The Joe Walker Podcast - The Untold Tale Of How One Ruthless Company Subjugated A Subcontinent - William Dalrymple

Episode Date: November 4, 2019

William Dalrymple is an acclaimed historian and travel writer. He lives nine months of the year on a...See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You're listening to the Jolly Swagman Podcast. Here's your host, Joe Walker. Hello there, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, swagmen and swagettes. Welcome back to the show. Now, if you're like me, you probably had a very vague concept of British rule in India. My images of the British Raj are scantily gleaned from a pastiche of sources. I can conjure black and white photographs of Gandhi. I tend to blend in scenes from Orwell's essays, Hanging and Shooting an Elephant, which I've since remembered were actually set not in India,

but in Burma, and I recall literary depictions from biographies of Winston Churchill, of a young Churchill, as a soldier in Bangalore and Calcutta, and of how he allowed the 1943 Bengal famine to break out as Prime Minister. It's an altogether very patchy picture of British rule in India. The British Raj lasted nearly a century, from 1858 to 1947, a period punctuated by some unfortunate bouts of violence and suppression, during which the Brits delivered tea, trains, cricket and democracy to a benighted subcontinent, leaving it, we are assured, net better off. But this story masks an altogether more sinister truth. For India was not, in the beginning, conquered and subjugated by the British government, but by a single commercial company operating from a nondescript building just five windows wide in London. That is, the British East India Company.

The East India Company's birth could not have been less auspicious, set in the rickety Founders Hall in 1599, around the time Shakespeare was reviewing his first draft of Hamlet. A motley collection of merchants and former pirates were assembled to form what was an incredible innovation in its time, a joint stock corporation. The purpose of this corporation would be trade with the East Indies, hence its name, and eventually the company was launched with its royal charter giving it express permission to wage war. By the time the company pivoted its focus to India, India was one of the most powerful countries in the world. On the 28th of August 1608, Captain William Hawkins became the first company man to set foot on Indian soil. At that time, India contributed

a quarter of global manufacturing and had a population of 150 million people, or about a fifth of the world's total. The Mughal emperor was the richest monarch in the world, with about 100 million pounds annually, or 10 billion in today's terms, flowing into the imperial coffers in Delhi. In contrast, Britain was a tiny economic backwater. Fast forward 150 years, and the company's domination of India seems slow at first, but then to happen almost all at once. In 1757, the East India Company seized control of Bengal, and in the years that followed, but then to happen almost all at once. In 1757, the East India Company seized control of Bengal, and in the years that followed, it continued to annex large chunks of India. At its height, the East India Company had a standing army of 260,000, twice the size of Britain's.

So how did a single commercial company come to enslave a nation of 200 million people? This episode answers that question, and my guest is the acclaimed historian and travel writer, William Dalrymple, whose new book, The Anarchy, sets out to explain this untold story. We discuss how the East India Company took control of India, but we also delve into historiography, into William's background he's making as a travel writer and historian, and many other things besides. well-traveled and I so wanted to speak with him for longer we originally booked in for two hours but another appointment came up he had to fill in for someone at the Jaipur Literary Festival in Adelaide but this hour we ended up recording is just jam-packed with laughter with erudition, and with information you may not have heard before. So without much further ado, I hope you enjoy. William Dalrymple, welcome to the show. Thank you very much. So it is Sunday the 3rd of November, and we are in Adelaide in South Australia. In a very curious

recording studio in the back of a trailer Australia. In a very curious recording studio in the back of a trailer park. In some sort of industrial suburb. Steel construction on our left and right. It looks like there's a place that John Travolta's about to turn up with his friend and order a Mac Royale. And I've come all the way from Sydney to follow you here

through an arduous plane trip with a four-year-old girl squealing like a dolphin in front of me. But nonetheless, I will do my best to ask some erudite and stimulating questions. Take us back to 18th century India. Despite what you have done to me. I'm innocent. No, but seriously, it's a pleasure to speak with you.

William Dalrymple, born in 1965, acclaimed historian, writer, co-founder and co-director of the Jaipur Literary Festival. In the course of researching for this conversation, I discovered that you went to school at Ampleforth College. I've been to Ampleforth. Not many people have. It was 2010, so I was doing a gap year between high school and university. I was living at Clongoswood College, a castle outside of Dublin, where James Joyce went to school for a while. And we had a rugby game of Australian Gap students versus Ampleforth teachers and locals.

Who won? Well, first let me tell you, what I remember about Ampleforth, I remember the side of the sandstone castle just lighting up like gold when the sun lit it. I remember it was in Yorkshire because we had to go through York on arrival and I was very taken by the nightlife in York. And I remember it was in Yorkshire because we had to go through York on arrival and I was very taken by the nightlife in York. And I remember this game. From which, of course, we were banned strictly from ever participating.

Yes, I'm sure. That would be a disaster if you weren't. But I remember, so this game we played, it was about this time in 2010 and the snow was literally knee deep in some parts of the field i've actually got a photo i'll show you and uh we had to i have no sympathy i had to do we had to call the game off like an option why would anyone play rugby full stop why would anyone play rugby in the snow in Yorkshire in winter. It was hilarious.

They called the game off halfway through because people's hands were freezing. We couldn't catch the ball. So after that, we settled in at the White Swan. A hostelry I didn't know. And some locals had just come in from a hunt. And it was a very aristocratic sort of atmosphere. But how do you look back on your 10 years at Ampleforth? Well, it's a very mixed bunch of stuff. On one hand, I had an incredibly

good education there. And what I was taught there, and my history teachers and my English teachers there set me up 100% of what I'm doing now. It was an English teacher there who gave me my first travel book and, in a sense, started my trajectory off towards becoming a travel writer, which is what I did immediately after college. What was the book? She gave me Patrick Lee Fermor's A Time of Gifts, which remains one of my kind of sacred books, in any desert island selection, however small it would be there.

And I had an amazing history teacher, too, who taught me medieval history, the Crusades, first interested me in the world, the other side of the Mediterranean, and had a very sophisticated library, which he would lend. And I remember reading early Arab history and so on there at the age of 17 and 18, which he would lend. And I remember reading early Arab history and so on there, at the age of 17 and 18, which I think would happen in very few other places. On the other hand, it was a kind of completely bonkers institution. It was a boarding school run in the late 20th century by monks, Benedictine monks, operating on the rule of St. Benedict, which was written in the sixth century, as a sort of means for coping, operating on the rule of St. Benedict, which was written in the 6th century

as a sort of means for coping with life after the fall of Rome. And not necessarily immediately applicable to life at this end of the millennium. And there were kind of, I mean, another plus was it was, as you saw, incredibly beautiful. It was one of the most astonishing places. And I got my taste for sort of traveling around and beetling around as a historian, going around on a bicycle, looking at churches and writing about my first published piece. was on an Anglo-Viking strange hybrid high cross in a little village called Stonegrove that was about seven miles from Apple Forge. On the other hand, there's all sorts of incredibly unhealthy things about it.

It was, although I was only sort of vaguely aware of it at the time, it was a major centre of sort of Catholic child abuse like it seems every other Catholic institution in the world. Rather unflatteringly, I never even got my bottom pinched. And every few years, a little sort of questionnaire comes through from the North Yorkshire police saying, you know, did you know Father X? Did he do anything to you?

And each time I have to write back and say, actually, no. Even though I was in his care for, you know, a year and would have been a sort of ripe target. And I was a quite a small, fat little boy with a pudding bowl haircut, which I think clearly warded me, warded demons off as successfully as garlic or a sort of. How do you keep vampires away? Garlic and silver bullets. And crucifixes. And crucifixes. Crucifixes probably have attracted these particular type of vampire. And also, I mean, I certainly didn't send my kids

to a boys-only school locked away miles from civilization. And I don't think it is probably the best way of bringing up kids, nor do I think necessarily bringing them up only immersed in one religious tradition, which is something my parents believed very strongly in. I don't think that's probably the best way to prepare anyone for the modern world.

But I was actually happy there, and it very much prepared me for what I do now, in an odd sort of way. I mean, in a very unlikely way. I mean, had I been interested in astrophysics or something, I don't think I'd be in a very suitable education. But as I was interested in medieval history and archaeology and art history, it really couldn't have done me better.

On the 24th of January, 1984, just about two months shy of your 19th birthday, you found yourself in Delhi, which is a world apart from Ampleforth, not just geographically. 26th of January. I said 26th of January, didn't I? 26th of January, yeah. How on earth did that happen? Huge series of chances. The system in those days was that if you were a bright scholarship boy, you would take your Oxbridge exams to get into Oxford or Cambridge in November,

which left you until the following September before you next had anything to do. You were free to do what you like. This was the famous gap year. And those nine months, you could do what you liked. And I had been planning this for some time, as I always hoped that I would make it to doing the Oxbridge exam and going to Oxford or Cambridge and studying history or archaeology. And my big plan as a keen, enthusiastic sort of teenage archaeologist who spent his summers digging on causeway camps and rocks in Orkney and strange Viking burial sites in the English Midlands. My big plan was to go and dig in Iraq on the Syrian sites. I was very into that whole Indiana Jones idea of sort of sitting in the desert with sort of Syrian bulls merging out of sand dunes.

But just before I was due to go, having got a place on this dig, Saddam Hussein closed down the British School of Archaeology in Baghdad, saying it was a nest of British spies, which for all I knew, because I never made it there, probably was. And very much as a second best option at the last minute ended up

going with my best friend who had got a job teaching in india and india was somewhere which i not only did not have an interest in i had a sort of mild aversion in my elder brother was my school uh school uh hero he'd been a sort of double blue at uh represented oxford in cricket and and and rugby and then he went to india and came back as this sort of bedraggled hippie filling the house with sort of terrible tamil tack and sort of horrible as i thought age 14 horrible uh uh sort of papi maché dolls and started making coffee in a weird way, pouring it from one container to another and had long bedraggled hair and terrible facial hair, looked like Neil Young at his worst moment as a heroin addict,

sort of circa Tonight's the Night, that sort of era. And I kind of never quite forgave India for this. But nonetheless, anyway, with no other plans and every other thing that I wanted to do sort of apparently not possible, I did jump on a plane to India, completely unprepared, knew nothing about India, had no idea that I had any connection with this place

or would have any connection with it. And immediately fell in love. It was very odd. I mean, you know, really profoundly, properly, within about three weeks, I was thinking, you know, I may well never leave. And indeed, I haven't. I'm still there now. I was 18 then. I'm now 54. And most of my time in between those two ages has been spent in India, writing in one way or another about it. And since then, I found that not only did generations of my family from South Scotland go out there, make livings there with first the East India Company, then the Raj, but even more bizarrely, it turns out I had quite a significant trickle of Indian blood. In fact, two trickles. One, Islamic Mughal Vah Nur Jahan, the great empress of the Moguls, great, great niece

who married a man called James the Rumpel in Hyderabad in 1789. So actually, you know, mainline genetic connection to the Mogul dynasty, which I've been writing about for the previous 20 years. I had no idea before these documents turned up in Edinburgh when I was writing White Moguls. And then a second collection, which was to a Hindu Bengali woman a little bit later in the late 18th century. And I always wondered, you know,

is the fact, does the fact that generations of my family, although I was brought up in Scotland, had no knowledge that anyone in my family, except possibly I knew that my dad had been there at partition. But I mean, other than that, I had no knowledge that anyone in my family had ever been to India ancestrally. And I always wonder, is the fact of either just the experience of generations of my forebears or the actual genetic connection of blood from that part of the world, whether that is the reason that I responded to India rather than a thousand other countries I visited in the course of my life and happily left, never to go back to.

And it's a very odd thing. I don't know the answer to that. Does the experience of your forebears wandering a particular patch of earth somehow communicate itself? Ditto, you know, the DNA that you inherit, is it just a bunch of chemicals and genomes? Or does it actually leave an impression of place and an interest in a place and mean that when your descendants arrive there, they suddenly feel a connection to it. It's a serious question. Your Indian blood is about 1 16th? I think even more remote than that. 1 32nd or something. It's not close by, but it is there.

Yeah. And, you know, as far as I know, I don't bulgarian blood or venezuelan blood or something that might have drawn me off in a different direction so from when you first met delhi a city the size of about 1 million people in 1984 it's now more than 26 million people does that change the character of a city well at this particular moment we're talking, Delhi is under a terrible chemical smog. It is not only the most polluted place on earth currently, it is, I think, something like 20 times over the safety level following Diwali. This is, I mean, a freak that happens this time of year. Nonetheless, it is true that Delhi is not becoming any easier to live in,

shall we say, not least because of this pollution, which no one seems to be bothering about. And my wife is an asthmatic. And she is seriously concerned about whether we have a future there. There is also an extremely nasty far right wing government in place at the moment. So for the first time in many years, we are beginning to ask ourselves whether this is a sustainable future. But certainly, I can't imagine actually leaving the moment. So for the first time in many years, we are beginning to ask ourselves whether this is a sustainable future. But certainly, I can't imagine actually leaving the country. Maybe it'll be some village in the Himalayas or something next. But Delhi's looking quite tricky at the moment. I want to briefly ask you to outline the journey you took when you were 22

years old, because this was sort of the making of William Dalrymple, the writer. Can you tell us what that was about and how that came to be? Sure. So since I was about 12 or 13, what I used to do at Ampleforth, first of all, was to get on a bicycle and go and look at things. And then when I got my driving license, I used to go around in a clapped-out old banger. And even before I was in India, I was beetling around, writing about stuff, photographing it. I was a very keen photographer as a teenager and digging in my summer holidays. And so when I went to India, the first thing I did in 1984 was to just go all around the country with a very, very, very low budget, but sleeping rough in tombs and temples and had this sort

of extraordinary year from which, in a sense, I've never recovered. This sort of life-changing year, discovering this entire incredibly complex country with this rich succession of layers hindu muslim portuguese dutch french british um and then i did a journey again with sort of echoing the stuff i suppose i'd done at ampleforth in uh studying the crusades i went off following the route of the first crusade from scotland to jerusalem uh hitchhiking and walking right across Italy, across to Yugoslavia, down to Bulgaria, Greece, across Turkey, down through Syria, Jordan, and into Israel, Palestine. And it was only then in 1986 that I did the journey that, as you say, in a sense, made me as a writer, which was the journey that became my first book in Xanadu. And it very much

in my head then was, you know, was part of a long succession of journeys I'd already made. Not a beginning, but a sort of, but a more serious and more ambitious version of what I'd been doing for a while. And this was to follow Marco Polo's journey to Jerusalem. And in all honesty, the stimulus for this had come not from any burning lifelong interest in Marco Polo, but instead the fact that my college at Cambridge, which I was very lucky to be in, Trinity, was an incredibly rich college, and in a very benign way used to work hard at finding ways

to share its incredible investment wealth and its bequests from old dons and old members of college and so on, to find ways to get that in an improving manner to the students and encourage them. And I remember just passing a notice board one day and seeing uh a travel prize specifically aimed at medieval history students now i knew there were only about 10 others in the whole college who would be eligible for this and uh and most of those probably couldn't be asked to apply anyway so i went into the library that day and put in an application looked at the times atlas of put in an application, looked at the Times Atlas of History and tried to work out what the longest medieval journey I could do possibly

was, therefore, for which I could apply for the most possible funds. And it was Marco Polo's journey. And just for the hell of it, I thought, I'll ask for a thousand pounds. And the day after I finished my exams, an envelope was put under my door of my college with a cheque for £750. And I suddenly realised to my horror, I was actually sort of now committed to making this sort of ridiculously ambitious journey,

starting in Jerusalem, where I'd finished the previous year doing this crusade, and working up through Syria to Turkey, Iran, up the length of Pakistan, over the Karakoram Highway, which had opened up for the first time that year, into the back end of Xinjiang, across the Gobi Desert, and then over the length and breadth of China, up to Kublai Khan's old pleasure dome of Xanadu in Mongolia. Were you the first Westernist to visit his ruined palace in over a century? I don't know because there wasn't a sort of visitor's book there.

I don't know where I read that. But certainly there are no other records of anyone since I think the 1930s having made it there. I'm sure probably someone went at some point, some diplomat from somewhere got permission. But it's not impossible at all that we were the first there. Certainly we were the first to write about it. And no one since I published the book has claimed I was there five years earlier. And Xanadu, immortalized by Coleridge, is not a figment of his opium-fed imagination. It is a real place.

Its real name was actually Shangtu. And it was the palace of the Yuan Emperor Kublai Khan, who, again, was a real person, the grandson of Genghis. And Kublai Khan ruled partly from what's now Beijing, under the Forbidden City, but also for quite a lot of the time from his beloved steppes. And Shangtu was in a sense on the edge, just the nearest point to China that was definitely Mongolia. And when we went there, there wasn't a whole lot left. It was an archaeological site rather than a, you know, there were very few standing ruins,

but it was an incredibly atmospheric site like some enormous Iron Age hill fort or something with these enormous valums and ditches and platforms where palaces had once been and fragments of roof tiles, which we put in our pockets and took home. And I've still got on my desk in Delhi to this day as a sort of good luck talisman.

And the point of the journey had been to follow Marco Polo. And at the beginning, it's the opening scene in the book, like Marco Polo, the lamps in the Holy Sepulchre, which in the Middle Ages was considered like a talisman of incredibly powerful, blessed, good luck, a million times more powerful than holy water or something. This lamp, which had burnt at the site where if you were a true believing Christian in the Middle Ages, you would have believed that Christ rose from the dead and was resurrected and ushered in a new era in human history. Those lamps still burn there. And I got a little file from the body shop, which had just opened at that sort of time, filled it with this oil. And at the end of the journey, we did indeed pour it on the throne dais of Kubla Khan in

Zanadu, mission accomplished, which was a very exciting moment. And then in a sort of it seemed the most obvious thing to do, we recited in Zanadu to Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree, whereof the sacred river ran, and so on and so on.

And I always knew that i was this i mean i had set out with a view to writing a book about this and had been keeping notes the whole way with a view to writing a book and um when we got back to beijing the people we were staying with who were diplomats and that we happen to know um put us in touch with the times correspondent who wrote a short report and then thought no this this has to be a feature so we got it uh on to amazingly exciting at the age of whatever we were 21 um on the front cover of the times weekend supplement and immediately i had 10 invitations to write a book from publishers

and the guy i accepted the uh that offer, who's a guy called Michael Fishwick, who then worked at William Collins & Son, is still my editor 30 years later. And we've now just published, I suppose, I think our 12th book together. Could you safely recreate that journey today? No, you couldn't because several bits of it will be tricky. Most obviously Syria. And, yeah, Syria would be very difficult to go through at the moment. You could go through, well, until recently you could have gone through Afghanistan, which we weren't able to go through.

But no, Afghanistan's not pretty well. Yeah, you wouldn't want to go on from, you get into Herat probably from Iran, but the next stage from Herat to Kabul would be pretty suicidal at the moment. And while you could definitely go through Western China if you were a foreigner, you would be going through a very different place to the very happy and beautiful and extraordinary state of Xinjiang, which we went through in the late 80s. Now, of course, the site of these massive Chinese detention camps. But a lot of it would still be unchanged. I took my kids, who are now the age I was when I made that journey, down the Karakoram Highway, which is my favorite leg of it in northern Pakistan. I mean, without question, the most beautiful road in the world,

of the bits of the world I've seen. And it's more or less unchanged. Those sort of bits. It's lovely. I mean, it's a slightly larger village in some places and places have grown. Other places have got smaller. But it's still a stunning, stunning trip. I saw photos of you as a 21-year-old, which is how old you were when you took the trip.

You were a good-looking young man. I'm curious, what's... Are you implying there's been some sort of decline since then? No, no comment at all. No, my question is, what's romance on the road like in some of the more socially conservative countries? Can you sort of go into a bar and pick someone up like you can in the West? Well, romance on the road was complicated in that journey

because I was traveling with two girls, one of whom was this sort of fearsome woman who was lovely, but it was a sort of terrifyingly organized and efficient young woman who went on to become sort of businesswoman of the year, run Marks and Spencer. This was Laura. Laura, okay. Who was the daughter of a British high commissioner,

had already traveled the world by the time she was with me, aged 21. And I mean, I'm hugely grateful to her because she got me organized on this trip in a way that I never would have managed. So anyway, that romance was not on the cards for that edge of the thing. And then for the second half of the trip, I went with my recently split-up ex-girlfriend,

who I would dearly have loved to have had romance on the road with, but who had recently gone off with somebody else. And so this slightly sort of sexually fraught but unromantic trip, to be honest. So I've had romance on the road before and since, but not on that trip. As a general rule, no, of course. I mean, as any backpacker knows, governments are very keen that you don't break any rules in public, but what goes on between consenting individuals in hotel rooms is not, I don't think, an issue,

even if you're in revolutionary Iran, there's a traveler. Let's talk about the anarchy. So, John Keat, an historian who you reference in your book, wrote a book on the East India Company, the British East India Company, called The Honorable Company.

And in the beginning, he has this entertaining passage where he imagines history professors, elderly history professors dying at their desks at the library writing about the company because I think it triplicated all of its records. And indeed, you nearly suffered this same fate yourself. I remember reading a Guardian article from 2015, which was opening the curtain on the book to be published the following year in 2016, although obviously now it's 2019. I also read your father, who passed away during its writing,

was convinced that you'd never finish it. Why did this book take so long to produce? It took longer than any other book I've ever written. And you're right, I thought I was going to knock it off in a couple of years. Sadly, that never happened. Six years later. Six years later. The story is incredibly complex, incredibly complicated piece of history.

The breakup of India in the 18th century. It's very easy when you're writing history, sort of something like the Mughal Empire or the Roman Empire, where you have a capital and various emperors that you could just follow. When a great empire disintegrates, there's a million plot lines going off in 100 directions. And trying to tame that sort of mess is much more complicated than writing a linear story through one great dynasty. But more to the point, as you hinted, the East India Company did everything in triplicate. And everything down to its very first meeting on the 24th of September, 1599, is there in the British Library. Literally, it is alleged 35 miles of records.

So no one, even if you were to start at the age of 18 and work through to your 95th birthday, no one is ever going to get to read all that stuff. Really? And you have to sample. Plus, of course, that's only half the story. Because if you're being a modern historian and trying to get the voice the lost voices of of the other side that you know the conquered the enemy the the other in this case the moguls um you have to read all the mogul sources too and they're much more difficult although they're or for us out there more diffusely scattered and in sort of strange places so the single most interesting thing we found on the

moguls relevant to this book was a sha'alam nama, the history of the emperor sha'alam, which was in a tiny provincial library in a place called Tonk, which is halfway between Jaipur and Bundi, which is, I mean, really is about as near to the middle of nowhere as you're ever going to get in this desert state of Rajasthan. And it was in Persian, which is a language I only have a fairly amateur grasp on. And I have to work with a colleague called Bruce Whannell, who I've been working with for the last 20 years. Sadly, we've just discovered it's going to be our last project together as he's now got terminal pancreatic cancer. And has 10 months. I discovered this two days ago.

He has 10 months, I discovered this two days ago, has 10 months to live. So that's definitely closing quite a lot of doors for future projects. As well as being incredibly sad, this was an extraordinary scholar who can read 18, clever, erudite translations, which I think are the main argument, are the main ornament of not just this book, but White Moguls and Return of the King. And an incredible partnership as well. Yeah, we've been working together 20 years. And I literally got an email in Sydney three days ago saying, Willie, it's been a great pleasure working together 20 years. I'm afraid that's going to be our last project. I have 10 months to live, which isn't, I'm glad to say, an email I've ever received from anyone before. It's literally like a death sentence for a guy. He's got a very advanced cancer. The British East India Company was a particularly special form of Tudor innovation, that is, a joint-stock corporation. I think it was the fourth of its kind, the first being the Muscovy Company.

How was it born? In what circumstances was the company created? The man behind it is a figure called Customer Smythe, Sir Thomas Smythe. And Customer Smythe, as his name suggests, was in charge of the customs. And he was the kind of senior trading figure in Elizabethan London. Lots of ties to people we today would call

pirates, privateers preying on Spanish and Portuguese shipping that was then regarded as entirely legitimate by everyone in Britain. They're not obviously everyone in Portugal and Spain. Peter Van Doren Matter of perspective. Peter Van Doren The Spanish ambassador would occasionally go to court and shout pirates pirates at people anyway Smythe

was a worried man in 1599 because his rivals in Holland had two or three different companies had just formed to pioneer a passage over the Cape of Good Hope and ran there and off to Indonesia

and to import spices, which was something that Smythe had made a fortune in, but importing from Aleppo and from Cairo, second or third hand from the original producers. And the Dutch just went straight to Indonesia, bought the stuff there, sailed back, and sold it for a fraction of the price, much, much fresher, Tudor London, guys who describe themselves as Vintners or Skinners or Haberdashers. And these guys put in their five pound and ten pound and six pounds and the company is

born. It sails off to India. It gets three quarters of the way there when they bump into a Portuguese galleon coming back. And so they know what to do. So the Jack Sparrows in the crew just sort of, you know, swing over on their guy ropes and do all the things that pirates do.

And they just unloaded the entire contents of this unfortunate Portuguese galleon into their hold and sail merrily back to London where they sell the contents for one million pounds. And this piratical start is the beginning of the East India Company as with quite a lot of its subsequent trade,

it was trade but trade at the end of a bayonet or a sword. And its initial charter from the crown in 1599 specifically authorized it to, quotes, wage war. And this charter, which must have been a sort of fairly sort of casual document when it was produced, because A, no one knew whether the company was really going to get it together and sail anywhere. The previous attempt by the captain who they'd employed, Sir James Lanchester, ended up with him sinking his entire fleet and most of his crew being eaten by

cannibals. It's worth noting that the length of time it would take to travel from Britain to India in those days is equivalent to today, how long it would take Elon Musk to get to Mars. Sure, exactly. Six to nine months, depending.

Exactly that. to claim the rights not only to trade with the East, but also to mint coins, fortify fortresses, fight wars, have law courts, and, you know, act in the manner of a state. did in India for the first 150 years. They behaved moderately well by East India Company standards and didn't go around doing many massacres. Hashtag not many massacres. But in the 1740s, they began importing military techniques from early 18th century Europe, where there'd just been two enormous wars, the War of the Spanish Succession, the War of the Austrian Succession, which had revolutionized warfare. And particularly Frederick the Great had come up with a whole load

of new innovations, particularly in artillery, but also in muskets, bayonets, and all sorts of stuff. None of which was really particularly rocket science. It was all quite simple stuff, but it changed the face of warfare. And the French were the first to realize you could train up local Indians just as well as you could train up Irishmen or Scotsmen in these techniques. And this happened in the 1740s, and in the first such battle, the Battle of the Adyar River in around 1740, I think it was 700 French-trained sepoys saw off 30,000 Mughal cavalry of

the Nawab of the Carnatic. And this opens up a period of about 30 years when both the English and the French companies realized that they can more or less do what they like, that there's no force in India that can stop these new military techniques. And both arm up massively. In the Seven Year War in the 1750s, the English company takes out the French company and they destroy the main headquarters at Chandanagar. And then also they begin encroaching on Bengal. And they first of all go to Calcutta, which they retake having been conquered by the local Noir, takes against them, building fortifications without permission. In fact, the fortifications are not aimed at him, they're aimed at the French. But he takes Calcutta.

And so this newly arrived British general called Robert Clive, sails north, retakes Calcutta, defeats the French at Chandonnaga, and at this point gets an incredibly important message. A local banker, not a local banker, the big, massive local banker, the Jagat Seth, the banker of the world, who is to 18th century India what Rothschild will be in 19th century Europe. it is said in Bengali that just as the Ganges flows into the ocean so gold flows into the coffers of the Jagat Set

and the Jagat Set who is irritated with the new Nawab of Bengal who is forcing him to give loans that he doesn't want and threatening to circumcise him if you resist enough to concentrate most men's minds. And he simply offers Clive two million pounds if he will topple the Jugget set, offers Clive

two million pounds if he will topple the Nawab of Bengal, Siraj Adana. What does Clive say? So Clive says, yep. No problem, sir. And is there anyone else you'd like me to talk about? And he goes up and he fights the Battle of Plassey, long depicted in... 1757.

1757, long depicted in British textbooks as this heroic action of brave Brits. Actually, it turns out just a complete set-up as the main general on the other side is the guy who stands to become the new Nawab if he doesn't fight and Clive then walks into the treasury at Mushidabad

which is the richest treasury in India since Bengal has one million looms and the reason the company is there in the first place is that this is now the world's centre of industrial production. There are an amazing amount of weavers producing the greatest textiles in the world. And the company has made its fortune over the previous century just trading in this stuff. Now, they've taken the capital.

And Clive wanders into the bank vaults, and there is gold and silver and amazing mogul jewelry just dripping on all sides. Later, when he's cross-questioned in Parliament about the way he just filled his pockets with his stuff, he retorts, perhaps not even unfairly, my lords, I was astonished at my own moderation. He only took a few million. He could have taken everything. And this, again, is this, you know,

as traditional history acknowledges, this is a major turning point. Suddenly the Brits are in charge of a bit of India. But it's not the Brits. It is this company. It is the East India Company, still very much a company run for and by its shareholders and not the British government. Yeah. And this is why you wanted to retell this story. Yeah. I mean, in the 19th century, the Victorians muddied the waters by turning figures like Clive into the founders of the British Empire. Clive who features on our curry paste.

Who features on your curry paste. I have greatly enjoyed Instagramming Clive of India curry paste since I got to Australia. To the horror and amazement of my Indian friends, I can't believe that anyone would try and sell something. It's like having some Lord Voldemort sort of pickle. Adolf Hitler, Kirkens or something. Sauerkraut. And Clive soon hoovers up the rest of northern India. And he does this for the company.

And the company, still a business operating out of one London office in Leadenhall Street, finds itself in effective control of the whole of the Mughal Empire by the end of the 18th century. And this is a kind of bonkers inversion of everything that you would expect. And it's one of the most improbable moments in all history, because up to this point, when the company is founded, Britain is producing about 3% of world GDP, and India is producing, I think, 27.8%. So in other words, about a third of world GDP is produced in India. Virtually nothing is produced in Britain, which is surviving on plundering Portuguese and Spanish shipping. And the company more or less inverts this.

By 1800, Britain is producing about a third of the world's GDP. And India is on its way to being produced to I think 3% which is what it has at independence Just a complete role reversal Total role reversal and India moves from being one of the richest countries in the world with the most flourishing industrial base to being a third world country

which is what the Brits leave it in 1947 and Britain moves from being a third-rate nation on the edge of Europe, surviving on sort of haddock, cod, and a few lucky Portuguese galleons, to being, you know, the British Empire that we think today. And there are two sources. One is India. The other is the Caribbean slave trade and the plantation economy of the Caribbean. And together, these two sources of fairly illicit and immoral wealth pour into Britain, building all those gorgeous National Trust houses that one goes around as a tourist today having cream teas in and half expecting Colin Firth to turn up sort of wading through ponds and doing the sort of thing Colin Firth does in his knickerbockers and breeches. And that is where the money of Britain came from. And that is the money that generated the whole imperial expansion of Britain as far as Australia, Canada, and most of the rest of the world.

And something which, of course, only broke down after it began losing the sources of those wealth in the 1940s with decolonization. Wow. But it was a company that was doing it, a joint stock corporation. This is the crucial thing. Not the British government. So it becomes the British government, but not until much later. So the company- Maybe we'll come to that in a moment. Oh, we'll just do the date. So the company was founded in 1599. It starts getting a bit militaristic in the 1740s, making serious conquests in the 1750s.

By 1799, its own private security force, the East India Company Army, is twice the size of the British Army. There are 100,000 troops in the British Army. There are 200,000 troops in the East India Company Army. But by the 1830s, the British are beginning to realize that it's not really very healthy to have one company that has twice the size of your own national army. And people are beginning to snip away at it, regulate it and put a board of control over the top of it, a government body that's overlooking its foreign affairs.

And finally, in 1857, the East India Company is in our terms nationalized, and it becomes part of the state. And so the Raj, which is the stuff that we see in Kipling, in those Merchant Ivory films, in Passage to India, that famous, much storied, much filmed, much Sunday night drama moment is only 90 years. It's 1858 to 1947. But the East India Company is 1599 to 1858, more than 250 years. So in a sense, what we'll keep looking at

is the sort of tip of the iceberg, the Raj, which pops out above the waves while forgetting this enormous block of ice, which sits beyond popular culture, invisible, which is the East India Company. And, you know, once you realize that, all this rhetoric that you get about the British Empire being, you know, about civilizing Johnny Foreigner and bringing the wonders of Western civilization to the East and all this bullshit evaporates because, you know, it was a company. It was about making profit as much as Goldman Sachs is about making a profit. No one in the company pretended they were bringing civilization anywhere. They were absolutely clear what they were after,

which was making a fortune for themselves and their shelves. And indeed, it wasn't so much that they weren't interested in introducing Western civilization to India, but many of them even adopted Indian civilization while they were there. So this is a crucial point. You get two very different phases of colonization of India by Britain over the 300 years. The East India Company is by far the most extractive.

It's unapologetically a business that involves shipping Indian gold back to Britain to build lovely country houses and to buy rotten boroughs for its returning nabobs. And it is looting, it plunders, it builds very little in the way of public services

or doesn't even pretend to sort of go around building railways or universities or health centers or anything else. But bizarrely, it's also very collaborative. It is financed initially by Indian bankers, later by bonds issued by the ordinary, sorry, financed initially by Indian bankers, and then the whole of the Bengal population invest their savings in

East India Company bonds, which give fixed returns. And the company is very careful to honor these very, very strictly, as a result of which the entire earnings of Bengal go towards the company and allow it to expand its army and conquer further. And it's a nice little earner. By the time that they've conquered India, they suddenly realized they don't need to ship out gold anymore from England. They just tax Indian people, keep the profits after they've deducted the costs of the occupation. And with that now, they buy the cotton, the silks, the opium, the indigo and all the things they want to buy in India and sell at profit abroad. So not only is it, you know, a nice little earner anyway, and a hugely profitable business to buy

a piece of cotton in India and sell it for 10 times as much in England. Now you're getting the cotton for free because you're just taking tax revenues. So India is drained of its wealth. And, you know, and the company is quite unapologetic about this. It's never promised to be there for the benefit of Indians. And the irony is that, you know, the Victorians pretend that they're there for anything other than plunder. And at the time, even though one particularly believes it, but you occasionally find odd British empire apologists who still pretend that Britain was this sort of benign force

and Britannia never did what the French did or the Belgians did in the Congo or the Germans in the Sudetenland. There's still this narrative that Britain's empire was somehow different, that it was an enormously benign force that brought democracy and railways and what have you to India. And it's just, you know, pie in the sky ignorance that leads people to believe this today. There is no teaching of the empire in schools. We move from the Tudors to the Nazis with a brief stopover where Britain liberates the Caribbean slaves. So as if the whole of British history had been this wonderful trajectory towards anti-racism

and freedom. And the dark sides of our past, the Atlantic passage, the slave trade, the conquest of India, the extraction of wealth, the massacres of any Indians who resist this process as well as all the other stuff like the Tasmanian Aborigines and the genocides which took place in various small genocides, just small massacres, hashtag. This stuff is just not taught. And as a result, the British do not know it and they think that they have a wonderful innocent history of anti-racism, freedom, and you find historians who will trot the stuff out, which has led us, I think,

very largely to the impasse we have at the moment, where Britain is in this terrible muddle with Brexit, wanting to escape the control of Brussels, as the Brexiteers see it, while appealing somehow to the old empire and old colonies to somehow come to the rescue. And quite literally, Theresa May's first foreign trip after the Brexit vote was to India in a effort that the civil service quite literally dubbed Empire 2.0. And they go to India, and the idea is, you know, we welcome you back in the fold. It was all a huge mistake. We want to revive the Commonwealth. We'll, you know, we'll all club together.

New Zealand, Australia, Canada, the old empire will all come together. It's all it was a huge mistake. The last 30 years, it'll all be absolutely wonderful. Come back, brothers. And of course, no one's interested. You know, you guys have got your own narrative down here. The Indians are much more concerned about Pakistan than they are about Britain. Canada's, you know, in a free trade arrangement with the United States. The world has moved on in the last 60 years. And the Brexiteers are living in Klaukukland largely

because I think they're simply ignorant of history. As Burke famously said, those who are ignorant of history are destined always to repeat it. There's so much I want to ask you about the history of the British East India Company, but I think in the interest of time, because we've got about 15 minutes left, I might pivot to some meta questions that I've been dying to ask you. So the first is, let's distinguish between two broad categories of doing history, analytical history, maybe, you know, pioneered by the French Annals School. And then on the other hand, narrative history, which focuses more on characters and maybe is more associated with Thomas Carlyle's view of history as being driven by great men.

Your work seems to sit more firmly in the latter category. What do you think the benefits of narrative history are? Well, I should say that I sort of come out of an annal background, very specifically in the Nile background, my uncle was a famous economic historian at Cambridge called Munya Poston, a Jewish refugee who fled the Bolsheviks. His wife Cynthia was a person who translated Georges Duby, who was one of the founding fathers of the Nile school and a great friend of Mark Block and Leroy Ladurie. So I grew up with all these guys very much around, and my uncle was a very formative figure.

And I think economic history is hugely important, and I secrete a great deal of it in my work, but in a way that is readable. The Nile school at its worst sort of breaks down into sort of equations and sort of Venn diagrams and sort of pseudoscientific puffery. And I think there are very few ideas outside high science which can't be actually conveyed very well by prose. And so while I certainly write, admire, and like narrative history, I try and hide away into its secret stowaway in chapters,

a lot of economic history and a lot of social history. And I think all that is there in my work. But the kind of history I like to read is well-written, well-researched, multilingual narrative history. And my great guru is Sir Stephen Runciman. So your favorite history book is The Fall of Constantinople, 1453, by Sir Stephen Runciman. So your favourite history book is The Fall of Constantinople, 1453, by Sir Stephen Runciman. Which to me, it encapsulates everything in a sense that I've tried to do. Why is that your favourite history book?

Because it has everything that is wonderful about a great novel. Incredible characters, extraordinary story, deeply moving storyline that leaves you gutted at the end. And yet it's true. That you get the additional satisfaction of knowing this is not somebody's pipe dream coming out of an opium haze or hours of sitting at his desk and imagining stuff. This is something that had happened. These people you're reading about lived. They are like us in many ways. And to me, that's kind of win-win. If you can have the pleasure of fine language, clever plotting, brilliant characterization, descriptions of landscape that you would enjoy reading if it were in a novel, but which are actually actual descriptions of actual landscape.

And be able to trust the historian who's writing it as having spent many years reading obscure sources and digging up new primary evidence of events by people on all sides of the story. Runciman to write The Fall of Constantinople, which is the story of the end of Byzantium, this moment when this great empire, which is all that's left of the Roman Empire after the fall of Rome, which has kept the flame going for a thousand years. this great empire, which is all that's left of the Roman Empire after the fall of Rome, which has kept the flame going for a thousand years. This moment that the Turks under a Solomon mass on the Bosphorus and cross over and eventually come down to the Golden Horn and surround besiege and finally take Constantinople and

the last emperor rides out into battle. I mean, it's all, you know, epic, epic stuff. That, to me, is everything I could ask for any book, really. It's war and peace, except it's true. And all the characters are real. Beautiful. And that is my model. I mean, to the extent that The Last Mogul comes close to plagiarism in terms of

form and sort of tone and my story is The Fall of Delhi and the end of the moguls. But it's a very, very closely modeled on what Ransom had done for the different story 300 years earlier, The Fall of Constantinople.

And that's the kind of history I like reading and try and write, however unsuccessfully I may be, and however much less good I may be than Ransom, and that's what I'm aiming at. And I read a huge amount of other sorts of history.

I mean, I'm still very much into that French medieval school, and Mark Block was my favorite historian at school, college. And in fact, I got into Cambridge, I think waxing about how much I love Mark Block and feudal society, which I did. But it's, I try and take what I've learned from those guys

and turn it into a narrative voice. And, you know, in an ideal world, you'll end up with something, you know, McGibbon, people used to rush out and buy the latest volume of The Decline and Fall with the same alacrity as they would buy a volume of Dickens or the latest Jane Austen. It was popularly enjoyed.

They were popularly enjoyed. They were scholarly admired. And you had the best of all worlds. Well, you know, the trouble we have today is that so many academic history books, whilst brilliantly researched, just aren't fun to read because they're not written to be read. They're written to get tenure and to fend off other academic colleagues who are after the same job. And, you know, they're making micro points about some debate, which no one else other than the other guys trying for the same job is interested in. And, you know, they're not there to be enjoyed.

They're ticking an academic box. And I see no reason why, in principle, great history, scholarly history, academic history cannot also be written in a literary style, a narrative style. And, you know, you can get the analysis in. You can get the detailed socioeconomic and financial material. I mean, you know, a lot of the story of the East India Company and the anarchy is a financial story. I think several reviewers have noted there could be a little bit more finance in this book. And I think, you know, if I was writing it again, possibly... I mean, it's a doorstopper already.

What do they want? If you make it any bigger, you can put this between the US and Mexico. That'll be the wall. Refugees crawling over other copies of the Anarchy. But I would add an intellectual reason for preferring narrative history beyond just the pleasure and enjoyment of reading the prose. And that is, it seems to me that narrative history is best placed

to capture the non-linearities and path dependency of history as it happened in the real world. So a counter example might be Polybius, the Greek historian who wrote about Rome in the second century BC. And he had this view of the patterns of growth and decay in history, and this grand causal theory about how Rome escaped this pattern through the checks and balances inherent in its constitution. To me, that is really a narrative and contrast that with focusing on characters and relationships, which I think you're more attracted to. I think that is in a sense altogether more accurate. There's just an example from your book I'd like to raise, and that is the founding of Madras and Francis Day,

which was done so he could be closer to a woman. In land. Yeah, yeah, that's right. You know, Madras wasn't founded for some grand narrative. It was just a guy who wanted to have more sex, which probably explains most of history. Exactly, one way or another. And I think, you know, if we're thinking about our own age, you know, we're aware that when

an election comes up, that a declining economy can lose a party, an election, and a rising economy can gain an election, even if they're Trump. But we're also aware that a single individual can make a major difference. In my own country at the moment, the fact that Boris Johnson, who really couldn't decide about the benefits of either leaving the European Union or staying on it, and who famously wrote two pieces for The Telegraph, one making the argument one way, one making the other, before deciding clearly that for his own career, and his wish to become Prime Minister, that the better choice was

to support Brexit. Now, he is, you know, for all his faults, is an amazing campaigner, an amazing speaker, and a hugely popular figure. And I don't think anyone today would deny that the fact that Boris Johnson joined the Brexit campaign changed the course of British history, I think, catastrophically, for the future. But there is an example from our own time, that we can judge with all our senses of an individual, you know, we're not talking this sort of slightly loopy Victorian great man thing where, you know, Boris is the great uber hero who transformed history through his genius, or just the fact that he's, you know, Boris is the great Uber hero who transformed history through his genius. So just the fact that he's, you know, quite a good speaker, quite popular,

swung it and got that vote over the line, the extra one or two percentage points that made the difference between loss and victory. And that, you know, any commonensical interpretation of Brexit has to take that decision he took, one man, into consideration. So when you're looking backwards at history, it's the same. A single person can change the course of history by doing one thing or screwing up or not getting out of bed in time or going off and seeing his girlfriend in London, Madras. All those things can play a role in history as much as a growing economy, new methods of warfare, fantastic inventions in ship design or whatever it is.

All these things do play their part. But individuals, innovations, cock-ups of various sorts do change the course of history too. And we know that from our own time. Yeah. I have two final quick questions. Number one is, so this is a very selfish question. I'm in the process of writing a book on the Australian housing bubble and housing bubbles generally at the moment. I've

been reaching out to a lot of authors whose writing I admire. You're obviously one of them. Another was Steven Pinker. Don't always agree with his conclusions, but I love the way he writes. He's a good writer, yeah. Yeah, what his process was, he said that his method is to write sequentially from the first to the last sentence, and as intensively as possible, almost all day, seven days a week, till he's done. I'm on his camp, yeah. You think that's the right way to put it? I do the same.

I'm always amazed when you hear these stories of novelists who say that they set off on their novel and they've no novel and they start with an idea or a smell or a snatch of music or something and suddenly the novel creates itself out of nowhere. With me, with my history books, every single twist, every single plot turn is plotted. I know before I start writing exactly what's going to happen in every set which doesn't mean there are not things that change and and and i see connections i didn't see when i'm actually writing which i didn't see when i was plotting and thing and there is still room for innovation

and inspiration and all these things which do come when you suddenly have your fingers tapping away at the at the keyboards but i have a very very very, very clear plan. And I compare it to Chinese cooking. You spend, in my case, often four or five years chopping up the ingredients. So all your spring onions are nicely diced and your ginger is prepared in a little pile in the corner of the chopping board. And the lamb is nicely marinated with all the fat bits cut off and waiting in the soy sauce ready to go. And then you put it in the wok at high heat and you cook it as quickly as you can for four or five minutes

and then you serve. That's the same model for me. I'm naturally very sociable. I like to eat and see people. But for the nine months it usually takes me to write one of these doorstoppers. I go to ground. I go on a diet. I stop drinking.

I never have lunch with anyone and I will only go out at night twice a week. Instead I'll usually be falling asleep and snoring into Netflix by about 8 o'clock and then up by 5. I've already got my work from the previous day printed out by my bed. I'm correcting it through till about 7, typing it in till about 9 and hopefully if all goes well, writing new stuff by about half past 10 or 11 in the morning continue without a break through till about four or five when i finally sort of just crash so for me the some of my best ideas float into my head when i'm doing something unrelated taking a shower going for a walk those two things very specifically oddly enough always it's walks yeah walks. Yeah, and showers. Showers and jogs and swims.

My other one is, oddly one of the things I love the most about travel is being in airports. Or aeroplanes where you can't look at your phone. Yeah, but you have an alibi from the rest of the world and you're in a bubble and that's where I have some great ideas. I don't think I've ever had an airport inspiration.

I certainly had a mid-flight moment. Because, again, your whole world is suddenly suspended. Until recently, there was no question of looking at the internet. I always feel vaguely guilty looking at movies on flights. I think you should be planning stuff and thinking through stuff. And yes, so that is a very good moment for correcting, for planning, for writing and ideas. I often end up with, with ideas on my notepad at the end of the flight. The big ideas, the big, the wider picture. Yeah. Final question. What, what's the modern lesson we should take from the anarchy? Well, the anarchy is a story of something that happened in the 18th century. And history never exactly repeats itself. So I'm always wary about using a history book as a sort of direct lesson for the future, because it doesn't. It's the story of the past. But the big story of the anarchy, I suppose, is the meta story of the power of

the state against the power of the corporation. Now, in this particular story, after 200 years, the state wins. There's moments when it looks like the company is going to be able to swerve the legislature of the state. It bribes MPs, 40% of MPs of shareholders by about 1770. It's caught for the first time in the first case of corporate corruption. There's insider trading. There's all these things that goes on and methods it learns to bend the state to its will so that you get this mysterious alchemy that we know so well in our own time, whereby the interests of shareholders of a particular company become mysteriously the interest of the state. For example, Exxon in Iraq under the Bush government. Suddenly, we have an invasion of a country which seems to be suiting oil companies more than the people of the United States. So, but I think the simple lesson is, you know, the battle of the state against the

corporation, against the big company, against big tech, big pharma, big data. These are lessons, and these are battles which each generation has to wave because the company, the corporation, will resist regulation. It will resist being boxed in. And yet it is the crucial issue. You know, we have two mobile phones in this recording studio. We're all going to get tomorrow on our social media feed adverts for East India Company tea because we've been talking about it, you know, with data harvesting and surveillance capitalism. Now, companies are listening to us every minute. They're in our fridges.

They're in our heads. They're in our pockets. They know what we're going to do. They know where we're going to be. Google knows where we've been every minute for the last 20 years. And these are every bit as powerful adversaries as the East India Company was with its weaponry, its artillery, its cavalry, its infantry. And we have to be careful. These corporations are very, very powerful. And each generation will have to fight this battle each time anew.

William Dalrymple, thank you so much for sharing this sauna of a studio with me. I'm glad. You're eating up as much as I am. You're a treasure, but thank you for your time. Thank you so much. Thank you for that. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed that conversation with William Dalrymple

as much as I clearly did. For everything we discussed during our chat, you can find links and show notes on my website. That is www.josephnoelwalker.com. That's my full name, J-O-S-E-P-H-N-O-E-L-W-a-l-k-e-r.com and you can follow me on twitter to continue the conversation my handle is at joseph n walker until next time thank you for listening ciao