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  • The Anarchy

  • The Relentless Rise of the East India Company
  • Written by: William Dalrymple
  • Narrated by: Sid Sagar
  • Length: 15 hrs and 43 mins
  • 4.6 out of 5 stars (475 ratings)

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The Anarchy

Written by: William Dalrymple
Narrated by: Sid Sagar
Free with 30-day trial

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Publisher's Summary

Bloomsbury presents The Anarchy by William Dalrymple, read by Sid Sagar.

The top five sunday times best seller.

One of Barack Obama's best books of 2019.

Longlisted for The Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction 2019.

A Financial Times, Observer, Daily Telegraph, Wall Street Journal and Times book of the year.

In August 1765 the East India Company defeated the young Mughal emperor and forced him to establish in his richest provinces a new administration run by English merchants who collected taxes through means of a ruthless private army – what we would now call an act of involuntary privatisation.

The East India Company’s founding charter authorised it to ‘wage war’ and it had always used violence to gain its ends. But the creation of this new government marked the moment that the East India Company ceased to be a conventional international trading corporation dealing in silks and spices and became something much more unusual: an aggressive colonial power in the guise of a multinational business. In less than four decades it had trained up a security force of around 200,000 men – twice the size of the British army – and had subdued an entire subcontinent, conquering first Bengal and finally, in 1803, the Mughal capital of Delhi itself. The Company’s reach stretched until almost all of India south of the Himalayas was effectively ruled from a boardroom in London.

The Anarchy tells the remarkable story of how one of the world’s most magnificent empires disintegrated and came to be replaced by a dangerously unregulated private company, based thousands of miles overseas in one small office, five windows wide and answerable only to its distant shareholders. In his most ambitious and riveting book to date, William Dalrymple tells the story of the East India Company as it has never been told before, unfolding a timely cautionary tale of the first global corporate power.

©2019 William Dalrymple (P)2019 Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Critic Reviews

"Gloriously opulent...India is a sumptuous place. Telling its story properly demands lush language, not to mention sensitivity towards the country’s passionate complexity. Dalrymple is a superb historian with a visceral understanding of India...A book of beauty." (Gerard DeGroot, The Times)  

"Dalrymple is a superb historian with a visceral understanding of India...A book of beauty." (Gerard DeGroot, The Times)

"An energetic pageturner that marches from the counting house on to the battlefield, exploding patriotic myths along the way...Dalrymple’s spirited, detailed telling will be reason enough for many readers to devour The Anarchy. But his more novel and arguably greater achievement lies in the way he places the company’s rise in the turbulent political landscape of late Mughal India." (Maya Jasanoff, Guardian)

What listeners say about The Anarchy

Average Customer Ratings
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  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars

Pronunciations not satisfactory

Too straining pronunciation, please use a person who speaks a proper Indian accent, when the book is related to India or is catering to the Indian market.

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9 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    1 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Fascinating tale of how a Company captured India!

The author has done a brilliant job of explaining how a 'Private' company i.e. the East India company ended up capturing power in India. If you haven't read books on this particular part of Indian history, you will thoroughly enjoy (listening to) this book.

Downsides:
1. Can't see any Maps, pics of forts, emperors, kings, nawabs, etc...

2. The pronunciations leave a LOT to be desired. The narrator can't even pronounce his own name properly! Instead of सागर, he pronounces his name as सेगर!

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8 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    3 out of 5 stars

wrong choice of narrator

the narrator has the same problem with pronouncing indian names as it would have been expected from an non indian.This completely takes you out from the experience of listening to history where remembering names are crucial.

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4 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Extraordinary Story though reading is not

speaker should have spared a second to understand native words before speaking them otherwise everything else is fantastic.

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3 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    1 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    4 out of 5 stars

excellent book RUINED by POOR performance

I keenly awaited this book, only to have my enthusiasm dampened by the lazy narrator who did not even bother to check the correct pronunciations before launching his work. This was not only a BIG let down, but it actually strained my senses to figure out what he exactly meant. Kindly keep the likes of him far AWAY from any book related to India

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2 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    1 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars
  • SG
  • 26-05-21

Great book, awful performance

Narrator couldn't get the pronunciations of Indian words correct by a long shot even after re-recording! Ganga was ganja in one instance. Ruined the experience of the book for me.

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2 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Enjoyed The Anarchy !

Enjoyed the entire 15h despite the narrator’s far from perfect pronunciation.

The Ganja for Ganga ?!?!

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2 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    1 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Very strong British accent

someone with a neutral accent would have added some semblance of intelligibility to many Indian words for eg words like Bhopal sounded as bopul, so does sepoy as see-pou, also names of many historical figures elicit laughter like rangéela( Mohd shah) as run-geela . The locality of characters in drowned in the haze of thick British accent . very poor execution, indeed

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2 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    2 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    4 out of 5 stars

Excellent story, spoiled by the pronunciation!

C'mon! The book is about company Raj over the Indian subcontinent! The biggest flaw of the company was that they did not assimilate with the local people. Sid Sagar, though, articulating the book very well, simply has not bothered to learn how to pronounce even the basic words! When you call Ganga as Ganja, its like calling the Thames and Ta-mez. Overall though a good book which definitely required better reader!

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2 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

the mispronounced indian words were off-putting.

this is my first Dalrymple, it's a magnificent book which opens your eyes to the attrocitues committed by the EIC. The narration is quite bad, many indian words are mispronounced and that's honestly off putting.

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2 people found this helpful