Narrator: In August 1765, the young Mughal emperor Shah Alam, exiled from his own capital and defeated by foreign troops, was forced to perform an act of involuntary privatization. Seated on a makeshift throne in a silk tent, he was compelled to sign a document that handed over the financial administration of Bengal, India’s richest province, to a private corporation. The recipient of this unprecedented power was not a nation or a state, but the East India Company, a trading firm run by English merchants from a small office in London. A Mughal historian, observing the swift and humiliating transfer of power, noted that this momentous transaction was "done and finished in less time than would usually have been taken up for the sale of a jack-ass."

How did a for-profit business, armed with its own private army, manage to subjugate a powerful empire and conquer an entire subcontinent? In his book, The Anarchy, historian William Dalrymple unearths the astonishing and often brutal story of how the East India Company executed the most supreme act of corporate violence in world history, transforming from a humble trading operation into an aggressive and ruthless colonial power.

Narrator: The British conquest of India did not begin with a government plan or a royal decree. It began in a London meeting hall on September 24, 1599, when a group of merchants, adventurers, and grocers gathered to petition Queen Elizabeth I for a charter. Their goal was simple: to break into the lucrative East Indies spice trade, which was dominated by their Dutch and Portuguese rivals. The "Governor and Company of Merchants of London trading to the East Indies" was a business venture, not an imperial one.

In its early years, the Company was an underdog. Its initial capital was a fraction of its Dutch competitor's, and its first voyages were fraught with peril, from cyclones to scurvy. Its first attempts at colonization, like the Roanoke colony in America, had ended in mysterious disaster. The English were seen as minor players on the world stage. When their first envoy, Captain William Hawkins, arrived at the Mughal court, he was treated not as an equal, but as a supplicant from a remote and relatively poor island nation. The Company’s survival depended on a revolutionary financial model—the joint-stock corporation—which allowed it to raise vast sums from private investors, but its rise was far from inevitable.

Narrator: Pushed out of the Spice Islands by the more powerful Dutch, the East India Company shifted its focus to mainland India. Here, it discovered a new source of immense wealth: textiles. India was the world's industrial powerhouse, producing a quarter of global manufacturing, and its fine cottons and chintzes were in high demand across the globe. The Company’s initial strategy was one of cautious diplomacy, not conquest.

The mission of Sir Thomas Roe to the court of Emperor Jahangir in 1615 perfectly illustrates this early dynamic. Roe spent three years trying to secure a trade treaty, but found the emperor more interested in European art and hunting dogs than commercial negotiations. Jahangir saw the English as just another group of traders seeking his favor. Roe’s advice to his directors back in London was clear: "A warre and traffick are incompatible." He argued that the Company should seek profit through peaceful trade, not military conflict. Following this advice, the Company slowly established fortified trading posts, or "factories," in key coastal locations like Madras, Bombay, and later, Calcutta, operating as humble tenants within the vast and powerful Mughal Empire.

Narrator: The East India Company’s fortunes changed dramatically as the Mughal Empire began to fracture from within. The long, costly wars and religious intolerance of Emperor Aurangzeb, who died in 1707, had weakened the state and drained its treasury. His death unleashed a period of instability and civil war that became known as "The Anarchy." Regional governors and ambitious warlords began carving out their own kingdoms.

The most devastating blow came in 1739, when the Persian ruler Nader Shah invaded India. He crushed the Mughal army, marched into Delhi, and unleashed a horrific massacre that left the city’s streets, as one observer wrote, "raining blood." Nader Shah plundered the imperial treasury, carrying away legendary treasures like the Peacock Throne. The invasion shattered the myth of Mughal invincibility and accelerated the empire’s collapse. Into this power vacuum stepped the East India Company, which saw the chaos not as a threat, but as an unprecedented opportunity for expansion.

Narrator: As Indian politics became more fragmented and militarized, European trading companies began to intervene directly in local conflicts. The French, under the ambitious governor Joseph-François Dupleix, were the first to demonstrate a new model of warfare. They recruited and trained local Indian soldiers, known as sepoys, arming them with modern European weapons and drilling them in disciplined formations.

The turning point came at the Battle of Adyar River in 1746. A small French force of fewer than 1,000 men, composed mainly of sepoys, was confronted by a 10,000-strong army of the Nawab of the Carnatic. The Mughal cavalry charged, expecting an easy victory, but were met with disciplined, rapid volleys of musket fire. The Nawab’s army broke and fled in disarray. The battle was a revelation. It proved that a small, well-trained, European-led army could defeat Indian forces ten times its size. The British East India Company quickly copied this model, building its own private army and transforming itself from a trading entity into a formidable military power.

Narrator: Armed with its new military machine, the East India Company began its aggressive expansion. The architect of this phase was Robert Clive, a volatile and ambitious Company clerk turned military genius. At the Battle of Plassey in 1757, Clive used a combination of bribery, conspiracy, and military force to defeat the Nawab of Bengal, Siraj ud-Daula. The victory was made possible by his secret pact with the Nawab's general, Mir Jafar, and the financial backing of the Jagat Seths, India’s most powerful banking family, who sought to replace the troublesome Nawab.

After the battle, Clive and the Company systematically plundered the Bengal treasury, shipping wealth equivalent to billions of dollars today back to Britain. They installed Mir Jafar as a puppet ruler, but the real power now lay with the Company. This culminated in the 1765 treaty forced upon Emperor Shah Alam, which gave the Company the right to collect all tax revenue from Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa. The Company had completed its transformation: it was now a sovereign power, a corporation acting as a state.

Narrator: The Company’s conquest of Bengal was followed by brutal asset-stripping and mismanagement. Its policies led directly to the great Bengal Famine of 1770, which killed an estimated ten million people, nearly a third of the province's population. Yet, despite the immense wealth it extracted, the Company was crippled by the costs of its constant wars and endemic corruption. By 1772, it was facing bankruptcy and was deep in debt to the Bank of England.

In a move that echoes modern financial crises, the East India Company went to the British government for a bailout. The request shocked Parliament. As the politician Edmund Burke warned, the Company had become a "viper" that could destroy the country that fostered it. The government agreed to the loan, but in exchange, it passed the Regulating Act of 1773, the first-ever government oversight of a corporation. The state had been forced to intervene to save a private company that had become too big to fail, marking the beginning of the end for the Company’s autonomy and setting a precedent for corporate regulation that continues to this day.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from The Anarchy is that the British conquest of India was not a state-led project of imperialism, but the action of a dangerously unregulated private company motivated by profit. The East India Company, through a combination of military innovation, political cunning, and the exploitation of a crumbling empire, effectively privatized a nation and looted its wealth, all while being run from a single office a continent away.

The story of the East India Company is a chilling historical lesson with profound modern relevance. It serves as a stark reminder of the potential for corporate power to eclipse the power of the state, and it raises an enduring question: What happens when the relentless pursuit of profit is untethered from any sense of morality or accountability? The Company’s rise and fall challenges us to remain vigilant about the role of powerful corporations in our own time and to question who truly holds power in a globalized world.