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The Empire's Salt Tax: Uncovering the Forgotten Hedge of India

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The Great Hedge of India, also known as the Indian Salt Hedge, was a particularly insidious project. It supported the Indian Salt Tax, perhaps the cruellest form of extraction in the British Empire, which levied excessive taxes on the essential commodity. The tax propped up the British colonial project, while exacerbating state-sponsored famines, killing millions and sickening millions more not only by starvation but also by salt deprivation.¹ Sir John Strachey, a British civil servant quoted in a footnote to Major-General Sir W. H. Sleeman’s Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official, offers an account of the Hedge:

To secure the levy of a duty on salt… there grew up gradually a monstrous system, to which it would be almost impossible to find a parallel in any tolerably civilized country. A Customs line was established which stretched across the whole of India, which in 1869 extended from the Indus to the Mahanadi in Madras, a distance of 2,300 miles; and it was guarded by nearly 12,000 men… It would have stretched from London to Constantinople… It consisted principally of an immense impenetrable hedge of thorny trees and bushes.²

The Great Hedge of India was a vegetated, physical manifestation of this “monstrous system,” explicitly designed to sow divisions and extract resources. As it was eventually cleared from the landscape, it also disappeared from people’s memories.

Although the Indian subcontinent has always had enough salt to support its needs via trade, large parts of the population live too far from sources of salt to make their own.³ The British exploited these geographic differences by heavily taxing salt in the areas they controlled. Under the governance of the East India Company, the British sought to build a physical barrier to stop desperate residents from smuggling cheaper salt in from other places like the Sambhar Salt Lake, in present-day Rajasthan.⁴ The Great Hedge of India was thus established in the 1840s as a form of deterrence and control, part of the Inland Customs Line, which divided the Indian subcontinent until the British assumed unified control over its disparate regions.⁵ The Customs Line surrounded the Bengal Presidency, the early seat of the British Empire in India, to tax all the salt that entered the region and all the sugar and salt that left it.⁶

Excluding a few stone walls where ground conditions constrained planting, the 2,504-mile-long Hedge was composed entirely of living vegetation.⁷ At its peak from 1869 to 1879, it stretched from the foothills of the Himalayas to the Orissa coast across parts of modern-day Pakistan and India.⁸ The Hedge was described as “utterly impassable to man or beast” and was heavily guarded by thousands of officers stationed at chowkies (guard posts) before it was abandoned on April 1, 1879.⁹ Made up of trees and shrubs chosen specifically for their impenetrability, it was a true feat of landscape design supported by incredible amounts of underpaid labour.¹⁰

Map showing the Inland Customs Line, adapted from Roy Moxham's book The Great Hedge of India, along with the rough locations of Sambhar Salt Lake and Rothney Castle. Courtesy of the author.

For nearly half the nineteenth century, the Hedge attracted legions of British civil servants, labourers, and security guards. There is little information about who had the original idea of building a hedge across India, but historical records show that Allan Octavian Hume, a former commissioner of Inland Customs, played an outsize role in strengthening it. The Great Hedge not only impacted its immediate surroundings and those who lived there but also had far-reaching effects. However, despite the vast size of this living infrastructure and the violence it enacted, its existence quickly disappeared from historical memory, erasing the real stories of the people and landscapes it affected.

What little information is available about the Hedge is due to Roy Moxham’s seminal 2001 book The Great Hedge of India: The Search for the Living Barrier That Divided a People. Moxham’s book uncovered the existence of the forgotten Hedge and transferred its fragmented oral histories and written reports into a combined history and travelogue.¹¹ In 1997, Moxham found a map of the Agra District at the Royal Geographical Society in Kensington Gore dated April 1879, when the Customs Line was abandoned.¹² This map provided him with definitive proof of the existence and location of the project, and it remains the clearest representation of the Hedge given the lack of academic research on the subject. Contemporary researchers are now building off of Moxham’s work: Aisling M O’Carroll’s ongoing research project “Tracing the Great Salt Hedge” not only searches for the physical remnants of the Hedge but also considers its larger-scale territorial impacts;¹³ the journalist Kamala Thiagarajan’s article, “The Mysterious Disappearance of the World’s Longest Shrubbery,” rehashes Moxham’s work for readers of BBC's “Lost Index” series.¹⁴ However, the scarcity of sources documenting the Hedge and its impacts is a reminder of how the colonial state enacted violence by controlling written chronicles of its reign in a society that traditionally relied on oral histories to communicate with future generations.

The Hedge’s erasure from historical narratives about the British Raj belies its scale and influence on the Empire and the horrors it wrought, raising questions about how quickly people forget the events that have shaped their present. The omission of such histories thus reproduces the violence of colonialism by denying access to past knowledge that continues to haunt the present. Moxham’s work is pivotal, and remains the only major source of research on the Hedge. Its singularity invites further critical research to help expand and refine the stakes of the subject. This essay illuminates the story of the Great Hedge of India, which helped fill the coffers of the British Empire with salt taxes, by examining its intertwined landscapes.¹⁵ Tracing the Hedge and its legacy through two sites, the Sambhar Lake and Rothney Castle, with the help of Moxham’s work, will hopefully render visible the scope of its destruction and underline how critical the preservation of this history is to understanding how natural environments continue to be weaponized.

A major source of the salt that crossed the Hedge was the Sambhar Salt Lake in Rajasthan, which has provided the mineral to the subcontinent for centuries. In the dry season, water evaporates from the lake, leaving behind salt sheets that are harvested and exported. The inland saline lake is also a critical biodiversity zone—host to many migratory birds, including flamingos.¹⁶ It is now gravely threatened because of pollution, land-use change, and climate change. Nonetheless, it remains an exceptionally important cultural and inancial resource, and an environmentally sensitive habitat.

The various myths surrounding the Sambhar Salt Lake’s creation highlight its historicity and importance. In a popular story, the goddess Shakambhari Devi gifted a regional king a large tract of land covered in silver. The king requested that the goddess replace the silver with salt, a more precious commodity, leading to the creation of the 230-square-kilometre salt lake, which still has a temple dedicated to Shakambhari Devi on its shore.¹⁷ In more easily verifiable historical accounts, the Mughals extracted salt from the lake for the entirety of their rule, starting with Babur in the early sixteenth century, before handing it over to the rulers of Jaipur and Jodhpur around the mid-nineteenth century.¹⁸ On May 1, 1871, the British forcibly took over the saltworks at the lake, gaining control of “the principal source of salt going into the Bengal Presidency from outside the Customs Line.”¹⁹ Seven years later, A. O. Hume helped transfer all salt rights from the Princely States of Rajasthan to the British Empire by paying the rulers a nominal sum of money, a process presumably accelerated by imperial threats of property seizure and the takeover of kingdoms.²⁰

With the seizure of the Sambhar Lake saltworks, the British refined their tactics for controlling those engaged in the harvesting of salt. Historical photographs taken in the 1870s housed at the British Library’s archives show Indian salt workers, or malangis, labouring under the gaze of British overseers.²¹ Moxham writes about the plight of malangis not only in Sambhar but also in other salt-producing regions of the country, like the rock salt mines in Punjab and the coasts.²² Starting in the 1770s, salt workers, who often belonged to families of independent salt-makers, “had suddenly found their business expropriated, and been forced to work for pitiful wages” under the new system of contracts and leases.²³ Although stories about their exploitation outraged members of the British public, the backlash was clearly not enough to ensure the malangis and their descendants greater dignity of labour—even in independent India.²⁴ The salt that the malangis produced for those pitiful wages would have to cross the Great Hedge of India to be heavily taxed and sold to British Indian subjects at highly exploitative rates. From the late eighteenth century to at least 1836, the salt tax was around a sixth of a rural labourer’s income; at its worst in 1823, it went up to six months’ wages.²⁵ Furthermore, locals were subject to new methods of surveillance and exploitation. Customs officers were stationed at chowkies near saltworks to prevent salt from being smuggled out.²⁶ The Empire incentivised the officers to abuse their positions by paying them a pittance, thus tacitly encouraging them to extort the locals.

Captions clockwise from top-left: A Katar or String of Camels Taking Away the Salt; Filling Salt into Bags and Weighing the Salt; Extraction of Salt from Bed of Lake; Measuring Labourer's Work and Storing Salt. Photographs from Sambhar Lake, 1870s, photographer unknown. Courtesy of the Asia, Africa, and Pacific Collections, the British Library.

As a form of colonial wealth extraction built on slavery and subjugation, the salt tax continues to affect national economies decades after the sun finally set on the British Empire. Its profitability encouraged the colonial state to invest enormous amounts of labour and capital into the huge and destructive landscape design intervention that was the Great Hedge of India. It is estimated that almost 14,000 people worked for the Customs Line in 1869, though the labour of villagers who planted the Hedge is not precisely documented.²⁷ Even more work went into a previous iteration of the Hedge, which was made up of dry shrubbery and required around 250 tons of material per mile.²⁸ According to Hume’s 1867−1868 report, dry hedges were destroyed by pests (like white ants), storms, fires, and natural decay.²⁹ These failures encouraged the British administration to grow a live hedge, an impenetrable barrier to keep an essential commodity from the starving masses. As Hume pointed out in a subsequent 1869−1870 report, a live hedge requires high labour inputs in its initial years but little maintenance once it is established.³⁰ Its existence was a point of pride for the British Empire. Hume announced that the Hedge was to the Customs Line “what the Great Wall once was to China, alike its greatest work and its chiefest safeguard.”³¹

Relentless attention to local vegetation and climatic conditions ensured that the Hedge thrived. In places where the land was incapable of supporting the Hedge, soil was imported. The use of a vegetated barrier perhaps served to visibly soften the brutality of the Customs Line in the public consciousness, but there was nothing benign about its design. Workers whose names have long been forgotten collected seeds from thorny indigenous plants that would grow fast and strong, selected for their ability to inflict maximum damage on those who tried to sneak across the barrier.³² The Hedge consisted of plant species like: babool (Acacia nilotica), Indian plum (Ziziphus mauritiana), karonda (Carissa carandas), nagphani (Opuntia, three species), thuer (Euphorbia, several species), thorny creeper (Guilandina bonduc), karira (Capparis decidua), and madar (Calotropis gigantea).³³ Ridges were raised and trenches were dug to ensure both adequate drainage and rainwater collection.³⁴ The resilience of live plants—or perhaps the maintenance that supported them—helped the Hedge endure environmental degradation.³⁵ According to a commissioner of the Customs Line, the Hedge was “in its most perfect form… ten to fourteen feet in height, and six to twelve feet thick, composed of closely clipped thorny trees and shrubs.”³⁶ It truly was an ecological marvel—though one designed to oppress.

Species clockwise from top-left: babool [Acacia nilotica]; madar [Calotropis gigantea]; karira [Capparis decidua]; karonda [Carissa carandas]; Indian plum [Ziziphus mauritiana]; nagphani [Opuntia, three species]; thorny creeper [Guilandina bonduc]; thuer [Euphorbia, several species]. Courtesy of Google Images via Creative Commons.

After the Great Famine of 1876−1878, which killed 6.5 million people in British India,³⁷ the British attempted to standardize salt taxes across the country, eliminating the market for smuggled salt and the need for a Customs Line.³⁸ This was not born out of an altruistic desire to stop state-sponsored genocide—once the British controlled all of India, including the Princely States, the labour and money that went into maintaining the Hedge seemed wasteful.³⁹ The Hedge was abandoned and gradually replaced by roads, housing, and farms—a stunning obliteration of such a carefully tended landscape feature. The natural forces that the British had fought so hard to keep at bay eventually took over, as did neighbouring landowners eager to expand their holding and government officials zealously building highways.⁴⁰ Although some locals at the sites Moxham visited remembered that a hedge once existed there, the Hedge itself was largely lost to public memory until Moxham traced its path and found its remnants—a grassy line that gave way to a 40-foot-wide embankment covered in towering thorny shrubs before disappearing again—in Etawah, Uttar Pradesh.⁴¹ More recently, Aisling O’Carroll appears to have found a section of the Hedge in Palighar, and her research promises to uncover more knowledge of this forgotten landscape.⁴²

The Hedge may have disappeared, but the wealth accrued by the repressive salt taxes that it helped enforce, along with other colonial spoils, continues to support the United Kingdom and many of its intergenerationally wealthy citizens. One of the people who drew a salary from the management of the Hedge was Hume.⁴³ After a radical professional transformation, in which he went from being a member of the colonial administration to helping found the Indian National Congress to advocate for Indian independence, Hume was forced out of the British civil services and bought an estate called Rothney Castle in Shimla. He spent freely from his personal funds to make Rothney Castle, with its sprawling grounds, “the most magnificent building in Shimla.”⁴⁴ A longtime enthusiast of nature in the nineteenth-century sense (more interested in taxidermy than preserving live animals in their habitat), Hume had used his horticultural knowledge to strengthen the Hedge, growing it to near perfection.⁴⁵ Given this expertise, he undoubtedly played a significant role in the castle’s design, expansion, and upkeep—no small feat for an estate spread over 17,500 square meters in mountainous terrain. He slaughtered thousands of birds during his time as commissioner—many of which he undoubtedly killed along the Hedge—and gifted 63,000 dead birds and 15,500 eggs to the Natural History Museum in London.⁴⁶ Long after his exploits along the Hedge, Hume displayed parts of his collection at Rothney Castle, where he lived for a few years before returning to England to retire.⁴⁷

Despite his support for Indian independence, Hume’s relationship to Rothney Castle in many ways reflects the ecologically and socially extractive practices of colonial governance that were bound up in the Great Hedge. Landscapes have long been altered in the Indian subcontinent, but the British sought to control nature to an obsessive degree. Hume’s work illustrates the jarring disconnect between the colonial fascination with the natural world and the violence unleashed to express “appreciation” for it. Hume slaughtered thousands of birds in what he saw as enthusiasm for avian fauna. Similarly, he used his extensive horticultural knowledge to drive millions of people to starvation instead of wielding it to restore landscapes ravaged by his government or support greater food security for a famished populace.Most importantly, Hume was able to leave India to return to England in 1894, while the millions of people affected by his and his administration’s policies had no choice but to deal with the repercussions. After his departure, Rothney Castle passed through various private owners, none of whom maintained it as well as its most famous inhabitant. Today, Rothney Castle lies overgrown and abandoned, an apt metaphor for the Hedge that funded its former glory.⁴⁸

The Great Hedge of India has been destroyed and largely forgotten by the descendants of those it oppressed. However, the fortune the British Empire raised through its salt tax, extracted from the blood of its subjects, persists via intergenerational wealth transfer and money held by both the State and the Crown. The colonial regime had obvious reasons to obscure its harshest cruelties in British India, choosing instead to amplify its meagre claims of civilising hordes of natives. What seems more shocking is that memories of the Hedge appear to have been wiped out of contemporary Indian accounts of colonisation. It is simply not mentioned in history books or referenced in discussions about the Salt Tax.

Landscapes, as Simon Schama explains in his book Landscape and Memory, are inextricably linked to human recollections.⁴⁹ “Before it can ever be a repose for the senses, landscape is the work of the mind. Its scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rocks,” he writes.⁵⁰ In the case of the Hedge, multiple generations forgot a visible landscape feature and the trauma it unleashed on the people it was designed to oppress. Even in a culture built around oral traditions, the Hedge’s disappearance is surprising; its omission (perhaps deliberate) from British colonial histories is even more jarring given the Empire’s obsession with documenting the minutiae of its reign.

The disappearance—both cultural and physical—is testimony to the brevity of human memories and the transient nature of landscapes. It is also a warning to us as we contend with shifting baselines in the face of the climate crisis. Our histories are tied to the landscapes we inhabit. It has become clear that our futures are also affected by our past and present landscape manipulations. The cycles of destruction and decay that swept away the Hedge and its associated landscapes seem more predictable than our collective inability to comprehend the potential horrors of the ostensibly innocuous profession of landscape design. Those of us who work with the built and natural environments must be attentive to landscape histories and cognisant of the violence that landscapes can inflict. The Hedge created a diverse and vibrant ecosystem, a stated goal of ecologists and landscape architects today. It also starved millions and ranks amongst the cruellest human-made structures in history. Unless we grapple with the power structures that helped create and sustain the Hedge and the collective amnesia that absolved its architects of responsibility for its excesses, we are doomed to continue greenwashing borders and enclosures. The Greatest Living Wall in history is dead. Where will it be raised next?

Acknowledgement: A version of this essay was originally written for “Theories of Landscape as Urbanism,” taught at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design in Fall 2021 by Professor Charles Waldheim and Teaching Fellow Hanan Kataw.

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The East India Company and the True Horrors of Empire

 

 

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Taboo: The East India Company and the True Horrors of Empire

By Andrea Major

West India Dock, London @ ilbusca

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Slavery and colonial exploitation are fundamentally entwined with Britain’s modern prosperity.

“When you left London the East India Company was a trading company,” Tom Hardy’s troubled anti-hero James Delaney is warned in the second episode of the BBC’s prime-time drama Taboo. “Now it is God Almighty.” Discussing the show before it aired, writer Stephen Knight referred to the East India Company as “the equivalent of the CIA, the NSA and the biggest, baddest multinational corporation on earth, all rolled into one self-righteous, religiously motivated monolith.”

The East India Company (EIC) was certainly both economically and politically powerful in early 19th-century Britain. With large swathes of the Indian subcontinent under its control by 1818 and financial clout in London exceeded only by that of the Bank of England, the EIC didn’t get where it was by playing nicely.

“We’ve screwed Maharajas, and we’ve screwed Moghuls,” the EIC’s fictional chairman, Sir Stuart Strange, declares in episode three—something to which the numerous delegations from Indian rulers arriving in London in the first half of the 19th century could attest. These rulers believed that if they could present evidence of broken treaties, annexed lands and non-payment of obligations in the imperial capital, they would receive redress for the EIC’s bad faith.

They were wrong. The slow encroachment of the East India Company on Indian land, resources and political authority continued unabated until it was violently cut short by the Indian Uprising of 1857.

Absent India

But India is strangely absent from Taboo’s depiction of early 19^th-century London. London’s multi-ethnic foreshore features Africans, Chinese, a “Malay” and even a Maori, but there is little sign of the Indian lascars (sailors) and dockworkers who would also have populated the banks of the Thames.

The EIC is positioned as an all-powerful antagonist, but the subcontinent from which it drew most of its wealth and power is alluded to only briefly, in vague references to a dispute between it and the crown over Bombay. More airtime is given to its (historically non-existent) Africa desk, while the plot centers around the trade in sea otter pelts from Vancouver to Canton and the anachronistic involvement of a company ship in the transatlantic slave trade.Embed from Getty Images

In 1804, when the slave voyage that forms a narrative cornerstone of Taboo is supposed to have taken place, the slave trade was still legal. So the ill-fated voyage of the Cornwallis is presented not as a breach of national law, but of East India Company policy.

Presumably, this is to get around the fact that the EIC was not involved in the transatlantic trade in this period. The last known voyage of an EIC slave vessel left Cabinda, in Angola, in 1765, nearly 50 years before the action in Taboo. That human cargo was headed for Bengkulu in Indonesia, not the sugar plantations of the West Indies. The EIC’s involvement in slave trafficking is a story that deserves to be told, but it was largely confined to 17^th and early 18^th centuries, and to the Indian, rather than the Atlantic Ocean.

Pedantry over historical accuracy is exactly why my husband won’t watch period dramas with me anymore. The use of a supposed outbreak of cholera to cover up various illicit goings on in 1814 might be jarring given that the disease did not reach Britain until 1831, but ultimately the anomaly does not detract from enjoyment of the drama.

Similarly, much of Taboo’s plot exposition regarding the nefarious activities of the East India Company goes on under the protection of the “raised hand,” which when raised in meetings excludes key revelations from the official minutes, and so from the historical archive. We do not know if this ever really happened, but is a clever device that creates space for some dramatic historical flights of fancy. As a historian of the period, I found it an evocative reminder of the silences in the historical record and the limitations on what we can glean about how the company functioned from its voluminous manuscript records.

What we know about the way the EIC operated, and how it related to Parliament, the crown and its colonies does conflict with its representation in Taboo. But, of course, in historical research there is always the potential for “unknown unknowns.”

Imperial Villains

But I do find other elements more significantly problematic. Particularly, the way in which Taboo inflates the role of the EIC as a global power, while simultaneously erasing its most significant sphere of influence and its most profound impacts.

The East India Company is presented both as more powerful than it actually was and as guilty of atrocities it was not responsible for. Meanwhile, many of the crimes it actually did commit, such as facilitating the opium trade, exacerbating rural poverty and famine, and aggressively extracting revenue in India are written out of the narrative.

Admittedly, the institutionalised exploitation of colonial resources through over-taxation and the slow drain of wealth are not particularly televisual, but they had long-lasting consequences for Indian society and economy. The silences and exaggerations in the depiction of this period of Britain’s colonial past are also important because they speak directly to how we understand the relationship between colonial exploitation and Britain’s social, economic and political development.

In a world in which jingoistic nationalism and imperial nostalgia are becoming increasingly potent forces, Taboo’s portrayal of the dark heart of colonial expansion is a timely reminder of the violent, ambivalent and amoral origins of globalization. There is no doubt that there are some very “bad hombres” in this show, including Delaney himself (whose character seems to be symbolic of both British colonial violence and imperial paranoia about supposed “native” savagery).

Yet by focusing on these Machiavellian figures as the movers and shakers of empire, Taboo allows the viewer to disassociate imperial misdeeds from mainstream British history. In doing so, it overlooks the pervasiveness of the imperial connection, its importance to the development of modern Britain and the deep structural inequalities that resulted from Britain’s global expansion.

Far from being the preserve of pantomime villains and all-powerful and unethical corporations, the impetus for—and profits from—slavery and colonial exploitation were deeply embedded in everyday life. They are therefore fundamentally entwined with our modern prosperity.

*[This article was originally published by The Conversation.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

Photo Credit: ilbusca

The East India Company: The original corporate raiders

An East India Company grandee. Photograph: Getty Images

Jahangir’s father Akbar had flirted with a project to civili

The East India Company: The original corporate raiders

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For a century, the East India Company conquered, subjugated and plundered vast tracts of south Asia. The lessons of its brutal reign have never been more relevant

William Dalrymple

Wed 4 Mar 2015 05.59 GMT

William Dalrymple CBE FRAS FRSL FRGS FRSE FRHistS
Dalrymple in 2014
Born	20 March 1965 (age 59) Scotland, United Kingdom
Occupation	Historian, art historian,

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One of the very first Indian words to enter the English language was the Hindustani slang for plunder: “loot”. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, this word was rarely heard outside the plains of north India until the late 18th century, when it suddenly became a common term across Britain. To understand how and why it took root and flourished in so distant a landscape, one need only visit Powis Castle.

The last hereditary Welsh prince, Owain Gruffydd ap Gwenwynwyn, built Powis castle as a craggy fort in the 13th century; the estate was his reward for abandoning Wales to the rule of the English monarchy. But its most spectacular treasures date from a much later period of English conquest and appropriation: Powis is simply awash with loot from India, room after room of imperial plunder, extracted by the East India Company in the 18th century.

There are more Mughal artefacts stacked in this private house in the Welsh countryside than are on display at any one place in India – even the National Museum in Delhi. The riches include hookahs of burnished gold inlaid with empurpled ebony; superbly inscribed spinels and jewelled daggers; gleaming rubies the colour of pigeon’s blood and scatterings of lizard-green emeralds. There are talwars set with yellow topaz, ornaments of jade and ivory; silken hangings, statues of Hindu gods and coats of elephant armour.

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Such is the dazzle of these treasures that, as a visitor last summer, I nearly missed the huge framed canvas that explains how they came to be here. The picture hangs in the shadows at the top of a dark, oak-panelled staircase. It is not a masterpiece, but it does repay close study. An effete Indian prince, wearing cloth of gold, sits high on his throne under a silken canopy. On his left stand scimitar and spear carrying officers from his own army; to his right, a group of powdered and periwigged Georgian gentlemen. The prince is eagerly thrusting a scroll into the hands of a statesmanlike, slightly overweight Englishman in a red frock coat.

The painting shows a scene from August 1765, when the young Mughal emperor Shah Alam, exiled from Delhi and defeated by East India Company troops, was forced into what we would now call an act of involuntary privatisation. The scroll is an order to dismiss his own Mughal revenue officials in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, and replace them with a set of English traders appointed by Robert Clive – the new governor of Bengal – and the directors of the EIC, who the document describes as “the high and mighty, the noblest of exalted nobles, the chief of illustrious warriors, our faithful servants and sincere well-wishers, worthy of our royal favours, the English Company”. The collecting of Mughal taxes was henceforth subcontracted to a powerful multinational corporation – whose revenue-collecting operations were protected by its own private army.

It was at this moment that the East India Company (EIC) ceased to be a conventional corporation, trading and silks and spices, and became something much more unusual. Within a few years, 250 company clerks backed by the military force of 20,000 locally recruited Indian soldiers had become the effective rulers of Bengal. An international corporation was transforming itself into an aggressive colonial power.

Using its rapidly growing security force – its army had grown to 260,000 men by 1803 – it swiftly subdued and seized an entire subcontinent. Astonishingly, this took less than half a century. The first serious territorial conquests began in Bengal in 1756; 47 years later, the company’s reach extended as far north as the Mughal capital of Delhi, and almost all of India south of that city was by then effectively ruled from a boardroom in the City of London. “What honour is left to us?” asked a Mughal official named Narayan Singh, shortly after 1765, “when we have to take orders from a handful of traders who have not yet learned to wash their bottoms

It was not the British government that seized India, but a private company, run by an unstable sociopath

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I CAN SHOW YOU THE ORIGINAL QUEEN ELIZABETH 1 

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We still talk about the British conquering India, but that phrase disguises a more sinister reality. It was not the British government that seized India at the end of the 18th century, but a dangerously unregulated private company headquartered in one small office, five windows wide, in London, and managed in India by an unstable sociopath – Clive.

In many ways the EIC was a model of corporate efficiency: 100 years into its history, it had only 35 permanent employees in its head office. Nevertheless, that skeleton staff executed a corporate coup unparalleled in history: the military conquest, subjugation and plunder of vast tracts of southern Asia. It almost certainly remains the supreme act of corporate violence in world history. For all the power wielded today by the world’s largest corporations – whether ExxonMobil, Walmart or Google – they are tame beasts compared with the ravaging territorial appetites of the militarised East India Company. Yet if history shows anything, it is that in the intimate dance between the power of the state and that of the corporation, while the latter can be regulated, it will use all the resources in its power to resist.

When it suited, the EIC made much of its legal separation from the government. It argued forcefully, and successfully, that the document signed by Shah Alam – known as the Diwani – was the legal property of the company, not the Crown, even though the government had spent a massive sum on naval and military operations protecting the EIC’s Indian acquisitions. But the MPs who voted to uphold this legal distinction were not exactly neutral: nearly a quarter of them held company stock, which would have plummeted in value had the Crown taken over. For the same reason, the need to protect the company from foreign competition became a major aim of British foreign policy.

Robert Clive, was an unstable sociopath who led the fearsome East India Company to its conquest of the subcontinent. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

The transaction depicted in the painting was to have catastrophic consequences. As with all such corporations, then as now, the EIC was answerable only to its shareholders. With no stake in the just governance of the region, or its long-term wellbeing, the company’s rule quickly turned into the straightforward pillage of Bengal, and the rapid transfer westwards of its wealth.

Before long the province, already devastated by war, was struck down by the famine of 1769, then further ruined by high taxation. Company tax collectors were guilty of what today would be described as human rights violations. A senior official of the old Mughal regime in Bengal wrote in his diaries: “Indians were tortured to disclose their treasure; cities, towns and villages ransacked; jaghires and provinces purloined: these were the ‘delights’ and ‘religions’ of the directors and their servants.”

Bengal’s wealth rapidly drained into Britain, while its prosperous weavers and artisans were coerced “like so many slaves” by their new masters, and its markets flooded with British products. A proportion of the loot of Bengal went directly into Clive’s pocket. He returned to Britain with a personal fortune – then valued at £234,000 – that made him the richest self-made man in Europe. After the Battle of Plassey in 1757, a victory that owed more to treachery, forged contracts, bankers and bribes than military prowess, he transferred to the EIC treasury no less than £2.5m seized from the defeated rulers of Bengal – in today’s currency, around £23m for Clive and £250m for the company.

No great sophistication was required. The entire contents of the Bengal treasury were simply loaded into 100 boats and punted down the Ganges from the Nawab of Bengal’s palace to Fort William, the company’s Calcutta headquarters. A portion of the proceeds was later spent rebuilding Powis.

The painting at Powis that shows the granting of the Diwani is suitably deceptive: the painter, Benjamin West, had never been to India. Even at the time, a reviewer noted that the mosque in the background bore a suspiciously strong resemblance “to our venerable dome of St Paul”. In reality, there had been no grand public ceremony. The transfer took place privately, inside Clive’s tent, which had just been erected on the parade ground of the newly seized Mughal fort at Allahabad. As for Shah Alam’s silken throne, it was in fact Clive’s armchair, which for the occasion had been hoisted on to his dining room table and covered with a chintz bedspread.

Later, the British dignified the document by calling it the Treaty of Allahabad, though Clive had dictated the terms and a terrified Shah Alam had simply waved them through. As the contemporary Mughal historian Sayyid Ghulam Husain Khan put it: “A business of such magnitude, as left neither pretence nor subterfuge, and which at any other time would have required the sending of wise ambassadors and able negotiators, as well as much parley and conference with the East India Company and the King of England, and much negotiation and contention with the ministers, was done and finished in less time than would usually have been taken up for the sale of a jack-ass, or a beast of burden, or a head of cattle.”

By the time the original painting was shown at the Royal Academy in 1795, however, no Englishman who had witnessed the scene was alive to point this out. Clive, hounded by envious parliamentary colleagues and widely reviled for corruption, committed suicide in 1774 by slitting his own throat with a paperknife some months before the canvas was completed. He was buried in secret, on a frosty November night, in an unmarked vault in the Shropshire village of Morton Say. Many years ago, workmen digging up the parquet floor came across Clive’s bones, and after some discussion it was decided to quietly put them to rest again where they lay. Here they remain, marked today by a small, discreet wall plaque inscribed: “PRIMUS IN INDIS.”

Today, as the company’s most articulate recent critic, Nick Robins, has pointed out, the site of the company’s headquarters in Leadenhall Street lies underneath Richard Rogers’s glass and metal Lloyd’s building. Unlike Clive’s burial place, no blue plaque marks the site of what Macaulay called “the greatest corporation in the world”, and certainly the only one to equal the Mughals by seizing political power across wide swaths of south Asia. But anyone seeking a monument to the company’s legacy need only look around. No contemporary corporation could duplicate its brutality, but many have attempted to match its success at bending state power to their own ends.

The people of Allahabad have also chosen to forget this episode in their history. The red sandstone Mughal fort where the treaty was extracted from Shah Alam – a much larger fort than those visited by tourists in Lahore, Agra or Delhi – is still a closed-off military zone and, when I visited it late last year, neither the guards at the gate nor their officers knew anything of the events that had taken place there; none of the sentries had even heard of the company whose cannons still dot the parade ground where Clive’s tent was erected.

Instead, all their conversation was focused firmly on the future, and the reception India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, had just received on his trip to America. One of the guards proudly showed me the headlines in the local edition of the Times of India, announcing that Allahabad had been among the subjects discussed in the White House by Modi and President Obama. The sentries were optimistic. India was finally coming back into its own, they said, “after 800 years of slavery”. The Mughals, the EIC and the Raj had all receded into memory and Allahabad was now going to be part of India’s resurrection. “Soon we will be a great country,” said one of the sentries, “and our Allahabad also will be a great city.”

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At the height of the Victorian period there was a strong sense of embarrassment about the shady mercantile way the British had founded the Raj. The Victorians thought the real stuff of history was the politics of the nation state. This, not the economics of corrupt corporations, they believed was the fundamental unit of analysis and the major driver of change in human affairs. Moreover, they liked to think of the empire as a mission civilisatrice: a benign national transfer of knowledge, railways and the arts of civilisation from west to east, and there was a calculated and deliberate amnesia about the corporate looting that opened British rule in India.

A second picture, this one commissioned to hang in the House of Commons, shows how the official memory of this process was spun and subtly reworked. It hangs now in St Stephen’s Hall, the echoing reception area of parliament. I came across it by chance late this summer, while waiting there to see an MP.

The painting was part of a series of murals entitled the Building of Britain. It features what the hanging committee at the time regarded as the highlights and turning points of British history: King Alfred defeating the Danes in 877, the parliamentary union of England and Scotland in 1707, and so on. The image in this series which deals with India does not, however, show the handing over of the Diwani but an earlier scene, where again a Mughal prince is sitting on a raised dais, under a canopy. Again, we are in a court setting, with bowing attendants on all sides and trumpets blowing, and again an Englishman is standing in front of the Mughal. But this time the balance of power is very different.

Sir Thomas Roe, the ambassador sent by James I to the Mughal court, is shown appearing before the Emperor Jahangir in 1614 – at a time when the Mughal empire was still at its richest and most powerful. Jahangir inherited from his father Akbar one of the two wealthiest polities in the world, rivalled only by Ming China. His lands stretched through most of India, all of what is now Pakistan and Bangladesh, and most of Afghanistan. He ruled over five times the population commanded by the Ottomans – roughly 100 million people. His capitals were the megacities of their day.

In Milton’s Paradise Lost, the great Mughal cities of Jahangir’s India are shown to Adam as future marvels of divine design. This was no understatement: Agra, with a population approaching 700,000, dwarfed all of the cities of Europe, while Lahore was larger than London, Paris, Lisbon, Madrid and Rome combined. This was a time when India accounted for around a quarter of all global manufacturing. In contrast, Britain then contributed less than 2% to global GDP, and the East India Company was so small that it was still operating from the home of its governor, Sir Thomas Smythe, with a permanent staff of only six. It did, however, already possess 30 tall ships and own its own dockyard at Deptford on the Thames.

An East India Company grandee. Photograph: Getty Images

Jahangir’s father Akbar had flirted with a project to civilise India’s European immigrants, whom he described as “an assemblage of savages”, but later dropped the plan as unworkable. Jahangir, who had a taste for exotica and wild beasts, welcomed Sir Thomas Roe with the same enthusiasm he had shown for the arrival of the first turkey in India, and questioned Roe closely on the distant, foggy island he came from, and the strange things that went on there.

For the committee who planned the House of Commons paintings, this marked the beginning of British engagement with India: two nation states coming into direct contact for the first time. Yet, in reality, British relations with India began not with diplomacy and the meeting of envoys, but with trade. On 24 September, 1599, 80 merchants and adventurers met at the Founders Hall in the City of London and agreed to petition Queen Elizabeth I to start up a company. A year later, the Governor and Company of Merchants trading to the East Indies, a group of 218 men, received a royal charter, giving them a monopoly for 15 years over “trade to the East”.

The charter authorised the setting up of what was then a radical new type of business: not a family partnership – until then the norm over most of the globe – but a joint-stock company that could issue tradeable shares on the open market to any number of investors, a mechanism capable of realising much larger amounts of capital. The first chartered joint-stock company was the Muscovy Company, which received its charter in 1555. The East India Company was founded 44 years later. No mention was made in the charter of the EIC holding overseas territory, but it did give the company the right “to wage war” where necessary.

Six years before Roe’s expedition, on 28 August 1608, William Hawkins had landed at Surat, the first commander of a company vessel to set foot on Indian soil. Hawkins, a bibulous sea dog, made his way to Agra, where he accepted a wife offered to him by the emperor, and brought her back to England. This was a version of history the House of Commons hanging committee chose to forget.

The rapid rise of the East India Company was made possible by the catastrophically rapid decline of the Mughals during the 18th century. As late as 1739, when Clive was only 14 years old, the Mughals still ruled a vast empire that stretched from Kabul to Madras. But in that year, the Persian adventurer Nadir Shah descended the Khyber Pass with 150,000 of his cavalry and defeated a Mughal army of 1.5 million men. Three months later, Nadir Shah returned to Persia carrying the pick of the treasures the Mughal empire had amassed in its 200 years of conquest: a caravan of riches that included Shah Jahan’s magnificent peacock throne, the Koh-i-Noor, the largest diamond in the world, as well as its “sister”, the Darya Nur, and “700 elephants, 4,000 camels and 12,000 horses carrying wagons all laden with gold, silver and precious stones”, worth an estimated £87.5m in the currency of the time. This haul was many times more valuable than that later extracted by Clive from the peripheral province of Bengal.

The destruction of Mughal power by Nadir Shah, and his removal of the funds that had financed it, quickly led to the disintegration of the empire. That same year, the French Compagnie des Indes began minting its own coins, and soon, without anyone to stop them, both the French and the English were drilling their own sepoys and militarising their operations. Before long the EIC was straddling the globe. Almost single-handedly, it reversed the balance of trade, which from Roman times on had led to a continual drain of western bullion eastwards. The EIC ferried opium to China, and in due course fought the opium wars in order to seize an offshore base at Hong Kong and safeguard its profitable monopoly in narcotics. To the west it shipped Chinese tea to Massachusetts, where its dumping in Boston harbour triggered the American war of independence.

By 1803, when the EIC captured the Mughal capital of Delhi, it had trained up a private security force of around 260,000- twice the size of the British army – and marshalled more firepower than any nation state in Asia. It was “an empire within an empire”, as one of its directors admitted. It had also by this stage created a vast and sophisticated administration and civil service, built much of London’s docklands and come close to generating nearly half of Britain’s trade. No wonder that the EIC now referred to itself as “the grandest society of merchants in the Universe”.

Yet, like more recent mega-corporations, the EIC proved at once hugely powerful and oddly vulnerable to economic uncertainty. Only seven years after the granting of the Diwani, when the company’s share price had doubled overnight after it acquired the wealth of the treasury of Bengal, the East India bubble burst after plunder and famine in Bengal led to massive shortfalls in expected land revenues. The EIC was left with debts of £1.5m and a bill of £1m unpaid tax owed to the Crown. When knowledge of this became public, 30 banks collapsed like dominoes across Europe, bringing trade to a standstill.

In a scene that seems horribly familiar to us today, this hyper-aggressive corporation had to come clean and ask for a massive government bailout. On 15 July 1772, the directors of the East India Company applied to the Bank of England for a loan of £400,000. A fortnight later, they returned, asking for an additional £300,000. The bank raised only £200,000. By August, the directors were whispering to the government that they would actually need an unprecedented sum of a further £1m. The official report the following year, written by Edmund Burke, foresaw that the EIC’s financial problems could potentially “like a mill-stone, drag [the government] down into an unfathomable abyss … This cursed Company would, at last, like a viper, be the destruction of the country which fostered it at its bosom.

The East India Company really was too big to fail. So it was that in 1773 it was saved by history’s first mega-bailout

But unlike Lehman Brothers, the East India Company really was too big to fail. So it was that in 1773, the world’s first aggressive multinational corporation was saved by history’s first mega-bailout – the first example of a nation state extracting, as its price for saving a failing corporation, the right to regulate and severely rein it in.

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In Allahabad, I hired a small dinghy from beneath the fort’s walls and asked the boatman to row me upstream. It was that beautiful moment, an hour before sunset, that north Indians call godhulibela – cow-dust time – and the Yamuna glittered in the evening light as brightly as any of the gems of Powis. Egrets picked their way along the banks, past pilgrims taking a dip near the auspicious point of confluence, where the Yamuna meets the Ganges. Ranks of little boys with fishing lines stood among the holy men and the pilgrims, engaged in the less mystical task of trying to hook catfish. Parakeets swooped out of cavities in the battlements, mynahs called to roost.

For 40 minutes we drifted slowly, the water gently lapping against the sides of the boat, past the mile-long succession of mighty towers and projecting bastions of the fort, each decorated with superb Mughal kiosks, lattices and finials. It seemed impossible that a single London corporation, however ruthless and aggressive, could have conquered an empire that was so magnificently strong, so confident in its own strength and brilliance and effortless sense of beauty.

Historians propose many reasons: the fracturing of Mughal India into tiny, competing states; the military edge that the industrial revolution had given the European powers. But perhaps most crucial was the support that the East India Company enjoyed from the British parliament. The relationship between them grew steadily more symbiotic throughout the 18th century. Returned nabobs like Clive used their wealth to buy both MPs and parliamentary seats – the famous Rotten Boroughs. In turn, parliament backed the company with state power: the ships and soldiers that were needed when the French and British East India Companies trained their guns on each other.

As I drifted on past the fort walls, I thought about the nexus between corporations and politicians in India today – which has delivered individual fortunes to rival those amassed by Clive and his fellow company directors. The country today has 6.9% of the world’s thousand or so billionaires, though its gross domestic product is only 2.1% of world GDP. The total wealth of India’s billionaires is equivalent to around 10% of the nation’s GDP – while the comparable ratio for China’s billionaires is less than 3%. More importantly, many of these fortunes have been created by manipulating state power – using political influence to secure rights to land and minerals, “flexibility” in regulation, and protection from foreign competition.

Multinationals still have villainous reputations in India, and with good reason; the many thousands of dead and injured in the Bhopal gas disaster of 1984 cannot be easily forgotten; the gas plant’s owner, the American multinational, Union Carbide, has managed to avoid prosecution or the payment of any meaningful compensation in the 30 years since. But the biggest Indian corporations, such as Reliance, Tata, DLF and Adani have shown themselves far more skilled than their foreign competitors in influencing Indian policymakers and the media. Reliance is now India’s biggest media company, as well as its biggest conglomerate; its owner, Mukesh Ambani, has unprecedented political access and power.

The last five years of India’s Congress party government were marked by a succession of corruption scandals that ranged from land and mineral giveaways to the corrupt sale of mobile phone spectrum at a fraction of its value. The consequent public disgust was the principal reason for the Congress party’s catastrophic defeat in the general election last May, though the country’s crony capitalists are unlikely to suffer as a result.

Estimated to have cost $4.9bn – perhaps the second most expensive ballot in democratic history after the US presidential election in 2012 – it brought Narendra Modi to power on a tidal wave of corporate donations. Exact figures are hard to come by, but Modi’s Bharatiya Janata party (BJP), is estimated to have spent at least $1bn on print and broadcast advertising alone. Of these donations, around 90% comes from unlisted corporate sources, given in return for who knows what undeclared promises of access and favours. The sheer strength of Modi’s new government means that those corporate backers may not be able to extract all they had hoped for, but there will certainly be rewards for the money donated.

In September, the governor of India’s central bank, Raghuram Rajan, made a speech in Mumbai expressing his anxieties about corporate money eroding the integrity of parliament: “Even as our democracy and our economy have become more vibrant,” he said, “an important issue in the recent election was whether we had substituted the crony socialism of the past with crony capitalism, where the rich and the influential are alleged to have received land, natural resources and spectrum in return for payoffs to venal politicians. By killing transparency and competition, crony capitalism is harmful to free enterprise, and economic growth. And by substituting special interests for the public interest, it is harmful to democratic expression.”

His anxieties were remarkably like those expressed in Britain more than 200 years earlier, when the East India Company had become synonymous with ostentatious wealth and political corruption: “What is England now?” fumed the Whig litterateur Horace Walpole, “A sink of Indian wealth.” In 1767 the company bought off parliamentary opposition by donating £400,000 to the Crown in return for its continued right to govern Bengal. But the anger against it finally reached ignition point on 13 February 1788, at the impeachment, for looting and corruption, of Clive’s successor as governor of Bengal, Warren Hastings. It was the nearest the British ever got to putting the EIC on trial, and they did so with one of their greatest orators at the helm – Edmund Burke.

Portraits of Nabobs, or representatives of the East India Company. Photograph: Alamy

Burke, leading the prosecution, railed against the way the returned company “nabobs” (or “nobs”, both corruptions of the Urdu word “Nawab”) were buying parliamentary influence, not just by bribing MPs to vote for their interests, but by corruptly using their Indian plunder to bribe their way into parliamentary office: “To-day the Commons of Great Britain prosecutes the delinquents of India,” thundered Burke, referring to the returned nabobs. “Tomorrow these delinquents of India may be the Commons of Great Britain.”

Burke thus correctly identified what remains today one of the great anxieties of modern liberal democracies: the ability of a ruthless corporation corruptly to buy a legislature. And just as corporations now recruit retired politicians in order to exploit their establishment contacts and use their influence, so did the East India Company. So it was, for example, that Lord Cornwallis, the man who oversaw the loss of the American colonies to Washington, was recruited by the EIC to oversee its Indian territories. As one observer wrote: “Of all human conditions, perhaps the most brilliant and at the same time the most anomalous, is that of the Governor General of British India. A private English gentleman, and the servant of a joint-stock company, during the brief period of his government he is the deputed sovereign of the greatest empire in the world; the ruler of a hundred million men; while dependant kings and princes bow down to him with a deferential awe and submission. There is nothing in history analogous to this position …”

Hastings survived his impeachment, but parliament did finally remove the EIC from power following the great Indian Uprising of 1857, some 90 years after the granting of the Diwani and 60 years after Hastings’s own trial. On 10 May 1857, the EIC’s own security forces rose up against their employer and on successfully crushing the insurgency, after nine uncertain months, the company distinguished itself for a final time by hanging and murdering tens of thousands of suspected rebels in the bazaar towns that lined the Ganges – probably the most bloody episode in the entire history of British colonialism.

Enough was enough. The same parliament that had done so much to enable the EIC to rise to unprecedented power, finally gobbled up its own baby. The British state, alerted to the dangers posed by corporate greed and incompetence, successfully tamed history’s most voracious corporation. In 1859, it was again within the walls of Allahabad Fort that the governor general, Lord Canning, formally announced that the company’s Indian possessions would be nationalised and pass into the control of the British Crown. Queen Victoria, rather than the directors of the EIC would henceforth be ruler of India.

The East India Company limped on in its amputated form for another 15 years, finally shutting down in 1874. Its brand name is now owned by a Gujarati businessman who uses it to sell “condiments and fine foods” from a showroom in London’s West End. Meanwhile, in a nice piece of historical and karmic symmetry, the current occupant of Powis Castle is married to a Bengali woman and photographs of a very Indian wedding were proudly on show in the Powis tearoom. This means that Clive’s descendants and inheritors will be half-Indian.

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Today we are back to a world that would be familiar to Sir Thomas Roe, where the wealth of the west has begun again to drain eastwards, in the way it did from Roman times until the birth of the East India Company. When a British prime minister (or French president) visits India, he no longer comes as Clive did, to dictate terms. In fact, negotiation of any kind has passed from the agenda. Like Roe, he comes as a supplicant begging for business, and with him come the CEOs of his country’s biggest corporations

The idea of the joint-stock company is arguably one of Britain’s most important exports to India

For the corporation – a revolutionary European invention contemporaneous with the beginnings of European colonialism, and which helped give Europe its competitive edge – has continued to thrive long after the collapse of European imperialism. When historians discuss the legacy of British colonialism in India, they usually mention democracy, the rule of law, railways, tea and cricket. Yet the idea of the joint-stock company is arguably one of Britain’s most important exports to India, and the one that has for better or worse changed South Asia as much any other European idea. Its influence certainly outweighs that of communism and Protestant Christianity, and possibly even that of democracy.

Companies and corporations now occupy the time and energy of more Indians than any institution other than the family. This should come as no surprise: as Ira Jackson, the former director of Harvard’s Centre for Business and Government, recently noted, corporations and their leaders have today “displaced politics and politicians as … the new high priests and oligarchs of our system”. Covertly, companies still govern the lives of a significant proportion of the human race.

The 300-year-old question of how to cope with the power and perils of large multinational corporations remains today without a clear answer: it is not clear how a nation state can adequately protect itself and its citizens from corporate excess. As the international subprime bubble and bank collapses of 2007-2009 have so recently demonstrated, just as corporations can shape the destiny of nations, they can also drag down their economies. In all, US and European banks lost more than $1tn on toxic assets from January 2007 to September 2009. What Burke feared the East India Company would do to England in 1772 actually happened to Iceland in 2008-11, when the systemic collapse of all three of the country’s major privately owned commercial banks brought the country to the brink of complete bankruptcy. A powerful corporation can still overwhelm or subvert a state every bit as effectively as the East India Company did in Bengal in 1765.

Corporate influence, with its fatal mix of power, money and unaccountability, is particularly potent and dangerous in frail states where corporations are insufficiently or ineffectually regulated, and where the purchasing power of a large company can outbid or overwhelm an underfunded government. This would seem to have been the case under the Congress government that ruled India until last year. Yet as we have seen in London, media organisations can still bend under the influence of corporations such as HSBC – while Sir Malcolm Rifkind’s boast about opening British embassies for the benefit of Chinese firms shows that the nexus between business and politics is as tight as it has ever been.

The East India Company no longer exists, and it has, thankfully, no exact modern equivalent. Walmart, which is the world’s largest corporation in revenue terms, does not number among its assets a fleet of nuclear submarines; neither Facebook nor Shell possesses regiments of infantry. Yet the East India Company – the first great multinational corporation, and the first to run amok – was the ultimate model for many of today’s joint-stock corporations. The most powerful among them do not need their own armies: they can rely on governments to protect their interests and bail them out. The East India Company remains history’s most terrifying warning about the potential for the abuse of corporate power – and the insidious means by which the interests of shareholders become those of the state. Three hundred and fifteen years after its founding, its story has never been more current.

• William Dalrymple’s new book, The Anarchy: How a Corporation Replaced the Mughal Empire, 1756-1803, will be published next year by Bloomsbury & Knopf

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I cannot FORGET 1944 FAMINE BY CHURCHILL 

Churchill's policies contributed to 1943 Bengal famine

The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com › world › mar › winston-...

29 Mar 2019 — The Bengal famine of 1943 was the only one in modern Indian history not to occur as a result of serious drought, according to a study that ...

Great Bengal Famine of 1943: Winston Churchill's Death Blow ...

YouTube · Peepul Tree World (Live History India)

28.9K+ views · 3 years ago

5:07

The Bengal Famine of 1943 took the lives of 3 million Indians yet, very cleverly, it was never declared a 'famine' by the colonial British.