 Yn ni wedi elwed o Gyllidgoedd JLF, rwy'n oedd 350 dych runway yng Nghymru, 4 oedd cy Aujourda, rydych i'w broses iawn i'r gwyllus trwy'r gwyllidio ac felly gwaith bwynt gweld eich gweithio cyfle, 2 miliwn i'ch cyngor ymddangos llwynt, 4 o'r petubwydd mewn cyfant sydd dyna ymweld wedi ddim yn falch, fel y myfyrwch, ond y clywed dwi'r allan o'r rheinydd yma o eich yma o holl y plwynt yma o'i cynllun i'r Unedol. Rwy'n mewn ffocwsiaeth o'r tynnu'r hyn, fyddai o'r gennyn nhw'n jaleff, ac yn roedd mae'n 75th anfertyf y 1947 o'r Gymru. Felly, mae'r llwg ei unrhyw ymlaen o'r Llyfr, a dyna'r gweithio'r berthynas o'r Llyfr yma, mae'r Unedig Brithl Cysyllt, a'r Unedig Unedig Unedig Unedig, Mae'r Exhibition ddoedd yng Nghymru, Ffotograffwyr, sydd yn Lundiol ac Mwmbaig. Mae yna ddweud o'r UK RIs a'r 75 Côl yn Llyfrgellol, ac yn Llyfrgell, yn Llyfrgell Llyfrgell. Be'n gweithio i Lwyddo'r UK i'r bydd. Mae'r rhaglion o'r Unrhyw Unigwyll Cymru a'r India. There are a few people who have done more to research and tell those stories than our next two speakers. There are two people who literally need no introduction to the crowd. So, all I say is, William, great to have you back in what we call the National Library of the UK and what you call your London office, and Shashiy, it's been three years since you've been here and it's great to have you back, lighting up the library again. Ladies and gentlemen, William Dunremple, Shashiy Thorull. Hello everyone, I'm delighted to be here again with William. We actually had a conversation about this book at the at the JLF in Jebwyr. It's wonderful to have a chance to reprise this all too often in Indian publishing. It's the British book that comes out first. But here we have an Indian conversation that did. And I know I can tell you that you're really in for a treat because apart from what we're going to be saying to each other, William has a slideshow to show you that will take us through the history that he has done in four books. Now, just a couple of things. The company Quartet is indeed a quartet of four of his books. They were not published in the order in which they are meant to be read in the company quartet because he wrote them at different times. Chronologically, we're looking at the history of this rapacious corporate that took over India, the East India Company. The first book is really one of his more recent ones, The Anarchy, first book in terms of the historical evolution of their domination of India. The second is White Mughals, which has already been referenced a couple of times in conversations today on the stage. The third then takes us to Return of the King, which of course takes us also towards Afghanistan. And the fourth and final one is The Last Mughal, which is about Bahadur Shahzath for the final end of the British East India Company because the so-called Indian Sipoi Mutiny, which many of us call the Indian Revolt, ended the rule of the East India Company in India and its takeover by the British Crown. I think what we'll do is we'll walk through that narrative in that order and because of everything else, the slides will tell you such an interesting story about the way in which it happened. And then as William speaks to the slides, I'll try and occasionally provoke something out of him by way of a question. So William, why don't you start unfolding the narrative? I think we've actually got the wrong presentation up. This is just The Anarchy. We'll go back to, after we do the first one, we can go back to, here we go. First of all, thank you all for coming. Thank you for sitting through an empire double bill with First Satnam, now Shashi and I. I think next time we do this, we're going to get Shashi to interview Satnam and then I can just retire altogether and give up. But what a great privilege it is to be on with you, sir. Thank you again for being our frequent and most popular guest. And again, what you've done to bring this story to audiences everywhere, not just in India, but here, is extraordinary. The story I've been telling over the last 20 years is not the whole story of the British India. It's just the first half of the story. It's the story of the East India Company. And in none of my writing have I really gone beyond the watershed of 1857. But the story I tell is a very surprising one, but I think a very important one because it's actually two stories. On one hand it's the story of the beginnings of British engagement with India and becoming the story of British colonialism in India. But on the other hand it's the story of another major theme of our times and one that, like colonialism, only becomes more important with time, which is the story of the power of corporations. When we think of empires, we tend to think of the power of the state and the way that states can send armies, navies and task forces over the borders as is happening now in Ukraine, for example. That was ordered by Putin, the Russian army went in. The story of the British India is the story of colonialism led by a corporation, which is both more sinister and more weird because in one of the most bizarre stories in world history, India, which was then the richest, greatest country in the world, was overwhelmed not by Britain in the state, nor even England in the state, which is what was engaged at that time because the union hadn't happened before 1707, but was overwhelmed bizarrely by one English company in one London office block in one street in London. The office was five windows wide, I think you're right. And we're going to see a picture of it in a second. And it's not even a big office, it's a small office, it's much smaller than the British Library. And it did it by, and this is the complicating extraordinary story, it did it by borrowing money from Indian bankers and buying with that money the services of Indian soldiers. And 95% of the armies of the East India Company were Indian. I mean, it's possible to imagine anything like this happening today. And the complicity of some Indian reserves. And the complicity of some of the big bankers, particularly the Mawari. I don't just mean them, I mean things like the nobles. Okay, well don't worry, we'll go with that, it's fine. What happened? We haven't got the company quartet, we've got the, I think the anarchy, I may be wrong, we'll think whatever, it's all nice pictures. You have nice multi-coloured remote control, let's find out soon enough. And so the four books tells that story, and the study says there's four of them. Anarchy is actually the first chronologically. White moguls adds a certain nuance to the story, because at the same time as the East India Company was looting and plundering India and sending its goods back to Britain, was also ironically the time when most multi-racial interaction took place. That by the 1780s one in three British men in India has an Indian wife, girlfriend or child which they're leaving their goods in India. Well the others were largely single, they weren't English women in India. At all, exactly that. Exactly that. And the third story is the story of Imperial hubris at its most dramatic, the story of the East India Company's catastrophic invasion of Afghanistan. An army march is in, again it's an Indian army, it's Biharis, people from UP with a scattering of British officers. And everything goes wrong because they don't read any of the signs and they misbehave in every imaginable way. They're massacred on the way out, at least according to legend, one man makes it through to Jalalabad. In fact a lot more get out, but it's a complicated story. Then finally, the fourth one is the last Mughal, which is the story of Biharis al-Zhaffar in the last moment of the Mughal dynasty. Now shrunk almost to the walls of Delhi and how the British in 1857 provoked their own army of sepoys. The same army which had conquered Afghanistan, which had been responsible for taking this corporate rule through India, turns on its own officers, so badly behaved has the company been to its own troops that it turns it on officers and very, very nearly kicks the British out of India. And only again in a sort of complicating fact, only because the Sikhs of the Punjab and the Pashtuns from what's now Pakistan and Waziristan join and form a new army under corporate rule, they then take Delhi in September of 1857. So it's an uncomfortable and it's a difficult story for everyone. For British people it's difficult because it's the story of how the people that we've been taught in our school lessons built a great and glorious empire, in fact looted India and took from India the money to build all the great Palladian villains. So when you see some nice Sunday night drama with Jane Austen, with Colin Firth wading through some lovely river, the chances are it was built with money from Bengal or the Caribbean slave trade. There's actually a passage from Horace Walpole taking a horse carriage down the street and literally counting the number of mansions built with Indian wealth. And you know, if you look at the state of Britain relative to the rest of Europe in the 17th century, Britain is behind Spain, Portugal, France and Italy. How did it rise up through money from these two sources? The East India Company on one hand and the Caribbean slave trade in the other. Yesterday I was speaking at the kite festival and there's a large Palladian mansion there which was, I didn't know this when I was giving the lecture, I only looked it up afterwards. This is Dashwoods and some of the finest zophanies are pictures of the Dashwood family in Calcutta and it's all very lovely. But you know, look at the figures, the money comes from slaves and it comes from Indians. Absolute classic example of a beautiful 18th century mansion, the most perfect place to throw a beautiful summer festival, lovely avenues, couldn't be more pleasing to the senses but built on the back of slavery and exploitation and looting and it's understanding that that's so important with this. So to kick off a lovely mansion. And this is Powys Castle on the borders of Wales and England. Perfect English box hedges, just the sort of thing, we're talking about it, but inside, very different. More loot from India in that one room in Powys Castle than you'll find in the National Museum in Delhi, anywhere in Pakistan, anywhere in Afghanistan or anywhere in Bangladesh. And what it has is lovely 18th century Nawabi outfits, talwa, shields, spears, ivory chess pieces, some major pieces of loot. Loot, of course, as both our books point out, an Indian word, luthna de blanda, comes into England in the 18th century. Why? Because this stuff is landing in Powys and elsewhere. And this is Surajadunas Palankwyd, left on the battlefield of Plasi in 1857. Why is it there? Because this is Clive's own house, or the house that his descendants ended up owning. Through that arch in the left-hand corner, you'll find Tabus Sultan's campaign tent, seized at the attack, burning loot and plunder of Sri Rangaputna, when the city was just looted. And this is a story that tells how it happened, and you have to pass under it to get into that amazing gallery. And it's a kind of nonsense picture, because the painter Benjamin West had never been to India. One of the critics of the Royal Academy pointed out, it looked like the dome of St. Paul's rather than the Indian in the back. And the scene depicted had no reality to the actual event taking place. What is being shown here is that the smiling figure in Cloth of Gold, who is Shah Alam, the Mughal Emperor, is handing to the portly gentleman in a red coat. No portly jokes read the Shashi or Die at this particular moment. And what is happening there is that a document called the Dewani is being passed to the East India Company. The Dewani sounds like it's a nice sort of Dewali present or something. It's not. It's the right to administer the finances of the three or four richest provinces of India. Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. And it's being handed not to the British government, but to the representative of a company. And here is that house that Shashi mentioned. Look how modest it is. It's just the four windows in the middle. Five windows in the middle. It's set back from the street. So people passing by don't even have to go anywhere near it. They have to get through the railings to get there. There's one entrance on the left. And it's not even the two buildings on either side. They're different businesses. But from that building, the orders were issued and the decisions made, which resulted in everything. I mean, we wouldn't be sitting here today. The Indian British members of the audience would not be living in India. All the enormous imports of subsequent history start because of what happened in that building. It's an extraordinary tale. Does that physical building still exist or has it gone? It's totally gone. It's not even a blue plaque. That's in a sense the sinister thing. This is one of the most important things. It starts imperialism. For better or worse, it completely changes the world. But there's nothing. There's not a blue plaque. There's not a sign. There's not even a kind of tiny thing. What stands there now? The Lloyd's Insurance Building. This company has a founder. This is a guy. His name is Auditor Smythe and he's a chartered accountant. And he has the idea of trying to copy what the Dutch are doing, which is to go directly to the producers of spices, not in India at this stage, but in what he calls the East Indies, which means that our modern parlance Indonesia. And specifically there are islands off the coast of New Guinea in fact, Bunder and Run. And so he calls a start-up meeting. Anyone today is starting a tech start-up or something and they want to gather some investors, that's what he does. And here are the first investors. And this document, where is it? 500 yards away in the British Library. As is every single subsequent slip of paper that ever passed through East India House, Lead and Hall Street, it's now here, in the British Library underground, said to be 35 miles of East India Company papers. I don't know whether that's a complete myth, but if you look at the catalogues, it just goes on and on and on and we can only imagine the hole in the ground beneath here deep enough to hold all this stuff. And you can read it, here at number one, Mayor of London, £200. Secondly, some guys have given £1,000 and £200 and £300 and £1,000 and 1,000. So this is literally the start-up. And when they've got the money, they need a ship. So they get hold of this guy who's just come back. He's sank his previous ship, the one of the picture. But still, no one else has been to Indonesia, so they hire him. And they go to Blackwell and they try and get a nice ship. They find a pirate ship, its name, and I'm not making this up. You know, it sounds like something out of Johnny Depp and not out of the head, but out of Johnny Depp and Pirates of the Caribbean. It's the scourge of Malice. It's a pirate ship. So they buy the pirate ship, and being a clever corporate, they rebrand it, and they call it the Red Dragon, as if it's a nice country pub in Wales or something. And off they sail. And they duly get to Indonesia. And in Indonesia, off the coast of Indonesia, they see a Portugese ship coming the opposite direction. It's full of spices. Because they are pirates, they board it. And they transfer the contents into their own hold and sail back to London and sell it for a million pounds. And with that, they buy this, which is the first in the headquarters. It looks like a pub. It's lovely. But that's on the site, and that site remains the place where India is run until 1857. They then buy a harbour at Deppford, where they start making ships. And all goes well until this man, very popular with the current Prime Minister. This is Orag Zeb, who featured in an exclusive slot at the Independence Day speech for the Red Fort this year. And once he overreaches, and once the marathas bounce back and begin looting all the local territories and capturing Surat, the major local port, it all begins to collapse. And the whole local edifice, which has been secure and extremely prosperous, particularly for the ruling elite for 200 years, begins to collapse. And Delhi is sitting a city of a million people, the richest and largest city between Istanbul and Tokyo, Edo. And it's gorgeous. This is a little bit later. This is in the 1850s, but you can see what we're talking about. No smog, no pollution. Gorgeous canal running up the middle of Chandichoke until this guy turns up. And everyone's at this point wondering whether it's going to be, is it the marathas are going to get to loot Delhi? Is it going to be the jarts who are in dig? Is it going to be the Sikhs in the Punjab? In the end, it's none of them. It's this guy, the Persian, Nadisha. Modest berth manages to overthrow the Safavid dynasty and invent some exciting gizmos that can pierce Mogulama called a swivel gun, which could be fitted to a horse. And with this, he invades Afghanistan, captures Kabul, no resistance comes down, captures Peshawar, still no sign of any resistance, captures Lahore. And by this time, the Mogul empire finally sort of rumbles into life. And three Mogul armies converge on the plain of Karnal near Meirut. But the whole of Karn market turns up to ladies in Dior sunglasses and all this sort of stuff and dancing girls. And it's a bit of a mess. The army is not in fighting shape. And a very small army of 160,000 Persians destroys a 1.5 million camp, at least, of Mogul soldiers, leading to... That camp had a large, what's called a small teeth to tail ratio. The tail was much larger than the fighting teeth. Exactly that, exactly that. Nadisha invites on the right, invites Mohammad Shahrangila on the left to tea. Idiotic Mohammad Shahrangila goes with just a small bodyguard and is captured. They then march in together into Delhi. Six weeks later, they leave and Nadisha takes with them the Koinore. Now, I'm told... Beacock Throne. Beacock Throne. And so much loot and so much money from Delhi that the people of Persia didn't have to pay any taxes for the next three years. And 8,000 wagons. And when you go to Tehran today, some of the most beautiful objects in the palaces are the lost Mogul treasures of Delhi. Ditto bizarrely top capi palace in Istanbul, because in Istanbul, Nadisha sends just to irritate his enemies, the Ottomans, a scattering of the trifles that he's found, and they are today the highlights of the top capi palace. So the gorgeous Mogul things which aren't in Delhi are actually... and even before the Brits were able to get their hands on them, they're actually in top capi, and in Leningrad, and in Tehran. And then, as the Mogul empire unravels, because it's as if a big Barok mirror has been thrown out of a window, shattered into a thousand pieces, all these different states, Jopor, Jaipur, Tanjore, Hyderabad, all the different Maratha states, all slightly at odds with each other, none co-ordinating resistance against the imperial powers, both France and Germany import new military techniques from Britain. One second. I think we should clarify. The Mogul empire was indeed in control of pretty much the entire subcontinent. It had appointed provincial governors, remember communications are pretty meager in those days, provincial governors throughout the states, but they definitely owed fealty to the Mogul emperor. In fact, when Nadisha was in Delhi and he was massacring people left, right and centre, our chap from the Nizam from Hyderabad showed up in Delhi to try and negotiate terms on which Nadisha could leave. That's right. The whole thing was just incredible. But once it was done, the depleted Mogul throne was not in any condition to really exercise the same sort of control again. And then as William says, what you've got is you've got a whole, all these provincial governors, as it were, became de facto mini-kings. That's why you suddenly had a whole collection of states out of what had once been one empire, and that's what made it slightly easier pickings for the East India Company. And this may look like a sort of pride parade, but it's not. This is actually the leading military technology of its day. These are sepoys trained in the latest fighting techniques developed by Frederick the Great of Prussia. They use muskets, they don't fight on horseback, they use horse artillery, and later state-in-century ballistics. And this new type of warfare can take on anything that the Moguls or the Marathas can throw at it for about 40 years. And it only takes Indian courts 40 years to master and beat the company at this. But in that time, crucially, the company captures the most rich provinces of India. And just as the Mogul empire had actually been funded, mainly on the proceeds of Bengal and its million looms, India was the superpower of textiles, and it exported these textiles which were world-beating textiles all over the globe. So much so that even in Mexico, there is de-industrialisation because of the massive export of Indian cotton. Who is exporting it, it's the East India Company. And they are making their money taking magnificent Indian goods and then taking the mark up. And it should be pointed out that they were taking those Indian goods that they were paying for through Indian taxes. And it wouldn't actually cost them anything to take this off. And so they were extracting taxes from the Indian peasants in places like Bengal, Orissa and Bihar, and then buying all the stuff and shipping it off. It should also be said that, I mean this thing says 1780, but of course the big conquest, you're going to come to the Battle of Plasen in 1757, that kind of broke the back of Bengal, and thereafter the story, well, William tells it well, I'm going to leave him to do it. The question, two things, one is of course that if you look at the entire conquest by the East India Company, it actually starts off small but good, and what happened was between about 1614 and about the 1750s or so, you did have a British presence in various ports. The East India Company created warehouses, and for some obscure reason which maybe some Englishman can explain, they were called factories, but they weren't really manufacturing anything. I'm a Scotsman, but I can explain. Because they contained the factors, the people were the factors. So the place where the factors lived was the factory. Was the factory, there you are. So all these factories, which were all in port enclaves, but that's all they actually controlled. But now you pick up the story from there because you've gone too fast to 1780. Now we're just going back. So all the crucial turning point is when this character, Sirajadawla, captures Calcutta. And he's irritated because the East India Company has without any permission at all fortified Calcutta, put up or rebuilt the walls and added new cannons. Now he thinks understandably this is probably aimed at him at keeping his authority out. Partly because any of the, one of the ways that the East India Company had managed to work so successfully is it was like Singapore or Dubai. The rich Indian merchants, particularly the Mawari bankers from then Rajasthan have been attracted to Calcutta by tax-free status. So within the walls, if you were sitting in the middle of Bikaner, you'd have to pay something to the Maharaja of Jobpur, the Maharaja of Bikaner or whoever it was. But if you were in Calcutta, the East India Company gave you tax-free status and that's how they won over the bankers. So the bankers were on the side at this point. He thinks that this armament is aimed at him to keep him out so he can't tax the place. He's wrong. What's actually happening is that the French and the English are beginning to think about fighting what will become the First World War, known in America as the French and Indian Wars, known here as the Seven Ears War. And a piece of false intelligence, rather like the false intelligence that started the Iraq War, there is false intelligence that the French are about to send a massive fleet full of cannons to India. In actual fact, that fleet was going off to Canada to fight, maybe all that Daniel Day Lewis stuff, Larsson and the Mexicans, all that war. So it was off to fight that war. So they send a task force and it's led by this man, the young Robert Clive. Robert Clive arrives off the coast of Madras expecting to find a large French fleet and there's nothing there. It's gone off to Montreal, gone off to Quebec, wherever, on to the coast of Canada. But instead, he's only been there a week, twiddling his thumbs, wondering how he's going to explain this to his superiors. He's gone half way around the world and there's no one to fight. When news comes that Calcutta has fallen, so he just goes north and he takes Calcutta and he writes to his father that he's going back again and at least he's achieved something. At that point, a letter arrives from a man called the Juggett Set. The Juggett Set is the biggest banker in Bengal. He's a big banker in India. And he has already appointed Sirajadala, effectively appointed Sirajadala's grandfather, Ali Verti Khan. And now he's pissed off with Sirajadala for a rich variety of good reasons because Sirajadala sounds very unpleasant, a young man. And he writes to Clive and says, will you help me topple this man? And I will give you £1 million personally and I'll give the company £1 million in addition. And Clive says, yes, please. And he marches his troops that any authorisation from anyone else from... He doesn't tell Madras. He certainly hasn't got time to tell London. So he just marches up and he defeats Sirajadala and he walks into his treasury and he literally fills his pockets. And he then ships what's left of the treasury down in Punt's, down the Hoogley, to Fort William in Calcutta. And when he's called before Parliament years later until to explain himself why he thought he could just fill his pockets with all this stuff, he says, I was astonished at my own moderation. And rather like one of Boris Johnson's jokes in Parliament at the moment, everyone laughs and forgets that everything's happened at all and Partygate moves off. In the context, you should know that India was such a rich country according to the Oxford historian, Angus Madison, India accounted for about 27% of global GDP in 1700, 23% as late as 1800. But what is more, the revenues that Aurangzeb when he was the Mogol Emperor collected were more than those of the revenues of every single European monarch combined at that point. So that's how rich the place was. And when Clive is generated by the Mogol Empire and around 3% to 7% is generated by England. No, no, no, by Europe. England is less than 1% at that point. Because England, as you rightly pointed out, was poorer than Portugal, poorer than France and so on. So England, in fact, there are accounts of English shopkeepers trying to pass off shoddy English-made goods as Indian in order to get a higher price. And Made in India actually commanded a higher price in these 17, 18 centuries in England. But anyway. So when we managed to gossip away and nearly run out of time, but we're going to go counter through at least one end. You can turn, Arshil. No, no, no, please. Hang on. So a few years after this battle of Buxa, the East India Company fights not just the Noab of Bengal, but the Noab of Oved, Shujodala and the Mogol Emperor Sha'alum, and defeats them all. Again, it's a very tight run thing. There's absolutely no certainty that the battle is going to go this way. In fact, for quite a lot of it, run like one of those football matches where right up until the last minute you think one side's going to win and then there's two quick goals at the end. That's like the battle of Buxa is like. And suddenly, by 1765, the company finds that it's actually got control of all the richest areas of what they call the cow belt, the whole of the gadgetic valley. And they quickly send their tax collectors to collect all the taxes, and they spend the money to build up their armies. So from 7,000 sepoys at the time of Plessy, it's up to 40,000 by the 1780s, and by the 1800, you have 200,000 sepoys fighting for the East India Company at a time when the British Army in the same year, 1799, has only 100,000 troops. So you have 200,000 troops being owned and run by a multinational corporation just sitting on one London office block. Paid for entirely by Indian revenues and also by the wonderful mafia technique of going to small potentates and saying to them, you do need protection. And the guy says, I don't need protection. So we think you do because you might be attacked by us if you don't accept our protection. And this actually happened time after time, and they collected very fat fees from these kings who got their protection, the classic mafia technique. And then they realized that having conquered places like Bihar, that they can grow drugs there. So they start growing opium. And they then ship the opium to China illegally, fight two opium wars including capturing Hong Kong. And then they ship, with the profits of the opium, by which stage, incidentally, they are the largest narco operation in history. And makes the meddling cartel and Pablo Escobar look like sort of Andy Pandey and the Bill and Ben, the flowerpot men. And they use that money to buy tea which they then sell to the Indians, onto Europe and to the Americans. And it is East India Company tea that is dumped in Boston Harbour in the outbreak of the American Revolution. So by this stage, that little start-up that we saw at the beginning with that one document with the very first subscriptions has transformed and morphed like the creature in Alien from the little kind of thing that pops out of John Hertz' chest into the horrible monster that you have by then. The East India Company straddles America, Europe. It's got a flag that is the model for the future American flag. That little nice Tudor pub we saw has been transformed into sort of Buckingham Palace. And that room is what Racecourse Road is today. That's where decisions are made that affect everyone in India, still in the same office block. Now in all fairness, within the one reproach I have for your book is that you actually slightly underplay the extent of complicity of the British ruling establishment with the company. It was indeed the rapacious corporate you describe. But a phenomenal percentage of Parliament had shares in it. I think 26% of the MPs in the 1770s actually had shares in the East India Company when required they would pass helpful laws bailing these shafts out of trouble, lending them money and so on. And beyond a point, senior appointments were actually cleared with the palace and with the government. And this becomes more so as time goes on. So what starts off is a relatively independent operation, operating on a royal charter but nonetheless commercially and organisationally independent. After they asset stripped Bengal and stripped the place clean in 1772 there is a massive famine. Now this happens throughout Indian history, it's not unique but any responsible ruler will have grain and granaries which they will have prepared organised soup kitchens and employment for the starving people so that they can wade over the difficult years you prepare in the years of plenty so that in the years of famine the East India Company does nothing, it's got no grain. It exports grain out of famine in affected areas. And at that point it goes bust. It first of all sends out its sepoys into the countryside and extracts taxes at the point of a burn it and for one year 1772 succeeds still in getting its full tax revenue and when the news comes to London and the annual shareholders meeting they increase the dividend they pay themselves from 10 to 12.5% although 3 million or the figures are disputed but between 1 and 5 million certainly Bengalis have died that year. But obviously this is not a sustainable model so by the next year the East India Company has gone virtually bankrupt and there is a moment rather like the subprime collapse of 10 years ago in the States when one bank after another goes over and they have to go to the British government to bail them out and that's the moment when what has been an independent or a semi independent corporation certainly supported by the establishment as Shashi says and entirely pliant and complicit parliament who are many of whom increasingly throughout the 18th century more and more of the MPs are ex-nabobs anyway coming home and spending their money on a rotten borough. But after 1774 it ceases to be something that's owned entirely by shareholders because the government has taken a 50% share rather like Nat West at the 10 years ago. So from that point you have government becoming more and more involved in the daily running they start sending out government generals and as you say it becomes what we today would call a public private partnership. By this stage there are massive docks with all the goods coming in from India and elsewhere more docks, this is the Brunswick dock where all the ships are being built it looks rather like a massive airport imagine each one of these as a clipper taking opium or D all round the globe. And all continues increasing government control but the final moment is 1857 what in India is called the first war of independence what we still hear called the seapoy mutiny we both use neutral terms the uprising or the great uprising or the revolt or the great revolt when its own troops rise up against it and that's the point at which there is massive recrimination people talk about the Amritsa massacre and terrible as it was there are infinitely worse massacres in 1857 to 8 when not 100 or 200 or 1000 but tens possibly hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians are benneted, hung, massacred in a campaign of violence that leaves such a terrible legacy that there is not a stirring of rebellion for another 30, 40 years because people are so terrified of the massive killings that have taken place. 100,000 in one day in Delhi alone were butchered by the Brits 1858. Such is the embarrassment that this causes that this finally is the last straw and the East Indie company which is already now a semi-government run organisation is wound up and nationalised in our terms and this is the punch cartoon they've heard all the stories about the East Indie company blowing sepoys from the mouths of cannon and what they send what they show is East Indie company house the Buckingham Palace that we saw being blown from the mouths of the cannon and the banners are reading nepotism, blundering, avarice, misgovernment and supinus. Just to end with a quote before handing back to Shashi during the trial of Warren Hastings which is the only moment when Parliament actually confronts the East Indie company with its atrocities and in my opinion they've aimed it at the wrong man because Clive is a much worse character than Hastings who at least enjoys Indian culture reads the Bhagavad Gita and so on when he comes out for trial there is a wonderful quote given by the Lord Chancellor who stands at the bar and charges Hastings and it says true today as it was then he says corporations have neither bodies to be punished nor souls to be condemned they therefore do as they like Wonderful So that was how East Indie company got to where it got to there are four books that tell the story Since we have five minutes before we open it up to the audience while you're thinking of your questions and comments a couple of things I'd like William to sort of bring out father So one of the things that I always found troubling was the British pretence I think Sir John Sealy was one who said this that they had acquired the empire and a fit of absent mindedness It seems to me there was a very systematic desire to acquire territory to annex places In fact there were policies specifically designed for example if you didn't have a male heir your property was forfeit to the company that sort of thing so a lot of territories were annexed as a matter of deliberate policy Would you agree with that or is it am I being too Yes and no The difficulty when talking about both the British and India in general the company history in particular is your very long periods of history The company is found in 1599 The plassie doesn't happen until 1765 which is 160 years later The government doesn't get involved until 1787 1757 was plassie actually but it was still 1757 was plassie and the government doesn't get involved until the Regulating Act of 1774 and so there are different things true at different times in the 1858 that the company is wound up but the I mean no one had anticipated Sir Roger Darla attacking attacking Calcutta or Mir Jaffa betraying him That's a nobleman that's actually a relative of his He was part of the plot, he was also Clive and he were working for the same guy the jugger set was paying both Mir Jaffa and Clive The It's a complicated picture because no one planned that, that was not part of some imperial master plan laid down in Leadon Hall Street but you do get constant pressure on the ground to advance territory Now if you're a East India Company officer you actually have quite a low salary and it's assumed that you have to get or make the difference up through loot how you can't loot unless there's a war and what the rules of the war were at that stage that if a city surrendered there would be no looting but if it fought the loot would be given to the soldiers and the greatest proportion to the officers then to the men then to the seapoys the smallest bit of all So there was a constant incentive for the smallest grievances or the smallest opportunity to be taken and what you find is that the letters from London from the East India Company are saying what we want is trade we want to get on and make a profit we've got a very nice model here we can make a ton of money war however is expensive for us and it reduces our profit war is always expensive currently in Ukraine both sides are hemorrhaging money and this was true in the 18th century too So the East India Company financiers and accountants on what they call a quiet trade but there's always incentive for the officers and the soldiers on the ground to take the offensive and make their fortunes That's right and they didn't make any bones about it there were many many contemporary documents letters statements and so on but they opened about the fact that they are in India to make money and there's a charming letter I quote in Glorious Empire from a young man who writes to his father that how the best place in the world for a young Englishman of no particular distinction to make a fortune is to serve in India That was exactly what he was talking about This I think is why it's so rewarding in the sense to concentrate on the East India Company because the East India Company makes no bones at all about what it's up to Whereas when the British Government takes over after 1857 you get the rationalisations as Victorian morality comes in and the talk of civilising mission and the talk of civilising mission East India Company refreshingly it loots, kills, rapes, asset strips it doesn't pretend that it's there and save the children or you know and it really was even then it was quite cynical I mean it's been pointed out by again a British historian that when the Victorians actually set up famine relief camps which the East India Company had ever done they made them work camps and they actually gave the rations they gave he said were somewhat less than the concentration camp prisoners in Buchenwald got before they were sent off to the gas chambers that's how little they were paid in order to be able to survive enough to work to earn their relief But when in this country you confront empire nostalgist like Oliver Dowden of the Tory party who has begun these major culture wars that are going on saying that people like me who criticise empire or attack it are unpatriotic you can point out that the East India Company is very clear that it's there to make money there's absolutely no hypocrisy at all they're there to make money and they do and they take money from India and they bring it here Okay, one thing we haven't talked about you mentioned the non-racial period the white mughal period basically late 18th century I think about 1820 or so the so-called fishing fleet starts coming when the ships are more comfortable the seas are safer and more women come out to India looking for husbands can you tell us about that? One of my favourite characters writes about this who's called Hindu Stuart who's this officer based in Bengal and what happens is that all the English women who have failed to find a husband in the first season or two seasons are sent out to India and the idea is that they will find some poor chap sitting in a bungalo in Madhya Pradesh and they'll live happily ever after but of course when they first come out everyone has got Ashwari Aray in the back and so all these businesses have to go back straight away and they're called very cruelly returned empties returned empties but initially the figures are very interesting and how do we know the figures again contained here in the British Library because so many young men who joined the East India Company never came back in fact three quarters of them never came back if you joined the East India Company the chance was if you were very lucky you could build Cutlington Park where I was yesterday but the more likely outcome was like a lottery that you would die You could die in war, you could die in malaria you could die quite simply It was never the super toffs and the London elite that went out it was poor Scots with social aspirations they had to have enough connections to get into the East India Company but they had to be desperate enough I think my family was which were socially aspirational Scots trying to pay for expensive habits that they couldn't afford Let me just end with one small nugget quite literally when Thomas Spitt was governor of Madras he perloined a diamond which he then managed to ship off in safety to England which when sold to the Duke d'Orléans made him instantly the wealthiest man in England allowed him to buy a gigantic mansion and to found a dynasty that went on to produce two British Prime Ministers William Pitt and Pitt the Younger early Chatham so there you have the kind of scale of wealth when William talks about the gamble you might die but you might also just come back and become the richest man in England and this was not unusual it was typically diamonds that were used because if you accumulated fortune in India if you brought it back in goods or in money you got taxed but if you could hide some diamonds and show them in your pockets or do whatever dodgy way you could all send them to Amsterdam and then buy them back from Amsterdam to what Warren Hastings did that was how you avoided paying the British Exchequer to tax your Indian loot Ah, corporates and their senior executives always know how to do the tax dodge OK, question The corporate element is something perhaps we could just say one last thing what I think this shows is that we talked many a sense of the imperial side of the story what is also interesting about these indie companies is it shows for the first time how a very large corporation can overthrow a country and today of course we are in a situation where corporations such as Google or Facebook or Tesla or ExxonMobil have annual turnovers greater than the whole of Sub-Saharan Africa and as a result and this is nothing new and these guys learned their tricks in a sense the first prototype is the East India Company and what you find is that as early as it's a constant through history these indie companies wrapped up in 1857 but say in 1950 the Anglo-Persian Oil Company is worried that Mossadec, the first democratically elected leader of Iran will nationalise their very profitable corporation and what do they do they get the MI6 and the CIA together to do a sting operation and Mossadec is overthrown and they're saved so you get a corporation overthrowing a government the same happens two years later in Guatemala where United Fruit is going to have all its banana farms nationalised by the Guatemalan socialist government what do they do? CIA come in they're overthrown and the phrase banana republic is born and then finally I suppose in 1977 and Chile ITT is being overtaxed and its interest threatened by Salvador Endi again CIA coup the corporation is protected this may or may not have been the story in the invasion of Iraq why when 9-11 plotters were all Saudi Arabians is it Iraq that's attacked next arguably it's because of ExxonMobil and the oil reserve so the idea that corporation bring about change and bring down governments massively is something that is started by the East India Company and today even the Google or Facebook or Twitter these are vast corporations they may not have armies but they harvest our data tomorrow you're all going to get adverts for East India Company T in your social media feeds because you're in this room right questions from the audience are like oh lots of hands why don't we give the gentle lady here first one and we'll sort of go like this left center right and come back again okay I'm an American recently relocated to London and America experienced British colonialism kind of concurrently as what was going on in India right here yeah so America was experiencing British colonialism in parallel often with what was happening in India how much should what was going on in America influence the East India strategy or decision making in India not talking into this sorry when the Bengal famine happened in 1772 for the first time because you couldn't there were no sort of Christina Lam's jetting in or great war correspondence like Palo Biaia turning up and reporting from the front line in the 18th century and you had to have an East India Company passport to get into India at all so in very little about the atrocities was reaching back here there was a vague sense that these guys were making money far too quickly and on a far greater scale for it to be honest so there's a great undercurrent of distrust of East India Company money when it comes back but no one's sure of the details until the horrors in 1772 are so great that you get a whole load of whistleblowers who write reports one of them is called William Bolts there's three or four and they write these anonymous reports initially in things like the gentleman's magazine and the spectator and these reach America so they start to read about the East India Company and at the same time the East India Company is trying to recruit its money and there's that whole business of the t-tax which is imposed in America so it's strongly related and it's partly it's in the years following 1772 34 when these newspapers published in London begin to reach their readers in Massachusetts that people are terrified that the East India Company is going to be let loose on them and it's a major part of Patriot one of the main reasons that the Patriots turn against the Brits is fear of the East India Company and that was very much there at the time but patriotic American historians don't bring it out because it's of no really interest to them it takes some of the citation background to spot this and in a sense run with this one is a footnote to this which is that Lord Cornwallis after surrendering in Yorktown shows up in Bengal and then proceeds actually to create just like one of the ex American presidents what's that corporation that employs ex presidents and they all get paid very passively a ran corporation and all the bushes are kind of lined up getting enormous salaries so Cornwallis is out of a job after the fall of America oh we'll have you, come and run our colony come and run Bengal next gentleman so I grew up in the Republic of India and this is a ground related question coming up I want to challenge and if I may question you are framing in this conversation of the East India Company as a corporation so companies houses evolved quite a lot in the past few decades going all the way back to 1599 when you putatively said the East India Company was formed by the parliamentarians and the monies of Lord Mayor of London etc for a putative amount a 4 million quid in today's money and times I'm intrigued for a company let's still go with the thesis it's a company and a company's house and you showed the share register on your screen it was still a year after or so that they went to the crown slash the queen to get a royal charter they were denied it but very soon after they got it and in a free market you don't have monopolistic rights they did have monopolistic rights they did have the parliament and the crown supporting them to go to both and they had the right to use force granted to them by the queen and they had the right and they had those rights as well which no corporation like Google and others I don't want to go on naming them have those rights in today's world so could you please I'll challenge that framing it's a very important matter and it's certainly something that's open to debate the Easterday company has a charter from the queen and the strategy says it not only gives them the right to trade east of Suez it has a whole range of extraordinary other rights which apparently they weren't half-expecting it's sort of you know some Clark drafts this thing out and they said great because it gives them a right to wage war mint coins, control territory and a whole load of other rights that they hadn't actually expected but nonetheless despite having a crown charter and being given the the right to do this the company is organisationally independent but it is at all stages supported by the state so when Clive arrives in India to fight the French he's come on Royal Navy ships but when at the Diwani the entire right to administer Bengal, Bihar and Arissa in 1765 it's signed off it isn't signed to the British government it's signed to the company so the company plays it both ways it runs with the hands and runs with the hair the best of both worlds I'm trying to rush through lots of hands up so how differently did the money that came back from India from the empire from East India sorry how differently did that money affect different strata of British society of course that created something like Nabobs etc who were probably not the royalty but sometimes since we've been here what I see is that potentially it's still the lower strata of British society was still untouched by the money that came in is that correct? so you're absolutely right this is a highly stratified period of an English society most highly stratified in Europe and so the people who are making the real bucks are certainly those in the East India company at the top of the tree they're not as I say the dukes, the lords, the supertoffs they are the middle rank Vickers sons minus Scots gentry people who are prepared to take the risk and got enough extra sons to send out in the hope that one of them may win the what they sometimes call the great Indian lottery one of them will come back with enough money and a big diamond to do it but by the 1780s the East India company is the biggest employer in the country and it employs not only the people who are sitting working in the East India company house the clerks in Bengal who are always quite small in number at the time of plassies only 250 but they also employ millions of people running the warehouses making the sales, building the ships and so if you count all that stuff they are the biggest employer in the country and the biggest single component of the economy William Shashi fantastic discussion just one additional point that I you talked about William with the British Library having all of these documents and a whole treasure trove of information I recently discovered something which had probably just the same amount which is still undiscovered is the National Army Museum in Chelsea I don't know if you've gone there but that's actually it's a fabulous place where the entire British Army and I'm assuming a lot of the East India company artifacts that were then absorbed into the British Army what each of these soldiers and their superiors what they carried around in their pockets and brought back to themselves their diaries, their journals their stuff that they pilfered all of that which has now become the property of the Army and therefore displayed in the National Army Museum there's a wealth of information there which is yet to be so I met Jas the curator of the museum and he says that less than 1% of that has been catalogued and archived so there's a huge amount of information so I've worked a lot in that archive and particularly for white moguls has a great deal of research there but also for the last mogul and you could write the entire history of 1857 from their archive it's an extraordinary thing what they have, what you get here is official documents particularly you get everything that's the official a document starts in say a minor electorate in Peshawar a praesie is written in centre Calcutta and then a praesie is written of that which gets sent to Leadon Hall Street so the stuff that's in Peshawar is still in the Peshawar Archives or in the Lahore Archives the stuff that was in Fort William is now in the National Archives of India in Delhi so what you got here in the British Library is the praesies from all these different places so you can often follow them up streams if you're very interested in something you can find something here then go and look in the National Archives and then possibly end up in Allahabad or Madras or wherever it is we are literally down to the last half a minute so who has the mic, somebody with the mic already then you may as well ask the question there won't be time to go look for another question I'll try to keep it short if you have another question or whether what the company did was right or wrong and the national indignation South Asians might feel as to what happened the Saxons might say the same about the Normans and ask the question of statecraft so the question I have is this technological parity more or less tactical parity you said the military tactics were adopted by the Indian courts numerical superiority superiority in resources can I put a thesis to you and ask if you agree or disagree was the difference the joint stock company the idea of governance by committee and voting and the fact that England was run by parliaments while India was run by arbitrary individuals would you agree with that thesis was that the difference in statecraft it's hugely important what you say it's hugely important because the crucial middlemen in all this are the moneylenders of the bankers now if you are a banker sitting in Bengal or sitting in Rajasthan or sitting in Varanasi who do you actually want to lend to you want to lend to someone that you know will repay you on time with interest and if you have a choice of lending say to some great Maratha general or lending to the East India Company there are good arguments for lending to the East India Company because they may loot they may rape they may pillage but they know to repay on time with interest they understand commercial contracts plus you kind of you know even if you're a vegetarian Jane and they're a beef eating Englishman you kind of speak the same commercial language they understand each other and that is the nexus which allows the company to borrow the money and in the anarchy I followed that job this work incidentally is work that's been done over the last 30 years largely by Bengali economic historians it's not my own work at all and it's all there in scholarly journals but there's been particularly since Chris Bailey in the 1980s huge study on the Indian bankers and how they supported the East India Company leaving aside the moral question it's quite clear from a pragmatic reason why it was in their interest from a modern point of view sell the country down the street but if I can just compliment this with a footnote Williams totally right and of course the jagat states were hugely rich they actually dealt with more money every year than the entire bank of England but almost while this is happening what's happening in the south the Dutch decide to invade India and they decide to do it from the south and they send a fleet commanded by the famous Admiral Eustatius the Lannoy to attack what was then the Kingdom of Travancore to capture India from the south and they are rungly defeated by the forces of Travancore under King Barthain de Barma so not every king was arbitrary and so on and so forth not only did he defeat them but he captured the Dutch commanders and Eustatius the Lannoy then joined the service of the Maharaja of Travancore and became his captain of artillery I hope that someone is tweeting this to Shashley's constituents that we need this man in power the Battle of Konachel however Konachel is now in Tamil Nad because we lost a good chunk of Travancore to Kenya, Kumari district that's another story but the fact is this happened so whenever your history books say that the first example of an Asian power defeating a European power is Japan defeating Russia in 1905 raw, it's Marthand de Barma of Travancore defeating the Dutch in 1741 very shashley alright on that note bring him down and hold him in my hand whatever you did if it wasn't good enough you needed to try and do better and keep at it actually village life produces the philosophical ideas that are germane to democratic thought and practice I mean just losing four of your bandmates, soulmates is bad enough but the worst thing is out of those four families two of the families blame to me 1991 to 2017 I think only took India to a better place it was really through the transition into politics that I had the good luck of becoming a writer