The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire
In August 1765 the East India Company defeated the young Mughal emperor and forced him to establish a new administration in his richest provinces. Run by English merchants who collected taxes using a ruthless private army, this new regime saw the East India Company transform itself from an international trading corporation into something much more unusual: an aggressive colonial power in the guise of a multinational business.
William Dalrymple tells the remarkable story of the East India Company as it has never been told before, unfolding a timely cautionary tale of the first global corporate power.
William Dalrymple
William Dalrymple FRAS FRSL FRGS FRSE (born William Hamilton-Dalrymple on 20 March 1965) is a Scottish historian and writer, art historian and curator, as well as a broadcaster and critic. His books have won numerous awards and prizes, including the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize, the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award, the Hemingway, the Kapuściński and the Wolfson Prizes. He is also one of the co-founders and co-directors of the annual Jaipur Literature Festival.
In 2018, he was awarded the President’s Medal of the British Academy. The television series Stones of the Raj and Indian Journeys, which Dalrymple wrote and presented, won him the Grierson Award for Best Documentary Series at BAFTA in 2002.
He has been five times longlisted and once shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for non-fiction.
In 2012, Dalrymple was appointed a Whitney J. Oates Visiting Fellow in the Humanities by Princeton University. In 2015, he was appointed the OP Jindal Distinguished Lecturer at Brown University. He was also among the unranked bottom 40 in the 2020 Prospect list of the top 50 thinkers for the COVID-19 era.
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