86 Books & arts The EconomistOctober 12th 2019
21At least the main expedition crew was
partly occupied by anticipation of the polar
crossing. The team had also established an-
other camp, just inland from the ice-
packed Southern Ocean. There two young
men, Anto Birkbeck and Simon Grimes,
were to guard the fuel and food supplies
that would be airlifted to Sir Ranulph and
his colleagues when winter was over.
At the time Mr Birkbeck, who is now a
fund manager, was just 22 and straight out
of university; he leapt at the chance of
spending an exotic winter in the polar
darkness. He and Mr Grimes, who had nev-
er met before they set out, were crammed
into an even smaller hut than their coun-
terparts on the plateau. There were two
desks, two bunks and over 200 books.
“Our hut was a bubble on the ice shelf,
miles of flat whiteness with a hundred foot
of ice beneath us, and the sky above and the
sea beyond,” Mr Birkbeck recollects. These
were abnormal—and, it turned out, risky—
circumstances. “The more I think about it,
the more really odd it was to be parked in a
box with some very good books and great
ideas...You do end up looking too deeply
into the Eye of Sauron,” the malign antago-
nist of “The Lord of the Rings”.
Mr Birkbeck started off with a clear plan
for his days: an hour of physical exercise in
the morning, followed by an hour of phys-
ics, an hour of Spanish study and then an
hour reading poetry. The rest of the day
would be spent with a novel. “As winter
wore on,” he says, “the novels took over. I
started getting up at midday and just read-
ing a novel until bedtime.”
He had asked friends to recommend
their desert-island books, and duly worked
through all of Tolstoy, Hardy and George El-
iot, plus “Don Quixote”, “One Hundred
Years of Solitude” and Joyce’s “Ulysses” (as
well as Homer’s “Odyssey”). As well as the
poetry (Chaucer, Milton, T.S. Eliot and “Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight”), there was
philosophy (Nietzsche, Hegel, Bertrand
Russell and Aristotle). And, almost fateful-
ly, he read Dostoyevsky.
There was one moment, towards the
end of the winter, when Mr Birkbeck had
just finished reading “Crime and Punish-
ment” and found himself walking behind
Mr Grimes on the ice. In his memory, the
events of that day are now murky. “I find it
very difficult to know whether it is a fig-
ment of my imagination or not,” he says.
“There’s no question that if you put two
people in a hut the size of a caravan and
shut them up for nine months, you will
generate intense frustration,” for which
“the other person is the obvious focus.”
On this particular day, “I don’t remem-
ber ever having a row, but I do remember
being intensely irritated by him.” Mr Birk-
beck also recalls having an ice-axe in his
hand as he trailed his hut-mate through the
whiteness. “I remember getting deeplyinto the mind of Raskolnikov and thinking
hard about this cold-blooded murder,”
which Dostoyevsky’s anti-hero commits
with an axe. At the same time he was pon-
dering the question of whether good and
evil truly exist. “I don’t really know wheth-
er [Mr Grimes] was in danger or not.”
Now, thinking back after four decades
on what he calls a “Boys’ Ownadventure”,
Mr Birkbeck says the experience was “more
powerful and meaningful” than he had re-
alised. Over the years the two feats in-
volved, one mental and one physical, each
formative in its own way, have come to
chime and blur. “It was not just about the
South Pole,” he concludes. “It was also
about Dostoyevsky and James Joyce,” and
about “the lasting power of great books”.^7A
t the startofhisnewbookWilliam
Dalrymple notes that it is “always a
mistake to read history backwards”, and to
assume that what happened was inevita-
ble. Readers are unlikely to make that mis-
take with his subject—the dramatic rise of
the East India Company (eic)—a tale so im-
probable as almost to defy belief.
A private company granted a monopoly
on trade with Asia, the eiclaunched its first
expedition in 1601. Armed with “40 mus-kets”, its crew of second-raters promptly
got stranded in the English Channel for two
months. At the time India accounted for a
quarter of global manufacturing, and back-
ward Britain just three percent. By about
1800 the eiccommanded the most power-
ful armed forces in Asia; its armoury in Cal-
cutta held 300,000 muskets. In the inter-
vening centuries it had grabbed control of
India, killed and impoverished many of its
people, enriched Britain and raised ques-
tions about the boundary between the state
and commerce that still resonate.
Mr Dalrymple sails through this story in
fine style. The first substantial contact be-
tween the eic’s grubby emissaries and
northern India’s sophisticated Mughal rul-
ers took place in 1614, with the British grov-
elling for commercial privileges; soon the
flow of spices to Europe by sea upended
centuries of overland trading routes
through the Middle East. After that comes
the decay of the Mughal empire, the devel-
opment of Madras and Calcutta and wars
between the French, British and local rul-
ers. The battle of Plassey in 1757 was pivotal:
the eicsecured control over Bengal, and
thus the ability to exploit its population.
By the end of the 18th century the com-
pany’s cruelty and cronyism caused out-
rage in London, and the British govern-
ment began to exercise more direct
oversight. There followed a final drive for
territorial dominance. In 1792 the eiccon-
trolled only 9% of the subcontinent’s area;
by the early 19th century it ran most of it. In
1859 the eicformally handed over power to
the British government.
Luck played a huge role in all this; sever-
al times the company flirted with disaster.
But it also had some competitive advan-
tages. Until the mid-18th century it relied
on naval power and commercial savvy.Colonialism and commerceBad company
The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the
East India Company.By William Dalrymple.
Bloomsbury; 576 pages; $35 and £30Captains of industry