Quotes from William Dalrymple

total; Mughal losses were many times higher, perhaps as many as 5,000 dead. For a long time the day's outcome was uncertain. But for all this, it was still, ultimately, one of the most decisive battles in Indian history, even more so than the more famous Battle of Plassey seven years earlier.

It was not the British government that began seizing great chunks of India in the mid-eighteenth century, but a dangerously unregulated private company headquartered in one small office, five windows wide, in London, and managed in India by a violent, utterly ruthless and intermittently mentally unstable corporate predator – Clive.

The three great armies of the Mughal world had come together to defeat the Company and expel it from India. When instead it was the Mughals that were defeated, the Company was left the dominant military force in north-east India. Buxar confirmed the Company's control of Bengal and the coast and opened the way for them to extend their influence far inland to the west.

What honour is left to us?' asked a Mughal official, 'when we have to take orders from a handful of traders who have not yet learned to wash their bottoms?

Finally, he wrote, Shiva ordered Nandi to enter the body of the Maratha king Shahu. 'Let him send his agents, that sinners and evil doers be punished.'29 Soon after:

Zafar always put huge emphasis on his role as a protector of the Hindus and the moderator of Muslim demands. He never forgot the central importance of preserving the bond between his Hindu and Muslim subjects, which he always recognised was the central stitching that held his capital city together.

The battle was fought on the banks of the River Dehva.

All this would be done in return for a payment by Shah Alam of Rs40 lakh.* The terms were secretly ratified by the Emperor on 22 March

The Marathas soon detected their movements, surrounded them and fell on the column at first light: 350 were dead before noon. Egerton had no option but to surrender, and six days later signed the humiliating Treaty of Wadgaon. With this he handed over Raghunath Rao and several senior Company hostages and agreed to give up a swathe of Company territory to the Marathas.

Indeed, one of the principal fears of the American Patriots in the run-up to the war was that Parliament would unleash the East India Company in the Americas to loot there as it had done in India.

As the political sky darkened, the court was lost in a last idyll of pleasure gardens, courtesans and mushairas , or poetic symposia, Sufi devotions and visits to pirs , as literary and religious ambition replaced the political variety.

The EIC was, as one of its directors admitted, 'an empire within an empire', with the power to make war or peace anywhere in the East.

Deciding to lure Bourquien off his strong position, Lake gave the order for the infantry to fall back in a feint, and they did so, between two wings of cavalry who lay hidden behind the tall grass. The Marathas took the bait and rushed forward, only to find themselves

Little wonder that the British were soon being reviled in the Surat streets 'with the names of Ban-chude* and Betty-chude† which my modest language will not interpret'.

The Company's conquest of India almost certainly remains the supreme act of corporate violence in world history. For all the power wielded today by the world's largest corporations – whether ExxonMobil, Walmart or Google – they are tame beasts compared with the ravaging territorial appetites of the militarised East India Company.

In this way the EIC prefigured by 300 years the response of many modern corporates when faced with the regulating and taxation demands of the nation state: treat us with indulgence, they whisper, or we take our business elsewhere.

Travels in the Mogul Empire and Manucci's Mogul India.

Yet, like more recent mega-corporations, the EIC proved at once hugely powerful and oddly vulnerable to economic uncertainty. Only seven years after the granting of the Diwani, when the Company's share price had doubled overnight after it acquired the wealth of the treasury of Bengal, the East India bubble burst after plunder and famine in Bengal led to massive shortfalls in expected land revenues.

The British had long used Shah Alam's confidant, Sayyid Reza Khan, as a discreet channel of communication with the Emperor, and now Wellesley decided to send a secret letter to Shah Alam, offering him asylum and opening negotiations to take the Mughals back under Company care for the first time since the Emperor had left Allahabad thirty years earlier, in 1772:

Bihar] and of no inconsiderable weight at the Mughal court, it was natural to determine on him as the properest person to settle the affairs of that government. Accordingly, when the new Nawab returned my visit this morning, I recommended him to consult Jagat Seth on all occasions, which he readily assented to.'84

It seemed impossible to imagine that a single London corporation, however ruthless and aggressive, could have conquered a Mughal

One woman, however, was spared. Both Miran and his father asked for the hand of the famously beautiful Lutf un-Nissa. 'But she declined and sent this reply: "having ridden an elephant before, I cannot now agree to ride an ass."'87

the summer of 1600 that the Privy Council had a change of heart and felt confident enough to stress the universal freedom of the seas and the right of all nations to send ships wherever they wished.

Wellesley noted, 'there is not a Maratha in the whole country, from the Peshwa down to lowest horseman, who has a shilling'. This was hardly surprising as, by 1801, Arthur had noted that after the devastations of the Maratha civil war, there was 'not a tree or an ear of corn standing for 150 miles around Pune'.