Review: The Anarchy, by William Dalrymple
This review is by a non-historian, for other non-historians. Given that’s most of us, I felt like it might be of interest.
There seems, in this restive and contentious post-colonial period, to be a few ways of writing about the British Empire. One, exemplified this year by Caroline Elkins’ Legacy of Violence, is to detail the abuses of Empire in order to shake readers out of Victorian nostalgia. Another, which has in many ways begun to represent government policy, is to vigorously condemn such arguments as ‘talking down Britain’. These defences of Empire owe much to the work of Niall Ferguson.
At a surface level at least, William Dalrymple’s The Anarchy eschews both approaches in its account of the British conquest of India. I am quite sure that he would say that, if his book contains any critique of colonialism, it emerges solely from the facts. But I suspect he would say so with a twinkle in his eye.
If the previous paragraph seems over-familiar from someone who has never met Dalrymple, that is because I have spent many happy hours in his company. I am a huge admirer of his podcast Empire, co-presented with Anita Anand, which is now in its third series. It is a peculiar experience, reading a book written by someone whose voice has told you amazing stories for hours on end. Of course it is impossible not to read the book in Dalrymple’s posh scots baritone, nor to compare the narrative style of the Anarchy with his podyarns.
I think the comparison favours the podcast- perhaps Anand is a more effective editor than Dalrymple, or maybe the wealth of material slightly got the better of him, but there are definite longueurs in The Anarchy. It is not that there is a lack of incident, far from it, but after a while, one battle between something Khan and George something is a lot like any other, and in a book of this length (577 pages) there is bound to be a degree of reader fatigue.
Overall, though, this is a tremendous narrative. I wasn’t, of course, quite correct to describe the subject as the British conquest of India. The conquest was by the East India Company, and was more akin to a series of mergers and variably aggressive takeovers than a conventional military campaign. The Anarchy of the title wasn’t created by the EIC (a point missed by multiple reviewers)- the company took advantage of the chaos following the collapse of the Mughal Empire with a combination of hard-headed capitalism, opportunism and advanced military tactics which was, in the end, irresistible.
What brings the narrative to life, however, is the characters, which linger in the memory long after the details of this or that engagement has faded. On the English side, the racist bully Robert Clive is contrasted with the rational Indiophile Warren Hastings, before Richard Wellesley makes a dashing late cameo. More vivid are the Indian characters, more numerous for obvious reasons, through which Dalrymple’s obvious love for his adopted country shines through. The dignified figure of Shah Alam is in many ways the tragic hero of the book, as he sees his Mughal empire go from all-powerful colossus, to symbolic rump, to oblivion. And perhaps the best derring-do is reserved for the brilliant Mughal general Najaf Khan, introduced as a young adventurer infiltrating rival fortifications in the most daring manner.
This sense of boys own adventure story, which Dalrymple never quite gets away from, does come with pitfalls. It might lay the book open to accusations of ignoring the terrible suffering that this century of constant war inflicted on the Indian people. Such a criticism would be unfair on the book overall, and ridiculous after reading the emotional heart of the book, the account of the Bengal famine of 1770.
I don’t think that Dalrymple claims that the EIC is, by dint of being run by Europeans, more vicious or neglectful of the population than any alternative regime that might have been imposed on Bengal. But globalised capitalism is about the transfer of wealth between geographically disparate groups. So the resources that a ‘native’ regime would be able to access to prevent the catastrophe were gone: they were building the glorious neoclassical facades of London. When the harvest failed, there was nothing anyone on the ground could do (and the EIC agents were essentially told not to protect the population by their masters in London). Not all of the 10 million deaths would have been preventable, but the logic of Dalrymple’s narrative is that the extractive nature of EIC rule made the suffering incalculably worse.
This is another point that he has been criticised for- for example in this remarkably bitter and snarky review. The critique seems to be that the EIC was just doing what anyone else would- both from a commercial imperative to serve shareholders, and a military imperative towards expansion and security. But that’s the point- it is the combination of capitalism and militarism that makes European colonialism uniquely damaging. The fact that Dalrymple doesn’t need to stop the narrative in order to make this point explicit is to his credit- he simply doesn’t need to.
I would not have minded had he stopped the book after the famine- but he continues for another few chapters, until the EIC completed its domination of the subcontinent, and celebrated by morphing into the Raj. Like any great storyteller, Dalrymple wanted to get to his denouement, as Shah Alam dies under British protection. And if the story has slightly outstayed its welcome, it’s hard to begrudge the time. This is a really excellent history book, which manages to be a devastating critique of colonialism by not trying to be. And that is where Dalrymple’s twinkle would come from.