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The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire QUOTES

The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire QUOTES

1 " Ultimately it was the East India Company, not the Marathas or the Sultans of Mysore, that the financiers across India decided to back. "

― William Dalrymple , The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire

2 " Corporations have neither bodies to be punished, nor souls to be condemned, they therefore do as they like. Edward, First Baron Thurlow "

― William Dalrymple , The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire

3 " The master of Delhi, they knew, was always the master of Hindustan. "

― William Dalrymple , The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire

4 " The reforms Cornwallis initiated on his return to Calcutta further consolidated this position. In America, Britain had lost its colonies not to Native Americans, but to the descendants of European settlers. Cornwallis was determined to make sure that a settled colonial class never emerged in India to undermine British rule as it had done, to his own humiliation, in America. By this period one in three British men in India were cohabiting with Indian women, and there were believed to be more than 11,000 Anglo-Indians in the three Presidency towns. "

― William Dalrymple , The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire

5 " But it was the great temple of Sringeri that always received his most generous patronage, as a stash of correspondence discovered within the temple in the 1950s bears witness. Tipu put on record his horror at the damage done to the temple by a Maratha Pindari raiding party during a Maratha invasion of Mysore: ‘People who have sinned against such a holy place are sure to suffer the consequences of their misdeeds,’ wrote Tipu. ‘Those "

― William Dalrymple , The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire

6 " India’s transition to colonialism took place under a for-profit corporation, which existed entirely for the purpose of enriching its investors. "

― William Dalrymple , The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire

7 " The bankers and merchants of Bengal who sustained Siraj ud-Daula’s regime had finally turned against him and united with the disaffected parts of his own military; now they sought to bring in the mercenary troops of the East India Company to help depose him. This was something quite new in Indian history: a group of Indian financiers plotting with an international trading corporation to use its own private security force to overthrow a regime they saw threatening the income they earned from trade.60 This was not part of any imperial masterplan. In fact, the EIC men on the ground were ignoring their strict instructions from London, which were only to repulse French attacks and avoid potentially ruinous wars with their Mughal hosts. But seeing opportunities for personal enrichment as well as political and economic gain for the Company, they dressed up the conspiracy in colours that they knew would appeal to their masters and presented the coup as if it were primarily aimed at excluding the French from Bengal for ever.* "

― William Dalrymple , The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire

8 " Her conclusion was that the Mughal state was unusually extractive and appropriated 56.7 per cent of the total produce. Her research focused on five north Indian provinces: Agra, Delhi, Lahore, Allahabad and Avadh. The total "

― William Dalrymple , The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire

9 " Before long, Mir Jafar and the Jagat Seths had significantly raised their offer, and were now promising the participants Rs28 million, or £3 million sterling – the entire annual revenue of Bengal – for their help overthrowing Siraj, and a further Rs110,000 a month to pay for Company troops. In addition, the EIC was to get zamindari – landholding – rights near Calcutta, a mint in the town and confirmation of duty-free trade. By "

― William Dalrymple , The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire

10 " The Bengali poet Ganga Ram in his Maharashta Purana gave a fuller picture of the terror they inspired. ‘The people on earth were filled with sin,’ he wrote, ‘and there was no worship of Rama and Krishna. Day and night people took their pleasure with the wives of others.’ Finally, he wrote, Shiva ordered Nandi to enter the body of the Maratha king Shahu. ‘Let him send his agents, that sinners and evil doers be punished.’29 Soon after: The Bargis [Marathas] began to plunder the villages and all the people fled in terror. Brahmin pandits fled, taking with them loads of manuscripts; goldsmiths fled with the scales and weights; and fishermen with their nets and lines – all fled. The people fled in all directions; who could count their numbers? All who lived in villages fled when they heard the name of the Bargis. Ladies of good family, who had never before set a foot on a road fled from the Bargis with baskets on their heads. And land owning Rajputs, who had gained their wealth with the sword, threw down their swords and fled. And sadhus and monks fled, riding on litters, their bearers carrying their baggage on their shoulders; and many farmers fled, their seed for next year’s crops on the backs of their bullocks, and ploughs on their shoulders. And pregnant women, all but unable to walk, began their labour on the road and were delivered there. There were some people who stood in the road and asked of all who passed where the Bargis were. Everyone replied – I have not seen them with my own eyes. But seeing everyone flees, I flee also. Then suddenly the Bargis swept down with a great shout and surrounded the people in their fields. They snatched away gold and silver, rejecting everything else. Of some people they cut off the hand, of some the nose and ears; some they killed outright. They dragged away the most beautiful women, who tried to flee, and tied ropes to their fingers and necks. When one had finished with a woman, another took her, while the raped women screamed for help. The Bargis after committing all foul, sinful and bestial acts, let these women go. "

― William Dalrymple , The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire

11 " reached the plateau beyond without encountering opposition. He then seized by assault Tipu’s second-largest city, Bangalore. Here he was joined by his Hyderabadi ally, Mir Alam, who brought with him 18,000 Mughal cavalry. "

― William Dalrymple , The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire

12 " After two months of resting, feasting and military parades with their Maratha and Hyderabadi allies, Cornwallis sent his men off to begin besieging Tipu’s mountain fortresses that guarded the remaining passes through the ghats. They started with those commanding the Nandi Hills, overlooking Bangalore, and the fearsome fort of Savandurga, perched on a near-vertical peak and believed to be one of the most impregnable fortresses in the Deccan. "

― William Dalrymple , The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire

13 " The treaty was finally signed, and the two young princes – Abdul Khaliq, who was eight, and Muizuddin, aged five – handed over to Cornwallis on 18 March 1792. The boys were taken off by elephant to Madras, which they appeared in general to like, though they clearly did not enjoy being made to sit through entire performances of Handel’s Messiah and Judas Maccabaeus.58 Having created a sensation in Madras society with their dignity, intelligence and politeness, they were sent back two years later when Tipu delivered the final tranche of his indemnity payment. "

― William Dalrymple , The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire

14 " The Company had gambled everything – and won. "

― William Dalrymple , The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire

15 " malevolent "

― William Dalrymple , The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire

16 " began to emerge as moneyed landowners to whom the Company could devolve local responsibility. So even as the old Mughal aristocracy was losing high office, a new Hindu service gentry came to replace them at the top of the social ladder in Company-ruled Bengal. This group of emergent Bengali bhadralok (upper-middle classes) represented by families such as the Tagores, the Debs and the Mullicks, tightened their grip on mid-level public office in Calcutta, as well as their control of agrarian peasant production and the trade of the bazaars. "

― William Dalrymple , The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire

17 " On one occasion Aliverdi Khan told his elderly general, Mir Jafar Khan, that the Europeans were like a hive of bees, ‘of whose honey you might reap benefit, but if you disturbed their hive they would sting you to death’. "

― William Dalrymple , The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire

18 " The Company’s ever-growing Indian empire could not have been achieved without the political and economic support of regional power groups and local communities. The "

― William Dalrymple , The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire

19 " there could be little legitimacy for this general who had had his own Nawab murdered and who now sat in what one Company observer called ‘a throne warm with the blood of his Lord "

― William Dalrymple , The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire

20 " For the arrow of fate cannot be parried by the shield of effort once God’s decree has already passed another way. "

― William Dalrymple , The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire