The author seems to have no clue of Indian history. The book falls flat on that ground and it cannot justify the title as well. It's never about the atrocities of the East India Company; it's about how the author thinks things unfolded rather than how they actually happened.

A waste of time and mughal-all-good book!

Waste of time as the book does not present anything in details about the so-titled East India Company but rather goes on glorifying the barber Mughals.

The foundations of the British Raj in the subcontinent were not laid by the British government,but by a trading corporation which essentially wanted to enrich its investors.In less than fifty years,the East India Company had snatched control of nearly the whole of Mughal India.The company had recruited a private army of its own and with superior weapons and tactics,had defeated all its opponents in India.In the process,it had also thwarted the ambitions of the French to rule India.A key player i...

This author is out of his mind when he writes Indian history from an outsider's point of view. Just like an outsider cannot comment with authority about the country of author's origin, I am truly amazed to know how can Dalrymple assert his views, without any authentic proofs, with so confident sham!

"Corporations have neither bodies to be punished, nor souls to be condemned, they therefore do as they like." - British Lord Chancellor, Edward, First Baron Thurlow (1731-1806) You can't fine them either. Any financial penalty will just mean less taxes that they have to pay, and less bonuses to the shareholders. The CEO and executives will just happily carry on and award themselves even bigger salaries as and when they please.How the British added India to their Empire started with the world's f...

The question of how a relatively small group of Englishmen was able to subjugate the entire sprawling nation of India is a source of lasting disquiet. Like all of William Dalrymple's books, this history of the East India Company inspires both awe and melancholy. The EIC arrived in India at a moment in which the power of the Mughal Empire had already been shattered. Aurangzeb had mismanaged his realms, and Maratha and Afghan forces were rising on its peripheries. The death blow to Mughal power ho...

Okay guys here is my longest review. To be honest I am not a fan of long reviews. Even if I come across any long reviews of my friends, I mostly ignore or just read 2 paragraphs. (I have huge respect for friends; it’s just me who is lazy enough to not read those long reviews). I am writing this review to justify why I am giving 2 stars to this book considering it has got 4.23/5 stars (199 ratings). I had always been curious how the British had conquered India, with so few troops. The East India

Though you can not hide the truth, you can certainly give it your best try and this is what this author posing as a historian has done. He has whitewashed the crimes, atrocities, 'Anarchy' done by the Muslim rulers and the British businessmen. The rest that you read is the attempt that I referred to in my first line.

This book was another of my 2019 Christmas presents. Although I’ve read a fair bit on the history of Europe, and to a certain extent the Americas, I’ve previously read very little of the history of Asia.Although the book covers the early history of the EIC, it really concentrates on India from about the 1740s to 1803, when the Company took control of Delhi and of the Mughal Emperor, although by this time the Emperor was already a puppet of the Marathas. The author says that Indian sources descri...

The title is an act of deception. You should not be bemused to read this book as a book of history. The author has no cultural sense of Indian history and he has just rambled his way through dates, years and centuries with his 'facts' rather than the 'history' he should have cared about.

I think it is important to be clear what this account is not. It is not a history or India, nor is it a history of the Raj. It is not a complete history of the East India Company. It pretty much ends in about 1803, there is nothing on the first war of independence in 1857. What this actually does is chart the growth of the East India Company from its founding to the point where it gained ascendancy in the subcontinent. This is a very different telling of that tale than the one in British history...

The story of the East India Company, nominally of London, is a huge, sprawling, fascinating and gripping collection of great stories. The stories are of wars, battles, heroes, cowards, lovers, fools, incompetents, rape, plunder, torture and death. Lots of death. William Dalrymple has linked the stories into the history of the Company, that unregulated, arrogant and racist firm that took over the Indian subcontinent, piece by piece from the early 1700s, and held it and milked it until 1859 (when

Outstanding.William Dalrymple has the most felicitous ability to turn extensive research into a riveting narrative. And unlike a historian such as, say, James Mill, who wrote his History of British India (1818) - a standard work for generations of British students - without ever once setting foot in India, Dalrymple is scrupulous in using a variety of sources, not just the Company's own archives in the National Archive of India, but also contemporary Mughal historians such as Ghulam Hussain Khan...

William Dalrymple tells how a single business operation replaced the Mughal empire to rule the Indian subcontinent. The East India Company was a first major multi-national corporation, and an early example of a joint stock enterprise. Most events occur between 1756-1803, around the time of the American and French revolutions. The story begins in 1599 with the charter of the Company, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and the lifetime of Shakespeare.The Company was preceded by Walter Raleigh a...

This is another scholarly work of India’s colonial history , written with as much panache , passion and verve as I have come to expect from the finest living historian of colonial India , focusing on the anarchic period in Hindusthan triggering after the death of the last Mughal super power Aurangzeb in 1707 (an emperor who collected ten times more revenue than his contemporary King of France Louis XIV and contributed to a quarter of global GDP during his reign ) continuing till 1804 when the Ea...

Bad history writing couched in superfluous embellishments.Note: This is a critique on the historical accuracy and efficacy of a work that has been categorized as 'Non-Fiction'. I will not be critiquing the literary aspects here. There are some early spoilers in this review, but as it is Non-Fiction and history, that is to be expected.I'm very disappointed in this book. I had been expecting a lot since this is a very thoroughly studied period yet finds hardly any detailed mention in the mainstrea...

This was almost unreadable beyond the first few pages... the author lacks a complete sense of Indian history. It was like a French person spent whole life in France trying to attempt a book on history of Mithilanchal... absurd!

I seem to be in the minority for not loving this book.It’s not that it wasn’t brilliantly written, or that the subject isn’t worthy of discussion. It just wasn’t the book I thought it would be.This paragraph, from the Epilogue, describes the book I *wanted* to read:This book attempted to study the relationship between commercial and imperial power. It has looked at how corporations can impact on politics, and vice versa. It has examined how power and money can corrupt, and the way commerce and c...