William Dalrymple has nailed the East India Company for what it was: ‘a supreme act of corporate violence’

A boardful of company directors are summoned to explain themselves to a Whitehall select committee. The Bank of England has already had to bail out the company, the British economy has taken a hit in the fallout and parliament has now been recalled to discuss the company’s massive debts. In the committee room, the corporate directors face allegations of embezzlement, bribe-taking and corruption. This includes the handing out of £210 million of ‘presents’ over an eight-year period.

The scene is depressingly familiar, so is this Lehman’s? Facebook? Some of the stars of subprime? BAE? None of the above. The year is December 1772 and the directors, in charge of what was then the world’s largest trading company, have just requested ‘one of history’s first mega-bailouts’. All part of the rise of the East India Company, the ‘world’s first aggressive multinational corporation’, as told in William Dalrymple’s latest work.

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In three of his previous books he brought us the gloriously detailed stories of Britons who fell for Indians or India, of the last King of Delhi and the Indian War of Independence, and of the First Afghan War. The East India Company was a major player in each, but now Dalrymple has brought it centre stage. And here there should be a warning: the spotlight reveals truths you might find very uncomfortable, which is exactly what revisionist history aims to do.

The company was incorporated in 1599, at the end of Elizabeth I’s reign, when a group of traders, chancers and buccaneers, and a few more elevated characters led by the Mayor of London, came together to challenge the Dutch monopoly primarily of the eastern spice trade. They sent their ships to India, which at the time was divided into a number of independent sovereign states, and throughout the 17th century they vied with Dutch, French and even Danish traders for influence and market share.