John Keay
On Firm Ground
The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company
By William Dalrymple
Bloomsbury 522pp £25 order from our bookshop
Such was the size of the East India Company that writing a history of it raises the question of what to leave out. During its 250-year existence, the Company acquired a maritime dominion that extended from the South Atlantic to the North Pacific, an army that grew to eclipse those of most nation-states, a commercial portfolio that accounted for half of Britain’s overseas trade and enough taxable territory to form the basis of what became the British Raj. Meanwhile, at home the Company was responsible for many of the financial and corporate innovations that turned London into capitalism’s favourite capital. With all due respect to the Hanseatic League, the United East Indies Company of the Netherlands and, of course, Walmart, it probably was ‘the most powerful corporation in history’. But how is the historian to tackle such a leviathan?
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Perception is a weird thing. Lawrence Durrell saw Hydra as a ‘great horned toad’ but Henry Miller thought it resembled a ‘huge loaf of petrified bread’. Niko Ghika painted it as a series of neat white and orange squares.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-call-of-the-wine-dark-sea
The minimalist Fumio Sasaki 'confesses that as he began to purchase fewer consumer goods, his meals shrank in size. He decluttered and lost weight. Accumulation is not just an economic way of life but a form of embodiment too. Enlightenment is reduction.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/gardens-of-emptiness
'The river’s desecration mirrors Colombia’s long history of violence: "for years we treated it like a sewer," says Ahmed, a survivor of a particularly brutal paramilitary massacre, "just like we treated each other".'
Patrick Wilcken on the Magdalena.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/troubled-waters-3