William Dalrymple: East India Company (1764)

In this episode of Travels Through Time we join one of the world’s leading historians, William Dalrymple, who takes us on a tour of 1764 to try and explain how the East India Company became “An empire within an empire”

The history of the East India Company is astonishing.

Leo Tolstoy once wondered: How could a commercial company from London manage to enslave a nation comprising 200 million people on the other side of the world? 

With the battlefields of the Seven Years War still smouldering across the globe, we journey to the edges of the Moghul Empire along the banks of the Ganges to visit 1764, a year of bloodshed and confusion; a year that would change the history of India forever.

William Dalrymple is a British historian and writer, as well as an award-winning broadcaster and critic. His books have won numerous awards and prizes, including the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize, the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award, the Hemingway, the Kapuściński and Wolfson Prizes.

He has been five times longlisted and once shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction. He is also one of the co-founders and co-directors of the annual Jaipur Literature Festival.

His latest work, discussed here, has been described by the Guardian as:

“…not just informative but as colourful as a Maratha army in full battle array, as boisterous as a Calcutta boarding house in 1750, and as entertaining as an evening of poetry and music in a Delhi palace.”

Show notes:

Scenes:

1. February, 1764, Avadh. After years of being played against each other and picked off by the East India Company, Mir Qasim, Shah Alam and Shuja ud-Daula meet in Avadh to unite forces against the Company.
2. 3 May, 1764. The combined forces of the army reach the fortified walls of Patna, an ancient city on the banks of the Ganges. The army of 150,000 warriors comes face to face with 19,000 East India Sepoys.
3. 22 October 1764: The Battle of Buxar, a pivotal moment in history, between the forces under the command of the British East India Company, led by Hector Munro, and the combined armies.

Memento: One of Mir Qasim’s treasure chests, abandoned on the fields of Buxar.

People / Social

Presenter: Peter Moore

Guest: William Dalrymple

Producer: Maria Nolan

Editorial: Artemis Irvine

Digital Production: John Hillman

Titles: Jon O.