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This is a very informative history of how the British East India Company colonized India. It begins with the formation of the company in 1599, but the crucial time period on which most of the book is spent is from about 1750 to 1803, when the British took advantage of the implosion of the Mughal Empire to take over first Bengal, then other Mughal territories, and finally other Indian kingdoms entirely, through a combination of war, financial maneuvers and diplomacy. In some ways the fact that it was a private company rather than a government doing all this feels almost incidental, as the East India Company was more or less a government (hiring its own armies, coining its own money, collecting taxes, etc.), with the exception that milking as much out of its subjects as possible was actually its overt goal, with all that wealth being taken back to England.
This isn’t a time period about which much has been written, considering the massive ramifications and the fact that English-speakers’ involvement would lead one to expect these events to be well-known in the English-speaking world. Dalrymple covers the many maneuverings, battles, atrocities, and personalities involved in detail. It’s very much a political/military/diplomatic history, giving little sense of what daily life in India was like, particularly for Indians, but even with a fairly narrow focus it’s a chunky read. Dalrymple draws from a wide variety of sources, including sources in Persian, Urdu, Bengali and Tamil, which makes the book feel much more complete than most stories of colonial takeover – although I think he might use slightly more, or more varied, sources in English, at no point did the book leave me in doubt about the goals, feelings or activities of the Indian rulers and their generals. There’s probably around as much information on Indian affairs as British ones.
All that said, I didn’t love this book. Perhaps because so many important figures drop in and out (between deaths and, for the British, retiring or being recalled to England, most leaders don’t seem to last more than about 10 years), and because there’s so much political and military ground to cover, the book is a bit dry even though Dalrymple is clearly doing his best to make an engaging narrative of it, and doesn’t ever get too bogged down in mundane detail. There’s a lot of atrocity: famines, war, and a great deal of torture. And perhaps most relevantly regarding the book’s quality, Dalrymple seems to take somewhat black-and-white views of the personalities involved. Most of them come across as villainous, which almost always seems justified by their activities, but I couldn’t quite get behind his admiration for Warren Hastings, or distaste for Philip Francis on the apparently sole basis of his enmity toward Hastings. No matter how admirable Hastings might have been in his personal life, or how much true attachment he felt toward India, he nevertheless presided over a part of its destruction.
In the end, this is a valuable book, very informative, professionally put together and well-sourced, with an extensive bibliography, useful glossary and many color plates showing relevant Indian and European artwork. All around, an admirable work. Nonetheless, I breathed a sigh of relief to be done with it.
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