The Anarchy

The Relentless Rise of the East India Company

By: William Dalrymple

Narrated by: Sid Sagar

Bloomsbury presents The Anarchy by William Dalrymple, read by Sid Sagar.

THE TOP 5 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S BEST BOOKS OF 2019
THE TIMES HISTORY BOOK OF THE YEAR
FINALIST FOR THE CUNDILL HISTORY PRIZE 2020
LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2019
A FINANCIAL TIMES, OBSERVER, DAILY TELEGRAPH, WALL STREET JOURNAL AND TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR

‘Dalrymple is a superb historian with a visceral understanding of India … A book of beauty’ – Gerard DeGroot, The Times

In August 1765 the East India Company defeated the young Mughal emperor and forced him to establish a new administration in his richest provinces. Run by English merchants who collected taxes using a ruthless private army, this new regime saw the East India Company transform itself from an international trading corporation into something much more unusual: an aggressive colonial power in the guise of a multinational business.

William Dalrymple tells the remarkable story of the East India Company as it has never been told before, unfolding a timely cautionary tale of the first global corporate power.©2019 William Dalrymple (P)2019 Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

Critic reviews

An energetic pageturner that marches from the counting house on to the battlefield, exploding patriotic myths along the way (Maya Jasanoff)

A tour de force ***** (Anne de Courcy)

Magnificent … The Anarchy explodes myths that have accreted around the history of the Company like barnacles on the hulls of its ships ... Dalrymple shines a forensic light on the knotty historical relationship between commercial and imperial power (John McAleer)

Dalrymple has been at the forefront of the new wave of popular history, consistently producing work that engages with a wider audience through writerly craft, an emphasis on characters and their agency, evocative description of place and time, and the inclusion of long-neglected perspectives … The book’s real achievement is to take readers to an important and neglected period of British and south Asian history, and to make their trip their not just informative but colourful (Jason Burke)

Gloriously opulent … India is a sumptuous place. Telling its story properly demands lush language, not to mention sensitivity towards the country’s passionate complexity. Dalrymple is a superb historian with a visceral understanding of India … A book of beauty (Gerard DeGroot)

It is well-trodden territory but Dalrymple ... brings to it erudition, deep insight and an entertaining style

Combining extensive research, judicious analysis and an acceptable level of outrage, Dalrymple’s compelling account will cement his status as the most widely read British writer on India since Kipling … A brave and stirring narrative of India’s eighteenth-century fragmentation (John Keay)

[A] rampaging, brilliant, passionate history … Dalrymple gives us every sword-slash, every scam, every groan and battle cry. He has no rival as a narrative historian of the British in India … A gripping tale of bloodshed and deceit, of unimaginable opulence and intolerable starvation ... shot through with an unappeasable moral passion

‘Masterful … Dalrymple has been for some years one of the most eloquent and assiduous chroniclers of Indian history. With this new work, he sounds a minatory note … Dalrymple has done a great service in not just writing an eminently readable history of eighteenth-century India, but in reflecting on how so much of it serves as a warning for our own time’ (Stuart Kelly)

A magnificently readable book, deeply researched and richly atmospheric, written with a historian’s understanding of power and a novelistic eye for detail ***** (Francis Wheen)

A rip-roaring tale of wild adventure, amorality, feckless greed and despicable behaviour … His best history to date (Louise Nicholson)

[Dalrymple] is a terrifically good storyteller. He makes the reader see how events unfold and observe the personalities up close. He is widely read both in the primary sources and the historical scholarship. As a result, The Anarchy is one of the best books on Indian history published in a long time

Flawed

There are 3-4 fabulous chapters that are insightful, informative and analytical, Unfortunately the rest are just chronicles of battles and palace intrigue. I came away with no sense of how the company affected economic and social life in India; sense of what the company’s remittances meant to the Crown; no sense of whether it’s ultimate domination of the subcontinent sowed the seed of anti-colonialism. Also, I found gratuitos and unhelpful the endless descriptions of torture, dismemberment, rape, flailing and butchery.

The modern equivalent of these sums...

if i ever have to hear that phrase again... give us the rough parameters of conversion rates over this period once at the beginning rather than repeating it so tediously.

won’t please a historian or historical sociologist but a good listen with some colorful details.

Dalrymple Does It Again

Wonderfully written book wonderfully narrated. Could not stop listening. Much food for thought here comparing and contrasting to today...

Excellent history of how the East India Co conquered India

This was well read and well written. A very good history. It is a salutary tale of corporate overage, and the dangers of a badly divided country.

narrator needs to change

the mispronounced names are very very irritating. the content is fabulous, it's dalrymple after all and his writings and storytelling are superb. if you have an Indian origin guy narrating, one would presume that it's for the sake of pronouncing the Indian names correctly.if that's not the case then get any other narrator for the book. but if you have an Indian origin narrator and he garbles them so badly one would wonder why he is chosen at all. cannot pronounce city names correctly, let alone names of characters weather it be maratha ,Mughal or south indian, calls the ganga as ganja(bald man). makes for a very jarring listening experience. I have bought the book and I will read it rather than torture myself to this narration. I also had to reduce the speed to 90% to understand the content. and this is from a guy who usually listens to content at 120% speed. superb book and content but please have a different narrator