Quotes from William Dalrymple

in total around £1,238,575 was given by Mir Jafar to the Company and its servants, which included at least £170,000 personally for Clive. In all, perhaps £2.5 million was given to the Company by the Murshidabad Nawabs in the eight years between 1757 and 1765 as 'political gifts'. Clive himself estimated the total payments as closer to 'three million sterling'.

The same year that Ghalib died in Delhi, 1869, there was born in Porbandar in Gujarat a boy called Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. It would be with the political movements headed by Gandhi, rather than those represented by Zafar, or indeed by Lord Canning, that the future of India would lie.

Hindu civilisation is the only great classical culture to survive intact from the ancient world, and at temples such as Madurai one can still catch glimpses of festivals and practices that were seen by Greek visitors to India long before the rise of ancient Rome. Indeed, it is only when you grasp the astonishing antiquity, and continuity, of Hinduism that you realise quite how miraculous is survival has been.

Mir Jafar was not up to the job, and that however many members of Siraj ud-Daula's regime he and Miran purged, there could be little legitimacy for this general who had had his own Nawab murdered and who now sat in what one Company observer called 'a throne warm with the blood of his Lord'.

Whatever their many vices, wrote Shushtari, the English welcomed and rewarded talent: 'the English have no arbitrary dismissal,' he noted, 'and every competent person keeps his job until he writes his own request for retirement or resignation. More remarkable still is

was not made clear in the Treaty.

success in battle in Afghanistan was rarely decided by straightforward military victory so much as by successfully negotiating a path through the shifting patterns of tribal allegiances.

Modave noted that the further away you went from Calcutta, the worse the situation became: 'A European visiting the upper parts of the Ganges finds mere robbers in charge of Company affairs, who think nothing of committing the most atrocious acts of tyranny, or subaltern thieves whose despicable villainy dishonours the British nation, whose principles of honour and humanity they seem totally to have rejected

We have outdone the Spaniards in Peru! They were at least butchers on a religious principle, however diabolical their zeal. We have murdered, deposed, plundered, usurped – say what think you of the famine in Bengal, in which three millions perished, being caused by a monopoly of the provisions by the servants of the East India Company?

The East India Company limped on in its amputated form for another fifteen years when its charter expired, finally quietly shutting down in 1874, 'with less fanfare,' noted one commentator, 'than a regional railway bankruptcy'. Its brand name is now owned by two brothers from Kerala who use it to sell 'condiments and fine foods' from a showroom in London's West End.

named after the distinctively orange-flowered grove of palash trees which overlooked it. It was here, at Plassey, in the dark, about 1 a.m., that Clive took shelter from a pre-monsoon downpour.

For two thousand years Jerusalem has brought out the least attractive qualities in every race that has lived there. The Holy City has had more atrocities committed in it, more consistently, than any other town in the world.

How did the Indian Army behave when it got to Hyderabad?' I asked. 'When an army invades any country – whether it's Alexander the Great, Timur, Hitler or Mussolini – when it gets into a town, you know what the soldiery does. It's very difficult for the officers to control them. I can't tell you how many were raped or killed, but I saw the bodies of many. Old scores were paid off across the state.' I

In the course of this, in what seemed to many of its wisest minds an act of wilful self-harm, the English had unilaterally cut themselves off from the most powerful institution in Europe, so

turning themselves in the eyes of many Europeans into something of a pariah nation. As a result, isolated from their baffled neighbours, the English were forced to scour the globe for new markets and commercial openings further afield. This they did with a piratical enthusiasm.

Aliverdi Khan, who was of mixed Arab and Afshar Turkman stock, had come to power in 1740 in a military coup financed and masterminded by the immensely powerful Jagat Seth bankers, who controlled the finances of Bengal. The Jagat Seths

Instead it is an attempt to answer the question of how a single business operation, based in one London office complex, managed to replace the mighty Mughal Empire as masters of the vast subcontinent between the years 1756 and 1803.

fields in the world laid waste; and five millions of harmless and industrious people were either expelled or destroyed. Want of foresight became more fatal than innate barbarism; and [the company's servants] found themselves wading

Those once bitten by a snake fear even a twisted rope.

churches of those he conquered. He did this on a particularly horrific scale on his various campaigns in Malabar, Mangalore and Coorg. Huge numbers of people were forced to migrate from their homes: 60,000 Christians from the southern Carnatic to Mysore in one year alone.46 Christian Portuguese missionaries wrote that 'he tied naked Christians and Hindus to the legs of elephants and made the elephants move around till the bodies of the helpless victims were torn to pieces'.

One of the very first Indian words to enter the English language was the Hindustani slang for plunder: loot.

for the first time a writer grappled, for example, with the question of how to deal with a multinational whose tentacles extended well beyond

A body of merchants had been transformed into the de facto sovereign rulers of much of northern India. As one contemporary observer put it: 'Through many unexpected contingencies, an incorporated society of private traders [has become] a cabinet of Asiatic princes.'65 The result was what Adam Smith would call 'a strange absurdity' – a Company State.66

Already, by the end of 1771, the mood was beginning to change in London. Word was spreading about the Company's inhumanity in Bengal: the number of dead and dying was simply too vast to hide. Horace Walpole's letters reflected a growing awareness that behind the EIC's vast profits there was something profoundly rotten at work in the Company's Indian operations. 'The groans of India have mounted to heaven