from a man called the jagat set the banker of the world who is like the Rothschild of 18th century Bengal the richest banker in India who's been made a fortune from taking commissions from the tribute which Nawabs of Bengal would send every year to Delhi and he that jagat sets mawari Oswald Jane's for originally from the gore outside drug poor transmit these funds by the Hooda new system the government they just pay in the money to the office in Murshidabad and the Mogul picks it up at the office in Delhi and by taking up a steady Commission on this year after year running the mint of Bengal the jagat set is the richest man in the world and he literally looked so richest man in Bengal and he literally offers clive two million pounds to depose sir Raja dollar and Clive of course accepts I say they go up and the they're going to replace sir Raja dollar with this man mere Jaffa who is the controller is rather sort of dim elderly Arab from the JAF in Iraq originally who's now than as the puppet Nawab and the Battle of Plassey happens which is looks very heroic in this picture commissioned by Clyde but actually is really just a soup of corruption and betrayal and double-dealing between the braggart sets of life mere jaffa doesn't fight and Suraj of Dada is captured and taught tortured had chopped up and then paraded and bits around Murshidabad leaving the company very unexpectedly and without any plan to do so as the effective rulers of Bengal as the puppeteers controlling mere Java now none of this was part of some great imperial master plan there was no London didn't even know about this is that there's a very comical letter London gets very muddled by what's going on and one governor of the East India Company is heard to ask what he's killed about Sir Roger Dallas death that was it true that Sir Roger dialect was a baronet anyway so having seized Bengal the East India Company goes on to fight 20 years later under Clive's deputy Hector Munroe the Battle of Buxar and this is the is the time when the the last great mogul attempt to fend off the company the Mughal Emperor Shah Alam the Nawab the new Nawab of Bengal Mir Qasim and the Nawab of others sujod Allah all joined together and try and expel the company but instead they are defeated on the plains of Buxar and suddenly the company finds 1765 just what nine years after they lost Calcutta and everything was looking very grim for the company by 1765 they are masters of North India and being a corporation answerable only to their shareholders what do they do they do what corporations do anywhere they assets trip and in literally five years Bengal the richest province of the Mughal Empire is so ruthlessly plundered by these unregulated traders many of whom were in their early twenties these young men run around forcing their goods against their will on people putting their Indian rivals out of business old manner of shenanigans a shipping home every year some of them a million pounds a million and a half pounds so reversing the H patterns of trade which since Roman times has had gold coming from the West from Europe and going to pay for the luxuries and mazing crafts and arts of India suddenly it's the other way around the companies come up with a brilliant new business model in that you now conquer India you tax Indians and you use the profits of that tax to buy goods in India and then you sell those Goods home to to London to sell they haven't cost you anything they've just cost you the price of occupying and paying for your army so this business model is spectacular the company becomes the richest institution in Europe it controls about a quarter of British trade within a few years of this acquisition of Bengal Bihar and Orissa it builds half of London's docks its army grows to 200,000 it's sort of by the end of the 18th century it's literally double the size in the British Army a private army run by a corporation based still in that one office block in the City of London and these are the different regiments that begin springing up this huge massive it is the largest army modern army in Asia and it's owned not by a nation state but a trading corporation it's an extraordinary story and because we've grown up with this because we've heard about these syndicate we've heard about sea boys but we never somehow thought it through that this is a corporation this is ExxonMobil this is ITT this is Facebook this is Google and it now controls not not cyberspace but the whole of South Asia British officials like James Todd here on his elephants fan out across India taxing measuring doing land assessment and a whole new business model growth so that they start growing opium in Bengal Bihar and Orissa and in the largest narco operation in history selling it illegally in China now the Chinese won't open imported in China as much as your government here once crack cocaine were pouring in from Colombia and it is illegal but the British organised ways of smuggling by night and with the profits of this narco trade from their new base Hong Kong which they've just conquered another East India Company acquisition they then buy Chinese tea which they shipped to America this is the Boston Tea Party it's of course the East India Company tea that is poured in Boston Harbor so provoking a series of events here which I'm very little importance to Britain but some minor colony thirteen colonies that no one ever heard of disappear it all very unfortunate but it's the East India Company that is responsible so it spans the globe this is the flag also influences a flag of some nation that comes a little bit later these did accompany rebuilds its headquarters now into this grand sort of backing Palace style enormous headquarters in Leadenhall Street here is the directors room from which the whole of India is controlled today its control from Race Course Road then it was controlled from here in that North Street the docks of London three quarters of them are built by the East India Company and all the shipbuilding look at here or the East Indian being built in black wall and Brunswick dock near Blackpool and if this is a massive international trading corporation with tentacles like an octopus all over the world and it is the first time in history that whole series of questions are raised which are questions which we still have failed to find an answer to today namely how does a nation-state control a corporation whose profits an annual turnover is greater than those of many nation states and in addition in the case of this India Company it has an army twice the size of your own army these are still issues which we face today which we have no clear answer to and there are many strange echoes of modern events in the history of East India Company so just as these companies could appear so monolithically massively powerful they also have this strange vulnerability dependent on their profit line which is in a sense the heartbeat of a corporate entity so in 1765 the Dewani is handed over the tax act he begins by 1770 the company has assets tricked so spectacularly that it has effectively throttled the goose that laid the golden eggs and in 1770 a famine comes along it's it's a famine that caused the famine it's a natural event but they don't do anything to create famine relief works or provide soup kitchens some individual British officials do but by and large there's just massive negligence as 1 million Bengalis died a fifth of the population of Bengal some estimates were Warren Hastings thinks it's a third it's probably too high whatever it is it's a massive horrific death toll there are corpses all over mocchi de baad half of Calcutta is lying in the ditch dying the Ganges is clogged with corpses dogs are eating human bodies and it's a kind of sickening and dreadful sight and it's too big a screw up to keep quiet and the British press begins to learn about it and you begin to get horrific accounts of starving millions entering for the first time the Western media and then coming here to America where it becomes the central part of patriot literature forgotten today but very much there at the time because the Patchett's were the Tea Tax and everything else believed that the East India Company responsible for these horrors in India might be unleashed in the 13 colonies and it's a bit John Dickinson that the pen of the Patras writes these long screeds out of Boston saying we must not allow the East India Company to set foot in the United States so this so begins this process familiar to us today where the East India Company has to go to the central government because the not only in that in height of arrogance they for two years they managed to enforce the revenues at their highest level and they send out the C poised into the villages and just hang anyone who can't pay their taxes but the but they can't keep this up for long and in 1773 the profits of the company go off the off the cliff because everyone is dying starving and no one can pay taxes for two years they managed to force them into paying tax it's simply no money left by 1773 the profit that the pulse the pulse of estudio company profits sinks and the easterly company has to go to the Bank of England newly formed institution to borrow half a million pounds a week later they're back trying to borrow another million then another two million after that at that point the bank wing says we haven't got it and Parliament is recalled because unlike Lehman Brothers these dinner company really is too big to fail Parliament has recalled and you begin to get the first time in world history when an ailing corporation is bailed out by a central bank in return for regulating that corporation and partly privatizing it partly nationalizing it so begins the final stage of this dance between the the power of the corporation and the power of the state it was the East India Company which invented corporate lobbying in 716 97 less than a hundred years into its history the companies found bribing MPs by offering them its own shares and the governor of the eastern company goes to the Tower of London so does the Lord privy councillor but by this stage again there is the the the the state in a sense reaches the lost power although forty percent of of MPs in Parliament now have east india company shares although many of them are actually returned East India Company may Bob's the scale of the losses are too much and you have this process by which the in the case of the East India Company the state reassert control there are further scandals the impeachment of Warren Hastings by than Burke and then finally in 1857 the see poise of the company revoked unmask and put this man the last emperor bahadur shah zafar back onto the throne this is followed by the worst atrocities that the british ever committed in india infinitely worse and infinitely more bloody than the Jillian wala bug which is remembered so well today and whose anniversary is this year there the losses in 1857 to eight are about what you don't know but hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians are murdered and again this is too big a screw-up to be covered up hangings all over horrible scenes in Kanpur where the captured Indian civilians are made to lick up the blood of the murdered member sarbs it's also brutal and hideous and by the end after they go into Delhi and recaptured Delhi and Massacre every man over the age of 16 parliament reassert control and as this cartoon and punch shows you can see the legend who East India House in the back being blown from the mouth of a cannon this is a reference to the East India Company's past Ralph's trapping mutinous see boys two cannons and blowing cannonballs through them and here you can see being blown up along with East India Company has avarice blundering nepotism misgovernment and supine --less so in 1858 East India Company is wound up with says the times less fast than a regional railway bankruptcy and the East India Company Navy is disbanded the army is absorbed into the British Army and the raj begins we remember the Raj in Britain it's an obsession we have every Sunday night some lovely drama with smiling Maharaja's and elephants swishing their tails and croquet on the on the sheep on the similar Lord's and all this sort of stuff but what people forget is that behind the only ninety years of the raj 1858 to 1947 lies the much longer period 1599 - 1858 200 years which is the bit of the iceberg below the waterline we've forgotten when the British conquest of India was a corporate affair in the trial of Warren Hastings the Lord Chancellor Dan's up at the bar and I'll just finish this evening with his words at the end of this trial of the East the only time the East India Company is really put on trial for what it's done to India by Parliament and it's a mess they actually impeach the wrong guy Warren Hastings is one of the few decent men who joined the senior company at this period and in fact that they he gets off because he's far less guilty than most of the other people in the entire company but as the Lord Chancellor says standing at the bar at the trial of Warren Hastings he says corporations have neither bodies to be punished no souls to be condemned they therefore do as they like thank you that needless to say was absolutely brilliant woody what got you interested in in Indian history and Mughal history and how did you sort of come across all of this I mean so I ended up in India aged eighteen by a series of axes I've actually went to go to Iraq and thank God sanim is sane closed down the British school of archaeology to which I got a fellowship saying the nest of British spies but she probably was I'd never got there so I didn't discover so I came with a friend to India and I sort of never got out again and it's where I've SAT all of the research that you've done what's been the source of it is it British Museum rich library in in archives so the the biggest problem in this book which took six years and draws on everything I've ever really done it's sort of putting together all my work over many years big problem is that Eastern accompanied for all its faults was this sort of magnificently efficient bureaucracy everything was in triplicate and one copy of everything got sent back to London so there are 35 miles of East India Company documents in the British Library alone and then what you and that's not all because actually there's far more in the National Archives of India which has got the headquarters documents in from Bengal from Fort William and the difference between the two is rather like what you've got in London is what a university student tells his parents about what he's up to its university what you've got in Bengal is what's going on at universities so everything they don't want the governors and the directors to know is usually recorded somewhere in the Indian papers which are in the National Archives so if you're canny in your use of the ones in Delhi and that in a sense that's what's kept me in Delhi most of all in that it's in the last four books will be nice in their company books they've all been drawn from this much underutilized like anything what to do with Indian bureaucracy it's quite difficult to get in there you have to jump over fences and fill out forms and all the rest of it but once you're in there it's all that often badly catalogued often late but it's it comes and it's no one else very few other researchers have spent huge amounts of time in there on top of which you also have all the person stuff from the Mogul side that's now scattered around a lot of it's in the National Archives - on the on the first floor but in others I mean it's wonderful stuff in some obscure places like talk between Jaipur and wouldn t where there's magnificent oriental library with lot of stuff again no one ever goes to see and in fact you have to get the Sunda Raja and all sorts of get Marlon or such people in on the act to get permission to use this cuz they always try and stop you using it and but once you do get in there and you do get this stuff copied or photographed you could take it home and I work with this wonderful character called Bruce whanau who just sort of moves into the house for six months at a time and translates all the stuff in impeccable gorgeous English you can read all this eighteenth-century scribal notations and and at six years later yeah you do you this whole story really about the cooperation just going back I mean give us a sense of what would have happened if Britain hadn't discovered India what the Industrial Revolution happened anyway was this sort of did this power the Industrial Revolution so there is it's a it's long been a theory in nationalist Indian historians if this was the case it's now Fran Don I'm not an economic historian primarily so I can only tell you what other people have analyzed this is what started East India Company was a lot was basically sorry what started the Industrial Revolution was a series of mechanical inventions like the spinning jenny which actually had nothing to do with India and the story which I'm telling in this book which ends in 1803 is a very different story to what happens next which is in the mid 19th century around the time the company's being disbanded you get the massive growth of textile industries in the north of England and then that's the other story which Gandhi is the final point of where India is seen as a market for British textiles the exact opposite of what had been the case in the 18th century when these tinder company made its money by selling by selling Indian textiles and this is something where I mean we're gonna have a debate with Shashi on this in Toronto and this is something where I actually I agree on most things and we have a and we have a very very similar vision of this extractive plundering organization but where I think Josh's chronology is wrong is he says that that the company was involved in in the imported British textiles and that's just it chronologically it's wrong the big importing takes place after the company has been one down in the 1850s you know you again talk about how big corporations which are not regulated really then take over not just the economic activity but the socio-political and primarily the thinking activity when you look at that today with the Facebook's and the googles of the world and we've seen how perhaps they have been instrumental pretty much like the CIA used to be in regime change or at least instrumenting regimes here how do you see that playing out and what's the lesson or is there a lesson that we can look at to history in the way that you've documented it so as I see it there's a this advance between the state of the corporation and sometimes as in a tango one partners in the lead and sometimes as the tango the other partner is leading and dominating the dance and so you have moments in East India Company history where there are so many east east india company shareholders sitting in Parliament and so many returned East India Company men with massive shareholdings who's held fortune depends on Parliament helping least India company on its way either by military assistance or by extending its charter or giving it Napoles or whatever it is that they that it seems that Parliament is held hostage by the company and you can see cases in Indian history in modern Indian relationship between the Congress party and various corporates between the BJP and various corporates and as equally you can see in modern American history I mean just to lay it out quickly 1953 the anglo-persian oil company under Mossadegh the first democratically elected leader in Iran plans to nationalize oil interest in Iran mi6 and CIA under lobbying from this company effected coup Mossadegh has brought down murdered and we enter the spiral which has taken us to where we are with Iran today two years later United Fruit which controls 42 percent of agricultural land in Guatemala United Fruit lobbies the CIA because a new socialist governments come to path in Guatemala that wants to do land reforms and strip the United Fruit of a lot of its land a coup takes place bringing about the phrase Banana Republic which is born that year about this 1977 ITT threatened by Salvador end is Chile and they produce a coup IND is brought down a horrible hunter is put in its place with massive human rights abuses Bush is America we don't know the full story yet it's too soon but steam coal in his book private empire makes a very strong case for the influence of Exxon Mobil during that whole George Bush neocon regime with oil interests in Iraq obviously very much at the center of considerations alongside American interests in the Middle East such as Israel and so on so we have this in this you know you don't have to be a crazy anti-globalization socialist revolutionary to accept that in real the real world corporate interests exist that lobbying groups exist Exxon Mobil for example has 20 senators on its books as as lobbyists 10 rubba Coons 10 Democrats and they have a job to do they Lobby the government for the interests of the corporation this is this is a real thing that is that lobbyist lobbyist lobbying happens what these dinner company shows is that in a sense the importance of regulation so that the corporation does not overwhelm the state and this is something I mean I didn't plan this because this book has been something I've been working out for years six years ago but I mean I'm total is about Warren and her campaign speeches has been bringing this up this held business question of how do you regulate these enormous companies facebook good each one of these has a as its annual turnover a larger sum of money than if it were a nation-state would make it you know Exxon Mobil is the 14th richest country in the world so it was a country and so a big multinational corporation has a particular set of dangers to the state and it also plays particular set of games much as the East India Company did there's a moment in the very early on in the 17th century when the Nawabs of the Karnataka pissed off that Madras is doing a lot of stuff without without paying its taxes or giving its end honor to the Novica Matic they're not sending tribute they're not after the doing all sorts of things without the Commission and that he arrives with an army and the company sends out nikola Manucci this italian con man who's ended up at the end of his career in India and speaks perfect Persian and he sent out as the envoi to take a and he simply says well you know the East India Company can go elsewhere we could set up a headquarters in further up the coast in panna cotta we can set it up in Bengal we can move to Bombay we don't have to stay here so the same sort of game that Amazon was playing last year about its headquarters wasn't gonna be in Seattle it wasn't gonna be New York was gonna be in DC is what the East India Company was doing in the 16th century so there is a direct line because they are the same beast and the lessons of these two India Company remain incredibly valid today so and why did why did the British Parliament allow the company then to close was it because no profits the one being paid back and therefore the government took it over or do they just want to administer because not that they did any better a job than the East India Company 1857 is this big it's a massive up you know hundreds of thousands killed lots of British men and women and what supported London is the Met is the British men and women who massacred and the customers and you know major military campaigns then as now you know are hugely expensive things that drain the richest countries of their wealth and so there is it's it's seen that this is no way to run an empire you can't have a bunch of directors 6,000 miles away controlling stuffing so it's wound up and the stake exhibit does the does the British government do any better this is again a discussion one could have Shashi would say no actually would say they're both totally extractive I would disagree I think the we was refreshing about these didn't company doesn't have any can't about building the railways or you know civilizing mission or anything it is quite clear it's about profit it didn't pretend ever to be anything else why do people join these two the company the same reason people joined goldman sachs today you know become rich and in a sense there's nothing wrong with that the thing we haven't said which is also important is that east india company is Britain's biggest employer it provides huge amounts of wealth in honest trade you know it employs traits sail makers shipbuilders barrel makers hundreds of thousands of people are supported by this but why don't they then why did your ancestors or olives ancestors then sort of ship out to India if there's so much of opportunity in the UK why did they have to come out to India now don't bully poor Bengalis like us Oh Mike Gillis or whatever they did so the important point to realize about poor Bengalis eat us out of house and home the important point to make we're beggars and you've just reminded me about this which I'll be saving up sad joy is this whole business of collaborations and why does the East India Company win at the end of my period so we've seen in the 1740s these new military techniques are brought in sea poisoned up and for 20 years the East India Company has and the French East India Company have the run of things but by 1780 both Tipu and the Marathas are caught up they also recruit see boys who also wear red coats who fight in squares who have socket bandits there are elevating screws on the car the Murata cannon the baton leaves any company and so what is it that makes the difference at that point between 1780 and 1803 and the answer is ultimately the the or particularly the finances the my worries the descendants of the jug at sets the big Banaras bankers the bankers and partner ultimately they backed the company rather than the rather than the Marathas or typical Thailand this is a crucial point why do they do that they do it because basically the company which is a corporation speak the same language as the bankers who are finances and while the company may loot and may plunder it understands the importance of repaying debts with interest on time obeying contracts having courts that can enforce contracts all these things are the basis for a world in which finances bankers and businesses can flourish and operate and make profits and the Indian financial world chooses to support the companies the least worst option if you are mahadji scindia and you need to raise money and your bankers that pay up you call in the bankers and you hand them up you hang them upside down until they reveal where their pot of cash is in their roof in their Afton's the company doesn't do that they speak the same language and there we pay your debt so and the same is also true of the Bengalis as a whole and there is a whole new class of Bengali when in the old Nawab II world of Sir Roger de la isla verde con you had guys coming in from Persia and the mere Jaffa was a major foe was an Arab from the Jeff me accustomed was a second-generation Persian immigrant what happens with Cornwallis's land reforms in the 1780s is for the first time you get the beginning of the bad Rollag coming up the old states are split up and hindu wealth a new wealthy Bengali Hindu class the two goes the Debs the mullux buy the land and through this in become invested in the success of the company and this while I give this lecture in England I emphasized the plunder of India and the and the things that the Brits don't know I'm going next month to give this in Indian and I think the thing that will surprise the Indians not the plunder because you know that already shashi been telling you about it the last two years if nothing else the stuff that I think people will be surprised about is the degree to which the bankers and then later the upper Hindu Bengali middle class collaborate because ultimately they're never more than two thousand white British administrators of this period 2000 and the trick they pull off is that these two thousand administrators borrow money from hindu bankers to pay hindu mercenaries the z-boys at 80% Rajput and Brahman and to build up 200 armies of 200,000 strong which defeat other Indian armies how does that trick take place ultimately at some level while the primary cause is technological military strategic diplomatic there is the cold question enough people benefit from the kind of world the company is creating a world which doesn't have the old in the world a world which doesn't really have the moguls a world which is super attractive but also has many opportunities so for example if you're a Parsi you can jump aboard the opium industry and make a fortune in in in Hong Kong so all the great party dynasties become part of this thing if you are a good jarate ship trader you can go and trade with East Africa so there are alongside the unequivocal truth of the drain of wealth the plunder of India the asset stripping there is another world that becomes more and more important where you have the rule of law the rise of middle class and bankers who are doing well out of this sufficiently to choose ultimately to back this lot rather than the scindia's the hulka's tapu Hyder Ali and the other options and that is the bit which in a sense is is the dark story that India doesn't really want to know any more than the Brits don't really want to know about that plundering and it's somewhere between those two truths that you get the reason this will happen on that very happy note should you always to know more about this as Lilly is happy to sign the book he's going to be there just to say a big thank you to each one of you it's it's you know from a doctor two rats together yesterday thank you to everybody thank you all and see you all next year if not in Boulder or in Toronto

Channel: Asia Society

Views: 74,043

Rating: 4.8161225 out of 5

Keywords: asia society new york, video, complete, arts, books, indian history, jlf, jaipur literature festival, william dalrymple

Id: nUeyOEY9oWg

Length: 59min 51sec (3591 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 04 2019