In his most ambitious book to date, bestselling historian William Dalrymple tells the timely and cautionary tale of the rise of the East India Company and one of the most supreme acts of corporate violence in world history
William Dalrymple is one of Britain’s great historians and the bestselling author of the Wolfson Prize-winning White Mughals, The Last Mughal, which won the Duff Cooper Prize, and the Hemingway and Kapuscinski Prize-winning Return of a King. A frequent broadcaster, he has written and presented three television series, one of which won the Grierson Award for Best Documentary Series at BAFTA. He has also won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award, the Foreign Correspondent of the Year at the FPA Media Awards, and been awarded five honorary doctorates. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the Royal Asiatic Society and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and has held visiting fellowships at Princeton and Brown. He writes regularly for the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker and the Guardian. In 2018 he was presented with the prestigious President’s Medal by the British Academy for his outstanding literary achievement and for co-founding the Jaipur Literature Festival. William lives with his wife and three children on a farm outside Delhi.
Gloriously opulent … India is a sumptuous place. Telling its story
properly demands lush language, not to mention sensitivity towards
the country’s passionate complexity. Dalrymple is a superb
historian with a visceral understanding of India … A book of
beauty
*The Times*
An energetic pageturner that marches from the counting house on to
the battlefield, exploding patriotic myths along the way …
Dalrymple’s spirited, detailed telling will be reason enough for
many readers to devour The Anarchy. But his more novel and arguably
greater achievement lies in the way he places the company’s rise in
the turbulent political landscape of late Mughal India
*Guardian*
A tour de force *****
*Telegraph*
Dalrymple has been at the forefront of the new wave of popular
history, consistently producing work that engages with a wider
audience through writerly craft, an emphasis on characters and
their agency, evocative description of place and time, and the
inclusion of long-neglected perspectives … The book’s real
achievement is to take readers to an important and neglected period
of British and south Asian history, and to make their trip their
not just informative but colourful
*Observer*
Magnificent … Dalrymple is an accomplished historian with a gift
for imposing narrative clarity on a complex story. He combines a
profound understanding of the background against which the
Company’s story played out with an impressive capacity to weave a
range of historical voices into this history … The Anarchy explodes
myths that have accreted around the history of the Company like
barnacles on the hulls of its ships
*Evening Standard*
It is well-trodden territory but Dalrymple ... brings to it
erudition, deep insight and an entertaining style
*Financial Times*
Combining extensive research, judicious analysis and an acceptable
level of outrage, Dalrymple’s compelling account will cement his
status as the most widely read British writer on India since
Kipling … A brave and stirring narrative of India’s
eighteenth-century fragmentation
*Literary Review*
One of the best books on Indian history published in a long
time
*Times Literary Supplement*
[A] rampaging, brilliant, passionate history … Dalrymple gives us
every sword-slash, every scam, every groan and battle cry. He has
no rival as a narrative historian of the British in India … A
gripping tale of bloodshed and deceit, of unimaginable opulence and
intolerable starvation ... shot through with an unappeasable moral
passion
*Wall Street Journal*
‘Masterful … Dalrymple has been for some years one of the most
eloquent and assiduous chroniclers of Indian history. With this new
work, he sounds a minatory note … Dalrymple has done a great
service in not just writing an eminently readable history of
eighteenth-century India, but in reflecting on how so much of it
serves as a warning for our own time’
*Scotland on Sunday*
A magnificently readable book, deeply researched and richly
atmospheric, written with a historian’s understanding of power and
a novelistic eye for detail *****
*Mail on Sunday*
A rip-roaring tale of wild adventure, amorality, feckless greed and
despicable behaviour … His best history to date
*Country Life*
[Dalrymple] is a terrifically good storyteller. He makes the reader
see how events unfold and observe the personalities up close. He is
widely read both in the primary sources and the historical
scholarship. As a result, The Anarchy is one of the best books on
Indian history published in a long time
*Times Literary Supplement*
William Dalrymple’s galloping narrative vividly details how the
institution changed Indian and British lives while reshaping global
history
*Wall Street Journal*
A wonderfully readable history of the East India Company
*Prospect*
A dazzling account of multinational corporate rapacity in one of
its first forms, the East India Company; yet again Dalrymple
manages brilliantly to be both historian and contemporary
analyst
*Robert Macfarlane, author of 'Underland: A Deep Time Journey'*
Extraordinarily interesting and jaw-dropping … A winner
*Sunday Times*
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