The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire by William Dalrymple
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a deeply researched engrossing account of the evolution of a rapacious company from its humble origins as a group of ambitious British merchants.
The book starts appropriately with this sentence, "One of the first Indian words to enter the English language was the Hindustani slang for plunder: loot. This word was rarely heard outside the plains of north India until the late eighteenth century, when it suddenly became a common term across Britain."
It ends ominously:

The East India Company remains today history’s most ominous warning about the potential for the abuse of corporate power – and the insidious means by which the interests of shareholders can seemingly become those of the state…… Empire is transforming itself into forms of global power that use campaign contributions and commercial lobbying, multinational finance systems and global markets, corporate influence and the predictive data harvesitn of the new surveillance-capitalism rather than – or sometimes alongside – overt military conquest, occupation or direct economic domination to the effect its ends.
Four hundred and twenty years after its founding, the story of the East India Company has never been more current.

There appears to be a topographical error. General Lake on his way to Delhi from Kanpur, after vanquishing the Aligarh Fort, is said to have camped near Agra at Sikandra at Akbar’s Tomb and then marched to Hindan 18 miles away, only to be ambushed there. This is south-west of Aligarh, across the Yamuna river and more than 100 miles from Shahadra and marching to and from there would entail crossing the Yamuna twice. The author probably meant Sikandra that is close to present day Dadri.

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