En 1765, l'East India Company force le jeune empereur moghol à établir, dans ses riches provinces, une nouvelle administration composée de marchands anglais, s'appuyant sur une armée privée pour collecter des taxes : l'Inde subit une véritable privatisation. Dès lors, l'East India Company, cette entreprise conventionnelle spécialisée dans la soie et les épices, devient une entité tout à fait inhabituelle - un pouvoir colonial agressif, qui étend son emprise sous couvert d'une activité commerciale et qui en moins de quarante ans, va lever une armée de près de 200 000 hommes, conquérir le Bengale, et Delhi.
Anarchie raconte comment l'un des plus puissants empires du monde s'est désintégré, tombant entre les mains d'une compagnie privée basée dans un petit bureau à des milliers de kilomètres.
THE TOP 5 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2019 'Dalrymple is a superb historian with a visceral understanding of India . A book of beauty ' - Gerard DeGroot, The Times In August 1765 the East India Company defeated the young Mughal emperor and forced him to establish in his richest provinces a new administration run by English merchants who collected taxes through means of a ruthless private army - what we would now call an act of involuntary privatisation.
The East India Company's founding charter authorised it to 'wage war' and it had always used violence to gain its ends. But the creation of this new government marked the moment that the East India Company ceased to be a conventional international trading corporation dealing in silks and spices and became something much more unusual: an aggressive colonial power in the guise of a multinational business. In less than four decades it had trained up a security force of around 200,000 men - twice the size of the British army - and had subdued an entire subcontinent, conquering first Bengal and finally, in 1803, the Mughal capital of Delhi itself. The Company's reach stretched until almost all of India south of the Himalayas was effectively ruled from a boardroom in London.
The Anarchy tells the remarkable story of how one of the world's most magnificent empires disintegrated and came to be replaced by a dangerously unregulated private company, based thousands of miles overseas in one small office, five windows wide, and answerable only to its distant shareholders. In his most ambitious and riveting book to date, William Dalrymple tells the story of the East India Company as it has never been told before, unfolding a timely cautionary tale of the first global corporate power.
From the early 16th century to the eve of the Indian Mutiny, the "white Mughals" who wore local dress and adopted Indian ways were a source of embarrassment to successive colonial administrations. This book uncovers a world unexplored by history, and places at its centre a tale of betrayal.
The first comprehensive and authoritative history of the Koh-i-Noor, arguably the most celebrated and mythologised jewel in the world.
On 29 March 1849, the ten-year-old maharaja of the Punjab was ushered into the magnificent Mirrored Hall at the centre of the great fort in Lahore. There, in a public ceremony, the frightened but dignified child handed over great swathes of the richest country in India in a formal Act of Submission to a private corporation, the East India Company. He was also compelled to hand over to the British monarch, Queen Victoria, perhaps the single most valuable object on the subcontinent: the celebrated Koh-i Noor diamond. The Mountain of Light.
The history of the Koh-i-Noor that was then commissioned by the British may have been one woven together from gossip of Delhi bazaars, but it was to become the accepted version. Only now is it finally challenged, freeing the diamond from the fog of mythology that has clung to it for so long. The resulting history is one of greed, murder, torture, colonialism and appropriation told through an impressive slice of south and central Asian history. It ends with the jewel in its current controversial setting: in the crown of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother.
Masterly, powerful and erudite, this is history at its most compelling and invigorating.
Né en 1775, Bahadur Shah II, également connu sous son nom de plume, Zafar, fut le dernier empereur moghol, descendant direct de Gengis Khan. De royal il n'avait plus que son nom et son sang. Monté sur le trône à l'âge de soixante-deux ans, dépossédé de ses pouvoirs par la Compagnie anglaise des Indes orientales, il n'en fut pas moins un souverain éclairé, poète raffiné et remarquable calligraphe. Mais en 1857 Delhi fut le théâtre sanglant de la révolte des cipayes, bénie par Zafar puis réprimée par les Britanniques. La plus belle cité de l'Hindoustan fut détruite, et l'empereur exilé en Birmanie après avoir vu massacrer ses fils et petits-fils. Le Dernier Moghol est le portrait poignant de Dehli la Fabuleuse, personnifiée par Zafar, et de leur destin tragique à tous les deux. Après Le Moghol blanc (« Petite Bibliothèque Payot/Voyageurs », 2008), et à la lumière d'archives inédites, l'écrivain écossais William Dalrymple raconte avec autant de brio et de sens du détail la fin de la dynastie moghole, formidable synthèse de tolérance religieuse entre l'Inde et l'Islam.
