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William Dalrymple, historian: "The immense power of the India Company is a warning against large corporations"

2022-12-14T11:19:14.208Z


The Scottish writer and historian examines in his latest book, 'Anarchy', the influence of British private business on imperialist raids


“The power to influence governments through

lobbies

financed by today's large corporations, such as Meta, Google or Twitter, is not a problem of this century, since 300 years ago the British East India Company already exerted a immense power over Asian nations or even Great Britain itself”, warns the Scottish writer and historian William Dalrymple, 57, to this newspaper by video call.

Member of the Royal Historical Society and the Royal Asiatic Society, honorary doctor of several British and Indian universities and author of books and essays on India today or its colonial past, warns in his latest work,

Anarchy

, published in Spain in 2021, about the disturbing parallelism between the immense power that a private company accumulated three centuries ago, the British India Company, which manipulated governments and brought down the Mughal empire, with the prerogatives enjoyed today by large corporations.

More information

The first great Afghan disaster

“The India Company has been the largest and most prosperous private corporation that has ever existed;

he used his

lobbies

in the British Parliament to manipulate governments and blackmailed and destroyed the empire that ruled India, using violence with a powerful private army.

But today the big corporations do not need soldiers or artillery to try to dominate the world: they use their knowledge about almost everything we do and talk about and the analysis of the data they accumulate about us”, says the author of

Anarchy.

This book tells the story of the British India Company, whose abuse of power and looting of the assets of what in the 18th century was the richest empire in the world ultimately led to lawlessness, excessive violence and the collapse of a society that Before the arrival of this group of merchants, it was much more prosperous and organized.

Dalrymple, who has lived between Scotland and New Delhi since 1989, already recounted for the first time the excesses, greed and racism of that great British commercial company in India in his work

The White Mughals

- about the English, Irish and Scottish settled in the called “jewel in the Crown”, first in a certain harmony at least with the indigenous culture and then in a purely colonial relationship—;

the disaster of the British withdrawal in Afghanistan in the 19th century in

The Return of the King,

or the overthrow by the soldiers of the Company of the Last Emperor —which was now nothing more than a puppet of the colonizers— during the suppression of the Indian revolt of the sepoys in 1857 in

The Last Mughal

.

Cover of 'The Last Mughal', by William Dalrymple.

"The way in which today's large corporations eager for global power bribe or recruit politicians to achieve their ends is identical to the one that the Company used in Victorian London to defend its interests and not that of the citizens," Dalrymple asserts.

"At the same time," he continues, "in bankruptcy situations, as happened in 2008 with the fiascos of Lehman Brothers and others, the Crown Government also had to come to their rescue with public funds."

Educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, Dalrymple insists on the deep ignorance that exists about the colonization of India in his own country, where very few today are aware that it was not carried out by a nation, but, in an unusual way, by a private enterprise, at least until the rebellion of 1857, when the old Great Britain seized the reins of the vast colony.

"During the Victorian era, in the 19th century, the separation between the State and the Company was very tenuous and its leaders, such as Robert Clive or Warren Hastings, were considered national heroes."

Since the establishment of small trading enclaves on both coasts of the Indian subcontinent, achieved through agreements with Mughal emperors such as Jehangir, who received the British envoy Thomas Roe in 1619 and underestimated the danger of such concessions, the British East India Company began an expansion military that from the very rich Bengal ended with the total control in the 19th century of the territories that today form India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

From a small headquarters with a handful of employees in London, its managers imposed a monopoly on commerce and their own labor, civil and criminal laws on the indigenous population in their vast domains.

Scenes from a Bengal regiment on the march showing the Army on its way to Afghanistan. British library / Desperta Ferro

The Scottish author, winner of prizes such as the Wolson for history or the Kapuscinski for literary reporting and great-nephew of Virginia Woolf, warns via videoconference from his home in New Delhi: “Today the work of historians is more important than ever.

In recent years, a wave of imperial nostalgia has risen among the most conservative right in the United Kingdom, which claims pride in what it considers the best period in our history, emphasizing positive aspects such as the abolition of slavery, but which it hides events such as the massacres in Delhi and other cities after the revolt was crushed or the looting of India's wealth.

A few months ago, the ill-fated former Prime Minister Liz Truss urged to rid ourselves of all guilt over the UK's colonial past.

And it is surprising the ignorance about the history of the British Empire and especially its dark face in schools and even among university students.

Indeed, he points out, "in UK schools we have studied the Roman or Aztec empire, but since the mid-20th century, with its end, hardly anything about the British."

But, according to the author of

Anarchy

, that importance of insisting on the truth of history today is not only a duty of the former metropolises, but in many former colonies of the European powers, the facts of the past are also being hidden or misrepresented.

"In today's India, the ultranationalist government of Narendra Modhi, in its eagerness to discriminate against Muslims, insists on teaching about the medieval wars between Indians and armies that came from Afghanistan as religious fights: Hinduism against Islam, when they were really conflicts of political power or, similarly, reduce the Mughals, who ruled a great empire in India for three centuries,

According to Dalrymple, the

Hindutva

movement , this current of Hindu supremacy in a country with many millions of Muslims, Buddhists, Christians and other religious minorities, “will continue to grow, as it is very electorally profitable;

and it is a cause for great concern.”

Buddhism and cosmology

The Scottish writer, fervently in love with India, is currently preparing his next book on colonization or the influence of medieval India in Southeast Asia, "on this cultural and intellectual occasion and with hardly any intervention by armies."

“There are several aspects that I consider essential in the history of the great cultural influence that India exerted in other Asian countries: the first is the factor of Buddhism, a faith that many think is universal, but in its origin it was totally Indian and deeply rooted in its cosmology, and which, an extraordinary fact, came to establish itself not only in Korea or Japan, but in a great hermetic empire like China.

Secondly, there is the expansion of Hinduism in Indonesia or Cambodia, where it was combined with Buddhism in Khmer temples and, finally, the export of mathematics, of the Indian number system -inventor of zero- that first reached the Arab world. , to Baghdad, and then through Islam to Europe where, paradoxically, we continue to call digits that are actually Indian 'Arabic numbers'”.

Thus, for Dalrymple, the most precise comparison of Indian colonization in Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam or the Maldives is with that carried out by the Greeks in Europe in Antiquity.

“Without using weapons, Greece exerted a tremendous influence on architecture or civilization in general and it was because its system, its ideas or gods were not only attractive but also useful, as was also the case in Southeast Asia, which He even adopted the Sanskrit script”, he concludes.

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Source: elparis

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