The EconomistOctober 12th 2019 Books & arts 872
1After that new weapons and military tac-
tics became critical, until eventually some
local rivals achieved military parity. The
Tipu Sultan of Mysore, perhaps the eic’s
most effective adversary, used French tech-
nology. At that point the eic’s financial
clout became vital; it could tap into a net-
work of lenders in Bengal. Following the
American war of independence, Britain
discouraged the growth of a settler class in
India who might rebel. And the British
were expert manipulators. “Know you not
the custom of the English?” wrote Tipu.
“Wherever they fix their talons they con-
trive little by little to work themselves into
the whole management of affairs.”
Like other modern historians, Mr Dal-
rymple repudiates romanticised concep-
tions of colonialism. But in this case, he is
not breaking new ground: accounts of the
eic’s murderous blend of commerce and
government are nothing new. Adam Smith
called it a “strange absurdity”. Edmund
Burke accused it of “cruelties unheard of”.
The first page of John Keay’s history, pub-
lished in 1991, describes its venal reputa-
tion. At times Mr Dalrymple’s narrative,
with its romping descriptions of battle
scenes, itself verges on Hornblower.
What stands out is rather his sympa-
thetic portrayal of India’s embattled
Mughal rulers. He renders a poignant de-
piction of Shah Alam, an emperor in name
but for much of his life a puppet of the eic,
who expressed himself through beautiful
poetry. The book’s major omission is a full
analysis of the Asian trading system cen-
tred around Bengal—the role of commer-
cial agents who acted autonomously from
the company; the position of Calcutta as an
entrepot; and the strong links between the
eicand Chinese trade. Stamford Raffles,
who founded Singapore, was a clerk in the
eic. William Jardine, who would co-found
a firm that led the opium trade with China,
first worked as an eicship’s surgeon.
What relevance does the eichave today?
The reader will find plenty that echoes in
modern India. The well-to-do in Kolkata
(formerly Calcutta) still grumble about
Marwari money-men. India’s practice of
running its federal administrative service
with a tiny group of elite officers owes
something to the eic. Centuries of domina-
tion by the Mughals and then the British re-
main part of modern political debate, espe-
cially for Hindu nationalists.
Ultimately, Mr Dalrymple makes a bol-
der claim: that the eicwas an augury of to-
day’s Western multinationals and tech
giants. That is far-fetched. A better com-
parison is with China’s state-led expansion
abroad. While it lacks the eic’s habit of vio-
lence, modern China shares both its strate-
gic ambition and its commercial veneer.
Asia is still grappling with that awkward
mix, four centuries after the eic’s motley
crew sailed from the foggy Thames. 7“I
f anything on this graphiccauses
confusion, ignore the entire product.”
This footnote appeared on an official (if
impenetrable) spaghetti-like weather map
tweeted by Donald Trump on September
4th. It was not on the crudely doctored ver-
sion that he wheeled out at the White
House on the same day, to justify his mis-
taken warning that, among other places,
Alabama would “most likely be hit (much)
harder than anticipated” by Hurricane Dor-
ian. But perhaps it should have been. The
fiasco arose in part because of the “cone of
uncertainty” sometimes used to delineate
the possible paths of a storm—a template
which, as luck would have it, is one of
many maps and charts patiently explained
by Alberto Cairo in “How Charts Lie”.
His book could not be more timely.
Charts and maps pepper traditional and so-
cial media more than ever, but there have
been few attempts to improve what Mr Cai-
ro calls the “graphicacy” of their consum-
ers. His corrective begins with a chapter on
how to read a chart, and this basic notion—
that, to be understood, graphs must be
read, not merely glanced at—permeates
the book. He outlines the essential “scaf-
folding” of a chart (scales, legend, source
and so on), before describing the many
ways that data can be built upon it. Only
once readers know what a solid structure
looks like can they learn to spot a façade.
There are plenty out there. In one of the
author’s examples, global warming is all
but erased when the annual temperature
for the past 130 years is plotted with a base-
line starting at zero, resulting in a reassur-
ingly flat line; in another, a dual-axis chart
appears to show a shocking rise in abor-
tions carried out by Planned Parenthood, a
health-care provider, while their life-sav-
ing cancer-screenings plummet. In both
cases, the structure is designed to mislead.
Mr Cairo enjoins searching questions: Who
made the chart? What is their agenda?
Deception can begin before the axes are
drawn, when the content is selected. Trun-
cating a time-scale to exclude awkward
data—for instance, to omit a downturn in
profits—is a well-known shady practice. So
is overloading a graph to obscure an incon-
venient truth. Sometimes the numbers are
just plain wrong. In 2014 a blogger made a
splash when he plotted state-level data
from Pornhub, a website, and found Kan-
sans were viewing far more porn than oth-erAmericans.LateritemergedthatPorn-
hub’sgeolocationtrackerwasbamboozled
bypeopleaccessingthesitethroughavpn,
whichledthegizmotoregisterthemallin
thegeographicalcentreofthecontiguous
UnitedStates:a fieldinnorthKansas.
MrCairousesthisincidenttoconsider
thefallacyofdrawingconclusionsabout
individuals from group data. He com-
mendsthebloggerforadmittinghismis-
take,pointingoutthatthisincreasesper-
ceptionsoftrustworthiness.Andhisbook
reminds readers not to infer too much
froma chart, especially when itshows
themwhattheyalreadywantedtosee.Mr
Cairohassenta copytotheWhiteHouse. 7Lies and statisticsAxes of evil
How Charts Lie. By Alberto Cairo. W. W.
Norton; 226 pages; $25.95 and £15.99Inside the cone of uncertaintyF
ormuchofherlonglife,Gertrude“Ger-
tie” Legendre enjoyed a charmed exis-
tence. Born in 1902 to extreme wealth (her
father had inherited close to a billion dol-
lars in today’s money), for her the 1920s
were “a blur of parties, dances, theatre and
music”. Boredom was kept at bay by tra-
vel—ranging from Africa, where she and
her future husband Sidney dined with Em-
peror Haile Selassie in Addis Ababa, to
Indochina—and by a passion for hunting
that kept America’s museums stocked with
specimens from around the world. As Peter
Finn notes in his beautifully paced book,
she inspired a Broadway play and a film
starring Katherine Hepburn as “an amus-
ing, cocky, sometimes abrasive society girl
who wants to escape the confining expec-An heiress at warBig game hunted
A Guest of the Reich. By Peter Finn.
Pantheon Books; 240 pages; $28.95