In the 1770s, Edmund Burke—parliamentarian, philosopher, and one of the most eloquent critics of imperial excess—voiced serious concerns about the East India Company’s political and military entanglements in the Indian subcontinent. Far from being a crusading agent of British order, the Company, in Burke’s view, had become a mercenary force, lending its formidable military strength to local despots in pursuit of land, wealth, and influence.
In 1779, Burke collaborated with his cousin and confidant William Burke to publish the now largely forgotten but once incendiary pamphlet An Inquiry into the Policy of Making Conquests for the Mahometans. This text presented a searing critique of the Company’s complicity in the campaigns of Muhammad Ali Khan Wallajah, the Nawab of Arcot. Rather than advancing good governance, the British enterprise in India was, according to Burke, installing and supporting the “most degenerate forms of government” upon the Indian people. The Nawab’s campaigns, which devastated the Carnatic region, served not only to enrich his own house and the Company’s shareholders, but also created the very conditions in which the tyrant of Mysore, Hyder Ali, would rise.
In a landmark parliamentary speech delivered in February 1785—The Speech on the Nabob of Arcot’s Debts—Burke presented a harrowing picture of Hyder Ali’s march through the Carnatic. His words, suffused with moral outrage, remain among the most haunting indictments of colonial warfare in the English language:
“Then ensued a scene of woe, the like of which no eye had seen, no heart conceived, and which no tongue can adequately tell. All the horrors of war before known or heard of were mercy to that new havoc. A storm of universal fire blasted every field, consumed every house, destroyed every temple... fathers torn from children, husbands from wives... swept into captivity in an unknown and hostile land… One dead, uniform silence reigned over the whole region.”
Burke did not attribute this catastrophe solely to Hyder Ali. He was unequivocal in assigning responsibility to the East India Company, accusing it of being the author of these evils. The Company's deployment of 10 out of its 21 Madras battalions in defense of the Nawab of Arcot, he argued, made its soldiers as culpable in the destruction of the Carnatic as the armies of Hyder Ali and his “more ferocious son,” Tipu Sultan.
Burke's indictment was not abstract rhetoric. He carefully traced the material incentives behind the Company’s militarism. In exchange for its support, the Nawab of Arcot granted the British lucrative jagirs—land revenue assignments that bolstered the Company’s growing fiscal and territorial dominance. Yet this alliance, like so many others in the colonial theater, was ultimately expendable.
After Tipu Sultan's death at the Battle of Seringapatam in May 1799—an event made possible with the support of the Nawab’s troops—the British turned against their erstwhile ally. Wallajah, the Nawab who had once empowered the Company, had died in 1795, and his son, Umdat ul-Umara, had ascended the throne. The British accused Umdat ul-Umara of secretly aiding Tipu Sultan and demanded the surrender of his kingdom. When he refused, he was reportedly poisoned by agents of the East India Company—a grim reminder of how quickly alliances were discarded once they ceased to serve imperial interest. With his death, the British assumed full control of the Carnatic.
This history, so clearly documented in Burke’s speeches and pamphlets, poses a direct challenge to the popular narrative that the East India Company and Islamic rulers were perpetually in opposition. The truth is more nuanced—and more cynical. The Company frequently aligned itself with regional Islamic powers when it was advantageous to do so, only to betray them when they had outlived their usefulness.
And yet, in The Anarchy, William Dalrymple omits this critical aspect of the Company’s operations. Though he quotes Burke extensively, Dalrymple notably excludes Burke’s charge that the Company was colluding with Islamic regimes. Instead, he constructs a binary opposition between rapacious British commerce and an idealized Islamic nobility, presenting the two as moral antagonists. This framing, while rhetorically potent, ignores the long and opportunistic entanglement between the Company and Indian Muslim rulers like the Nawab of Arcot.
Dalrymple’s stylized prose and archival detail have earned him a large readership, but The Anarchy falters where it matters most: in confronting the full complexity of colonial complicity. By downplaying the Company’s tactical alliances with Islamic warlords and omitting Burke’s sharpest critiques, the book sacrifices historical fidelity for narrative elegance.
To remember Burke’s words in their entirety is to recall that empire did not unfold along neat lines of civilizational conflict—it thrived in murky corridors of convenience and betrayal. The East India Company was not merely the adversary of native kings; it was their co-conspirator, executioner, and eventual heir.
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