The kings and the nawabs had set up a haven of welfare and enterprise in their domains. Roy writes: “The default view, which was engraved in the collective consciousness of the Indians by the nationalist writers, started from the assumption that India had been a prosperous place to begin with. It is instructive here to refer to the work of historian Tirthankar Roy’s, The East India Company, the world’s most powerful corporation. The only difference between a textbook and Dalrymple’s work is, of course, the masterly narrative that he employs.Ĥ budget-friendly and award-winning Indian single malts below Rs 5,000 Check list The book is a plain vanilla story of the coming of East India Company to India as traders and becoming its rulers by stealth, deceit and loot. So when you pick up William Dalrymple’s latest work, one hopes to gain some fresh perspective with some new archival material, only to be disappointed. The Battle of Plassey, the Battle of Buxar, Robert Clive, Warren Hastings, Lord Cornwallis, Lord Wellesely, Mir Jafar, Mir Qasim, etc, are kind of iconic by now, and even schoolchildren know of their stories, be it conquests or loots. Leave aside students of history, even a layperson with no distinguished degrees in the subject is well aware of the story of the East India Company, its formation in London, its arrival in India as traders and subsequently becoming its rulers and the passing of reins of the Indian administration to the British crown from the hands of the Company post-1857.
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