William Dalrymple

In his most ambitious and riveting book to date, William Dalrymple tells the story of the East India Company as it has never been told before, unfolding a timely cautionary tale of the first global corporate power.

The Anarchy tells the remarkable story of how one of the world’s most magnificent empires disintegrated and came to be replaced by a dangerously unregulated private company, based thousands of miles overseas in one small office, five windows wide, and answerable only to its distant shareholders – an aggressive colonial power in the guise of a multinational business. In less than four decades it had trained up a security force of around 200,000 men and had subdued an entire subcontinent