Key Points:
According to Historian William Dalrymple, the East India Company rose to power through building relations with Indian merchants and filling the political void after Mughal Empire's decline.
Despite having largely Indian army, the EIC defeated Indian rulers with financial backing from local money lenders.
Dalrymple draws parallels between East India Company's rise and modern industrial powers like Ambani and Adani.
HOW DID mere dozens of Britishers from a private corporation come to rule millions of Indians in the 18th century? For what seems a puzzling question from the premise has an equally complex answer to it. Historians, authors, and experts have tried to answer this for decades since India’s independence in 1947. One of them is British Indologist William Dalrymple. In a podcast episode of Argumentative Indians, the Scottish historian spoke about his 2019 book The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company with the host Yajur Arora.
The conversation focused on the East India Company’s (EIC’s) rise from a mere group of merchants into an effective ruler of the subcontinent. He also addressed the question of why large numbers of Indians served or tolerated the company’s expansion.
Dalrymple stressed how vulnerable India has been to invasion from the northwest throughout centuries. “But the most damaging and arguably the most transformative invasion came in an utterly different way,” he said. “It came not from the northwest, but from the coast and not by mighty warrior charging down on horseback, but from a bunch of portly traders with beer bellies and wigs and stockings, who somehow managed to get Indians to fight other Indians.”
The East India Company was founded in 1600 — lasting far longer than the formal British Raj that followed the 1857 uprising. In the Argumentative Indian podcast episode, Dalrymple repeatedly emphasized that the early phase of the EIC was corporate rather than national. He said, “The [British] Raj actually doesn’t even last 100 years. It lasted 90 years from 1858 to 1947. But the East India Company lasts from the period of Queen Elizabeth right through to 1857 — 250 years. And it’s amazingly absent from our consciousness.”
Dalrymple argued that the Company’s early expansion could be credited more to commercial reliability than the military force. Indian money-lenders and merchants found that the British Company paid off its debts on time with interest, while many Indian rulers did not. “If you were a money lender and you went to the court of Tipu or to the Mughal, you’d probably be hung upside down,” Dalrymple said. “But the Company understood the importance of commercial contracts.” The British corporation founding common interests with Indian merchants was the first stepping stone in turning the local’s perception towards them.
The Scottish historian notes that by the late 18th century, the EIC’s army in India had grown to roughly 200,000 men, which was double the size of the British Army at the time. Out of this massive local force, Dalrymple notes that 95 per cent were Indians, largely Brahmins and Rajputs recruited from the present day Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. What was more striking was that the Company often paid its troops with money borrowed from Indian merchants and bankers, particularly Jain and Marwari financiers in Bengal.
Dalrymple argued that the political turmoil following the decline of the Mughal Empire created a void. After Aurangzeb’s death in 1707 and Nader Shah’s 1739 invasion of Delhi, the Mughal rule was devastated. The fall of the Empire was marked with proliferation of Regional powers, creating what Dalrymple calls “the Anarchy.”
To fill the void of one great ruler in the Indian subcontinent, the advanced European military techniques gave small but well-trained forces a decisive edge to expand in the region. The Scottish Indologist points out the critical window of roughly two to four decades in the mid-18th century, during which the EIC defeated much larger traditional armies like in the infamous Battle of Plassey in 1757 and Battle of Buxar in 1764.
At Plassey, Robert Clive, originally sent to fight the French, defeated Siraj ud-Daulah after the powerful Jagat Seth banking family offered financial incentives to remove the Nawab. According to Dalrymple, multiple accounts from that time portray Siraj as erratic and violent. The Company’s hold in the area got stronger with a victory in Buxar. It was soon collecting revenue in Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa as diwani, giving them control of some of the richest provinces.
The question of why there wasn’t an organized civil movement, such as the violent rebellions witnessed in other colonized countries, is central to Dalrymple’s discourse. The historian notes that there were fewer than 250 white employees in the EIC at the time of Plassey, while the majority of its army consisted of locals. He offers several explanations behind this local subordination.
First and maybe the most important reason was that the sepoys were paid double or triple the wages offered by most Indian rulers. Another reason, according to Dalrymple, was that the idea of nationalism had not developed as the Indian subcontinent had either been fragmented or ruled by outsiders for a large part of its history. He argues that the idea of India as a nation among the general public only developed in 1920s and 40s. The third reason behind the collaboration between Indians and the Company was that the British-controlled areas like Calcutta offered practical advantage to the army in the post-Mughal era.
However, this does not disregard that there was no formidable resistance at all. According to Dalrymple, Tipu Sultan was regarded by the British as their most serious threat on their expansion mission. The 1857 uprising, remembered as the first war of independence, nearly destroyed the Company, but the efforts remained fragmented. A single, organized civic or nation movement in the 18th-19th century was largely missing.
Throughout the conversation with the host Yajur Arora, Dalrymple drew parallels between the rise of the East India Company and present-day corporate powers like Adani, Ambani, Tatas, Musk, Google etc. The EIC, he argued, were practicing corporate techniques that are still prevalent today like lobbying, aligning with political parties, and influencing state policies for their commercial interests. Dalrymples said, “Just like a big corporation today like Adani or the Tatas, or an ExxonMobil, the East India Company found ways of actually manipulating the home government and manipulating the parliament.”
Taking some questions from the public after his discussion, the Scottish historian agreed with an audience member’s perspective that “follow the money” remains a key factor behind understanding power and politics. He notes that while modern corporations do not have private armies on the scale of the EIC, the larger pattern of crony capitalism still remains.
Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana is often remembered for his popular quote: “Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” That rings true in the discussion and evaluation of the British Raj as well. These observations by Dalrymple raise difficult questions for contemporary times. Are Indian citizens today above the subservient attitudes that once directly led to the rise of the East India Company? Do large industrialists still shape governmental decisions? Why does a sustained, organized civic engagement against large powers still remain relatively rare in Indian society? The study of our nation’s history offers some answers, but the experts believe that the subordination and collaboration of locals with the large powers have not entirely disappeared.
Suggested Reading:
Subscribe to our channels on YouTube and WhatsApp
Download our app on Play Store
.jpg){kind=link}