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‘Alma, Tell Us...’
The muse to Mahler,
Gropius,Werfel and
Vienna’s golden age C11READ ONLINE AT WSJ.COM/BOOKSHELFThe Anarchy
By William Dalrymple
Bloomsbury, 522 pages, $35BYFERDINANDMOUNTtheir own private armies of native
troops—the famous sepoys. To this day,
strictly economic histories of the company
can give a similar bland impression:
English merchants were happy to do busi-
ness with Indian bankers; rajas cut deals
with British envoys to the advantage of
both sides. One recent account describes
the company’s regime as “not so much
‘strange’ as typical” of an early modern
world filled with hybrid and overlapping
sovereignties.
By contrast, Mr. 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.
“The Anarchy” is not simply a gripping
tale of bloodshed and deceit, of unimagi-
nable opulence and intolerable starvation.
It is shot through with an unappeasable
moral passion.
The book concentrates on the second
half of the 18th century, for it was in that
period that a dangerously unregulated
company, which existed solely for the
purpose of enriching its shareholders,
seized most of India by force and fraud.
This was something that was understood
at the time. It was the Victorians who
muddied the waters. The way the Raj was
won had to be prettified for the sake of
British self-esteem.
The company had several pieces of
luck. It received active military support
from the British Crown during both the
Seven Years’ War and the Napoleonic
wars, which expelled the French from
most of South Asia. It also arrived on the
scene at a time when the Mughal Empire
was fracturing, after shattering invasions
from the Persians and the Afghans. The
nabobs, or deputies, who then set them-
selves up as independent rulers in Mysore,
Hyderabad and Lucknow could never com-
bine for long enough to beat the British,
nor did they have access to global credit
markets, which the East India company
used to finance long wars.
The only time the nabobs presented
a united front, at the Battle of Buxar in
1764, they were smashed in a close-run
thing by Hector Munro, a general of rare
brutality who delighted in blowing mal-
efactors from the mouths of his guns.
(He was the great-great-grandfather of
another Hector Munro, better known to us
as the writer Saki, who also inherited an
unnerving brutal streak). Buxar was the
decisive battle of the age, not the more
famous victory at Plassey seven years
earlier, from which British rule is usually
dated. Plassey was something of a fake
triumph, as British commander-in-chief
Robert Clive had bribed the nabobs’ Arab
general, Mir Jafar, to melt away as soon
as the fighting started.
Even by the standards of imperial
chancers, Clive was a nasty piece of work.
He always hated India—“I have not en-
joyed one happy day since I left my native
country”—but he could not keep away as
long as there were more millions to be
made. His personal cut of the loot after
Plassey was £22 million. He was the fore-
most adept of the “shaking of the pagoda
PleaseturntopageC9The Testaments
By Margaret Atwood
Nan A. Talese, 419 pages, $28.95BYSAMSACKSI
F EVER YOU wanted to see the
shape of the future, the best place
would have been in Founders’ Hall
in the City of London on Sept. 24,- There in this old merchants’
hall (founders meant brassfounders, not
founding fathers) were assembled more
than 100 of the City’s richest merchants
and sea captains, all primed to subscribe
large sums ranging from £100 to £3,000
for the greatest startup in history. Among
those present were the unstoppable ex-
plorer William Baffin and the great colo-
nial booster Richard Hakluyt. The com-
pany they were all there to promote was
“to venter in the pretended voiage to ye
East Indies and other Ilands and Cuntries
thereabouts to make trade...bybuying
or bartering of suche goodes, wares, jew-
elles or merchaundize as those Ilands or
Cuntries may yeld or afforthe...(thewhich
...itmaie please the Lorde to prosper).”
And it did please the Lord. By the
1750s, from its sober headquarters in
Leadenhall Street, the East India Co. was
running a business that brought in nearly
£1 million a year, an eighth of all Britain’s
imports. The Honourable Company, as it
liked to call itself, paid a dividend of 8%
and was able to borrow hugely, with a
total debt burden of £6 million in 1744. By
the 1800s it had constructed much of
London’s docklands and was responsible
for nearly half of Britain’s trade; its annual
spending in Britain alone equaled a quar-
ter of total government expenditure. By
then, it had become too big to fail.
As William Dalrymple shows in his
rampaging, brilliant, passionate history,
“The Anarchy,” the East India Co. was the
most advanced capitalist organization in
the world. But it was not the first. That
honor goes to the Muscovy or Russian Co.,
started in 1555, with the extraordinary
wizard-scientist Dr. John Dee as its guru.
He it was who first whispered the magic
words “British Empire” into Queen Eliza-
beth’s receptive ear.Her Royal Charter of New Year’s Eve
1600 gave the East India Co. its historic
impetus. What a chilling arrogance there
is about that charter: The Queen granted
the company a monopoly on trade over all
parts of Asia not in the possession of a
“Christian Prince,” with powers to punish
or imprison anyone who meddled with its
rights and privileges. The company’s fleet
was to be heavily armed, as it set sail “for
the Honour of our Nation, the Wealth of
our People...theIncrease of our Navi-
gation and the Advancement of Lawful
Traffic.” This wasn’t mere commerce.
From the start, the whole enterprise had
the imperial glint in its eye.
The East India Co. inherited, too, the
tradition of licensed piracy that had made
legends of Elizabethan privateers like
Francis Drake. When James Lancaster
came home from the company’s first
voyage to the East Indies with 900 tons
of pepper, cinnamon and cloves worth
£1 million, most of the cargo came not
from “lawful traffic” but from a Portu-
guese vessel he had seized off the coast
of Indonesia.
Corruption on
a luscious scale
came with the
territory. Less
than a century
after its found-
ing, the company
was discovered
to be using its
own shares to
bribe ministers
and MPs to the
tune of £1200 a
year. The Lord
President of the
Council was im-
peached and the
governor of the
company was
imprisoned in
what Mr. Dal-
rymple calls the “world’s first corporate
lobbying scandal.” By the 19th century,
the Commons benches were packed with
returned nabobs who had made fortunes
out of their years in the company’s
service. The Hindustani word “loot” en-
tered the English language and made itself
at home.
Around the company’s trading stations,
unpromising fishing villages grew into
great cities: Madras, Bombay, Calcutta.
The East India Co. “factories,” or ware-
houses, were the size of cathedrals. And
now began what Adam Smith called “a
strange absurdity”: a company State, or as
Mr. Dalrymple describes it, “the most ex-
traordinary corporate takeover in history.”
A mere company of merchants had come
to rule over most of a subcontinent.
How did they do it, and why? At school
in midcentury Britain, I remember, we
were taught a rather sanitized version of
the process. The honest British traders
were going about their business in their
fine factories when they were menaced or
attacked by marauding native rulers and
their nomadic hordes, and so they were
forced to defend themselves and recruitTRADE
Sale room
in India
House,
ca. 1808,
by Thomas
Rowlandson
and
Augustus
Charles
Pugin.Corporate Warfare
The East India Co. was the most successful and ruthless startup in history,
pioneeringinsider-tradingscams,corporate-lobbyingscandals—andtheBritishEmpire.
BOOKS
The Triumph of
Geometry
It’s Euclid’s world,
wejustliveinit C12Depiction of the Battle of Pollilur (1780), from a mural celebrating the decisive victory of Tipu Sultan over East India Co. forces.
MARY EVANS/OTTO MONEY/THE IMAGE WORKS (DETAIL); BRIDGEMAN IMAGES
Is There
No Balm
In Gilead?
N
INE YEARS after Miguel
de Cervantes’s “Don
Quixote” was published to
enormous international
success, a sequel appeared
continuing the misadventures of the
delusional knight errant. The problem
was that this book was written by an
imposter, a man known by the pen
name Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda.
Cervantes, who had been secretly
working on a follow-up, was incensed,
and when he brought out the true
second volume the following year, it
contained numerous sneering references
to Avellaneda’s knockoff. In one chapter
a character recounts visiting the gates
of hell and watching devils use a copy
as a tennis ball.
What author wouldn’t like to cast the
works of their pretenders into the depths
of hell? Literary popularity is to be
desired, but
it comes at
the price of a
loss of con-
trol over the
material, as a
book’s world
and charac-
ters become
a kind of
shared cul-
tural prop-
erty. Writers
(or their
estates) have done anything they can to
preserve their own authority over their
works. Mark Twain advocated before
Congress for copyright laws. Best-
selling authors like Anne Rice and Diana
Gabaldon have forbidden readers from
publishing fan fiction based on their
books. J.K. Rowling ended her Harry
Potter series years ago, but since then
has been chiming in to reveal new,
unwritten details about its characters.
These elaborations are heavy-handed
and often taken amiss, but they under-
score the point: However much you may
love the Potterverse, it belongs to Ms.
Rowling, and she has the last word in
deciding between canon and apocrypha.
Canonicity is very much at issue in
“The Testaments,” Margaret Atwood’s
wildly anticipated return to the
dystopian world that she created in
her 1985 novel “The Handmaid’s Tale.”
The premise of this book is now well
known, but for a quick refresher:
During a future period of environmental
collapse and plummeting birth rates, a
theocratic Christian regime stages a
coup against the United States govern-
ment and establishes the totalitarian
Republic of Gilead in the region of
New England. The principal feature of
this state is the violent enslavement
of women in a variety of strictly moni-
tored helpmeet classes, the most
notorious group being the Handmaids,
the still-fertile sliver of the population
who are forced to “fulfill their bio-
logical destinies” by bearing children
for the families of the Gilead elite.
Ms. Atwood’s dark-cornered, almost
Gothic story of a Handmaid called
Offred was an immediate crossover
success, both a Booker Prize nominee
and the winner of the U.K.’s Arthur C.
Clarke Award for the year’s best
science-fiction novel. Enshrined as a
trailblazer of feminist literature, the
novel occasioned lots of academic
studies, sporadic complaints from
school boards worried about its explicit
content, and the requisite murky,
forgettable film adaptation.
But in 2017 “The Handmaid’s Tale”
took on a remarkable second life, jump-
ing to the top of the best-seller lists.
This was in part due to the alarmism
that swept through parts of the country
after the shock result of the presidential
election. (George Orwell’s “1984” and
Sinclair Lewis’s “It Can’t Happen Here”
also sold by the pallet.) But the renewed
popularity also reflected anticipation for
the TV series that premiered later that
spring. Since then, as the show extended
beyond the events of the novel, racking
up awards in the process, the iconogra-
phy of Gilead has become ubiquitous in
both political and literary spheres. It’s
not uncommon to see women at protest
marches dressed in the Handmaids’
white bonnets and blood-red cloaks. A
new Atwood-inspired feminist dystopian
novel seems to be published every week.
The TV series has been renewed for a
fourth season, set to air sometime next
year. Blessed be the fruit.
PleaseturntopageC8Margaret
Atwood’s new
book is not
only a novel,
it’s also part of
a multimedia
franchise.