The EIC went on to conquer the Mughal empire, one of the largest and richest the world had seen, in what Dalrymple describes as a “supreme act of corporate violence” and “history’s most ominous warning about the potential for the abuse of corporate power”.

While The Anarchy charts the “relentless rise” of the EIC from its rather shambolic Elizabethan origins to a ruthless multinational corporation and colonial power, it also tells the story of the decline of the great Mughal empire. And it does so with the same audacious eloquence as the author’s acclaimed works White Mughals (2001), The Last Mughal (2006) and Return of a King (2012).

The book is also a study of the intricacies of war, weaponry, finance and corporate power, anchored in local rivalries and long-running hostilities between England and France as well as aggression by the company.

Laced with detailed accounts of bloody battles, The Anarchy at times reads like a military history of India. Still, Dalrymple did not set out to write a complete account of “the most voracious corporation in history”, but to ask how a single business operation, based in one London office complex, was able to subjugate and plunder the entire subcontinent.

The answer lies partly in the anarchy that ensued after the death of the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, in 1707, from which the book takes its title – with calculated irony, because the company would unleash unprecedented anarchy on India in the years to come.

After 1707, power and tax revenues shifted from Delhi to the governors of various regions, many of which enjoyed a cultural and financial resurgence as India “became a disjointed but profoundly militarised society”. This emboldened the now immensely profitable EIC, which became increasingly manipulative and expansionist, and like its French rival, Compagnie des Indes Orientales, began recruiting and training its own forces.

Yet no single event or person shored up the company’s parasitic grip on India as securely as Clive, who was sent to the country a second time in 1756 to head its private army. His orders were to defend British interests against the French. But instead, Clive – determined to rebuild his fortune after losing a chest of gold coins when the lead ship in his convoy to India was wrecked off South Africa – took on and defeated the nawab (viceroy) of Bengal, then plotted with Bengal’s financiers to install a puppet. All for an exorbitant fee.

The upshot was that, in 1757, the EIC became the dominant military and political force in Bengal, India’s richest province, and Clive got his hands on one of the largest corporate windfalls in history, estimated at £232.5 million (HK$2.25 billion) in modern terms, of which £22 million went directly into Clive’s pocket.

Clive returned to England in 1760 as the richest self-made man in Europe. But his machinations brought such chaos to Bengal, previously the most peaceful corner of the Mughal empire, that he was sent back to India some years later by the company’s directors to shore up its interests – and its flagging share price.

After arriving in Bengal in 1765 to news of company victory in the Battle of Buxar (1764), Clive went further than that. He connived to get the defeated but deeply respected Mughal emperor, Shah Alam, to sign away diwani rights to collect taxes on behalf of the emperor in exchange for “managing” the finances of India’s richest provinces, Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. (The company later called this handwritten agreement the Treaty of Allahabad.)

Grasping the vast revenue streams that had powered the Mughal empire for centuries had been a long-held ambition for Clive, who saw them as a means of financing all company expenses and, somewhat prophetically, a wider conquest of India. “I am arrived at the pinnacle of all that I covet,” he wrote to his biographer.

Clive had transformed the British East India Company from a trading enterprise into a colonial power, albeit in the guise of a corporate manager, and it proceeded to loot India as never before. Within five years it had uprooted Bengal’s entire social structure by squeezing ever greater tax revenues from this now ailing province.

This resulted in the Great Bengal Famine of 1770, which the company did nothing to alleviate despite having the cash reserves to do so. Instead, it ruthlessly enforced tax collection, sending its share price soaring. Many company merchants also profiteered by hoarding grain, transferring vast profits to London.

Any lingering notion that the company was on a civilising mission was destroyed. Dalrymple gives a harrowing account of the company’s inhumanity. By 1772, the EIC’s reputation was so damaged that its share price plummeted. Its financial foundations crumbled in 1773, yet even as it brought down 30 banks, it sought a bailout.

The British in India: a social history of 350 years of colonisation

By then, the contrast between the bankruptcy of the company and the immense wealth of its employees was so obvious that an investigation was launched, with even the prime minister demanding a Crown takeover of the company. But with the EIC now generating nearly half of Britain’s trade, and with 40 per cent of its MPs holding shares, it was deemed too big to fail. Instead, according to Dalrymple, it got the first corporate bailout in history.

While the company agreed to conform to the new Regulating Act of 1773, this, like subsequent regulatory measures, did little to curb its worst excesses. Dalrymple describes another six decades of company dysfunction, excess and exploitation as it went about subjugating the rest of India – until its brutal excesses during Great Uprising of 1857 finally compelled parliament to remove it from power.

Yet in narrating the story of how the British East India Company managed to replace the Mughal empire as overlords of the subcontinent in this 397-page history, Dalrymple poses an altogether more disturbing question, one that “remains today without a clear answer”. How has the joint stock company, an innovation of Tudor England, continued to thrive long after the collapse of European imperialism?

The British East India Company remains the ultimate prototype for many of today’s joint stock corporations. Although no contemporary company could get away with replicating its military might, many corporations attempt to match its success, he reminds us, by bending state power to their own ends.

“The most powerful among them do not need their own armies,” he writes. “They can rely on governments to protect their interests and bail them out.”