Quotes About Power

Ten years ago every second person at Delhi drinks parties seemed to be either an old schoolfriend of the Prime Minister or a member of his cabinet. Now, quite suddenly, no one in Delhi knows anyone in power. A major democratic revolution has taken place almost unnoticed, leaving the urban Anglicised élite on the margins of the Indian political landscape.

but we did not come into India, as they did, at the head of great armies, with the avowed intention of subjugating the country. We crept in as humble barterers, whose existence depended on the bounty and favour of the lieutenants of the kings of Delhi; and the 'generosity' we have shown was but a small acknowledgement of the favours his ancestors had conferred to our race.

To subdue and crush the masses of a nation by military force, when all are unanimous in the determination to be free, is to attempt the imprisonment of a whole people; all such projects must be temporary and transient, and terminate in a catastrophe...

The Company's ever-growing Indian empire could not have been achieved without the political and economic support of regional power groups and local communities. The

to stop squabbling and cooperate with each other. But both men did agree that this was the right moment to revive Maratha power in Hindustan, and that the best way of cementing this would be to install Shah Alam back in Delhi under their joint protection, and so secure control of his affairs.21 The master of Delhi, they knew, was always the master of Hindustan.

Siraj's most serious error was to alienate the great bankers of Bengal, the Jagat Seths. The Seths' machinations had brought Aliverdi to power, and anyone who wanted to operate in the region did well to cultivate their favour; but Siraj did the opposite to the two men of the family

Empire that was so magnificently strong, so confident in its own strength and brilliance and

Barter and exchange is the business of merchants, not fighting of battles and dethroning of princes.

was certainly responsible for a much larger share of world trade than any comparable zone and the weight of its economic power even reached Mexico, whose textile manufacture suffered a crisis of 'de-industrialisation' due to Indian cloth

In the 1520s the Spanish had swept away the vast armies of the mighty Aztec Empire in a matter of

grubby contemporaries in the West, stumbling around in their codpieces, the silk-clad Mughals, dripping in jewels, were the living embodiment of wealth and power – a meaning that has remained impregnated in the word 'mogul

On 19 October 1774, the three Crown councillors appointed by the statutes of the Regulating Act, Philip Francis, General Clavering and Colonel Monson, finally docked in Calcutta. They were immediately offended to be given a seventeen-, not a twenty-one-gun salute, and by the 'mean and dishonourable' reception: 'there were no guards, no person to receive us or to show the way, no state.

dominion in India shall long cease to exist, and when the sources which it once yielded of wealth and power are lost to remembrance … In truth I love India a little more than my own country.'87

plantations in Java; forty-seven chiefs were tortured and executed.

as Edmund Burke famously put it, 'a state in the guise of a merchant'.

Shuja ud-Daula, son of the great Mughal Vizier Safdar Jung and his successor as Nawab of Avadh, was a giant of a man. Nearly seven feet tall, with oiled moustaches that projected from his face like a pair of outstretched eagle's wings, he was a man of immense physical strength.

Corporations have neither bodies to be punished, nor souls to be condemned, they therefore do as they like.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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'.

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