The Anarchy: The Rise of the East India Company - William Dalrymple

Acclaimed historian, writer and broadcaster William Dalrymple tells the story of the East India Company as it has never been told before. Based on his book The Anarchy, William will reveal how the Mughal Empire disintegrated and came to be replaced by a dangerously unregulated private company, based thousands of miles overseas in one small office, answerable only to its distant shareholders. In August 1765 the East India Company defeated the young Mughal emperor and forced him to establish in his richest provinces a new administration run by English merchants who collected taxes through means of a ruthless private army – what we would now call an act of involuntary privatisation. The East India Company's founding charter authorised it to 'wage war' and it had always used violence to gain its ends. But the creation of this new government marked the moment that the East India Company ceased to be a conventional international trading corporation dealing in silks and spices and became something much more unusual: an aggressive colonial power in the guise of a multinational business. Join William for a timely cautionary tale of the first global corporate power.