Anarchy by William Dalrymple

"Corporations have neither bodies to be punished, nor souls to be condemned; they therefore do as they like."

This statement opens the book, and it is also its central thesis. Anarchy narrates the roughly hundred years between 1757 and 1857, during which several European colonial powers came to trade with — and profit from — India. While the Portuguese and the French play supporting roles, the English, in the form of the English East India Company, are the protagonists of this story. They are the "corporation" the opening quote refers to.

The Blueprint of Modern Capitalism

The strongest impression the book left on me was how closely the East India Company's operations mirror those of modern capitalist organisations. It feels as though the blueprint for modern capitalism was drafted in companies like the British East India Company and the Dutch VOC. They were among the first joint stock companies — and that, in hindsight, is where the seed of modern capitalism was sown.

When I visited Amsterdam, the walking tour took us to the building that once served as the headquarters of the Dutch East India Company. I remember standing there and feeling as though I was visiting one of the truly important sites of the modern world, given how pervasive and powerful that idea — the joint stock corporation — has since become.

Ambitious Men, Enormous Profits

Part of the book reads as a biography of the East India Company itself. The men who built these early capitalist organisations were ambitious to the point of recklessness - willing to sail to distant lands and face potentially fatal dangers for the chance of making enormous personal wealth. And they succeeded. The EIC grew so large that the British economy's fate became tied to the company's quarterly results. Figures like Robert Clive amassed staggering personal fortunes, becoming among the richest men in England.

The company also raised one of the largest armies in the world at the time. This was a private army, staffed largely by Indian soldiers (sepoys) but trained and led by their British officers. Its primary purpose was to protect the company's assets and interests - and to wage war to acquire more. This army, trained in arguably superior European military tactics and equipped with better arms and ammunition, won far more wars than it lost. That military edge was undoubtedly one of the key reasons for the EIC's dominance in India.

Come to think of it, the EIC was more honest than the modern corporations that hide behind a do-good-for-the-world facade. When you command one of the largest armies on earth, there is very little room for pretending to be a benevolent force. Modern corporations dont have standing armies on their payroll anymore. They let the government do that. They instead pull strings behind the curtains, lobby governments, bankroll election campaigns - to effectively do what EIC would do with their army - acquire more resources & crush competition ('build competitive moat' in business language). But because this is behind a curtain, that is there is no army or military campaigns undertaken in the company's name you can point a finger of blame at them, 

Capital as the Decisive Weapon

Another reason for EIC's success in campaigns across the Indian subcontinent was the effective deployment of capital - and, crucially, having more of it to deploy. One major reason was the backing of the Jagat Seths, a wealthy banking family in Bengal who had risen to prominence during the later years of Mughal rule. This again has parallels with modern capitalism, where the Jagat Seths, acting as medieval era VC funds, backed military campaigns they judged likely to succeed, in exchange for enormous returns if they proved right. Cold blooded 'return on investment' was the calculation behind backing a foreign power which ended up causing enormous devastation in Bengal, the home land of the Jagath Seths. 

All of this manifested in the British EIC and the Dutch VOC becoming disproportionately powerful enterprises for their era. There is a widely circulated graph (which I have not personally fact-checked) that illustrates just how large the Dutch East India Company was compared to the biggest corporations of today. Even accounting for imprecision, the scale is striking.

The Bengal Famine: Capitalism's Darkest Chapter

A particularly brutal chapter of the book covers the Bengal famine. It reads as a classic case of an organisation so fixated on extracting maximum value from its resources that it was effectively blind to one of the worst famines in human history unfolding around it.

Before reading this book, I had not fully appreciated how prosperous Bengal once was. Murshidabad was a thriving city with a population rivalling that of London, then one of the great cities of the world. The Hooghly River was the lifeline that enabled trade and commerce from what was an extraordinarily rich and fertile region, with sophisticated textile manufacturing. To read how this prosperity was reduced to the site of one of history's worst famines ought to give even the most committed free-market advocate a degree of sympathy for left-leaning politics.

A Game of Thrones in 18th-Century India

The other half of the book concerns what was happening in India when the Europeans arrived. The broad outline - multiple factions fighting one another, easily exploited by the British through divide-and-rule tactics - is a familiar story. But Dalrymple adds vivid colour and depth to the individual characters: Muhammad Shah Rangila, Shah Alam, Alivardi Khan, Siraj ud-Daula, Haider Ali, Tipu Sultan, Nana Phadnavis, Mahadji Scindia, and others. The narrative reads like a political thriller, with multiple parties locked in shifting alliances and betrayals. Dalrymple really shines in bringing key episodes to life like the Battle of Plassey, Siraj ud-Daula's attack on Calcutta, and this is what makes a 400-page book feel like a quick read.

A Cosmopolitan World, Now Lost

Reading this book made me realise what a fascinating period 18th-century India was. It was a time of rapid, often violent change, where entire regions like Bengal were thrown into shock by European capitalist ambitions. New cities — Bombay, Madras, Calcutta — began taking the shape that would make them modern India's great urban centres. The Indian marketplace was so prosperous that European mercenaries came to offer their services to the highest bidder, while merchants and traders from Iran, Afghanistan, and Central Asia flocked to its cities. It would have been extraordinary to move through such a cosmopolitan world. 

Onward

Another book I am currently reading, India in the Persianate Age, ends neatly where Anarchy begins — in the 18th century. Having nearly finished it, I feel I now have much richer context around the world Dalrymple describes. I look forward to writing about that one next.

Raya by Srinivas Reddy

I love history books for either one of these two reasons - either they are densely packed with historical information that i often find very juicy tangents to explore on my own and have many TIL moments (i am currently reading one such book called India in the Persianate Age); OR they tell a riveting story and read almost like a thriller novel (Anarchy by William Dalrymple was one such book). Unfortunately, this book was neither of those. 

It is a short book (about 176 pages of content, excluding the notes, bibliography etc.), so its a quick read. But that might not have given the writer enough space to add enough content, enough juice so that you come out feeling like you have immersed yourself in that time and world. I admit that this might be too strict of a benchmark. But i believe if you are reading history, you do so seriously. A casual read that you dont 'retain' of, is not a good history book. And i didn't retain enough from this book. 

I also wonder if i found the book lacking because it didn't have a central hypothesis, a central theme that it was trying to paint via historical facts and legends and stories. It is a book about Krishnadevraya, the most successful and hence well known rulers of the Vijayanagar empire - and like any biography, it talks about the context in which he became king, the people closest to him, his politics, his wars, and the eventual decline of the empire. But it lacked the detail and the narrative you need for the picture to render completely. Again, Anarchy of William Dalrymple or India under the Persianate Empire are both good examples of books with a strong, central hypothesis  and offering enough depth to reiterate that throughout the book. 

The book references many historical artifacts, but it does so in a very dry manner. It is not fun to write the english translation of an inscription. Its great when it is referenced, but within the framework of a narrative or a story. In some parts, the book reads like it has been commissioned by Krishnadevraya himself to sing his praises - it goes so over the top. That was underwhelming. 

Not to say the book does complete injustice to portraying Krishnadevraya or the context of his rule. It was interesting to learn that the Tirupati temple was a very important religious site for the king, and he seems to have visited there about 7 times. The story around how Krishnadevraya captured Raichur from the Adil Shahi sultanate was painted very well. It was also a TIL moment to learn that Prataprudradeva, the Gajapati king, was a rival for Raya throughout his reign - his conception of the Vijaynagar rulers as less then him because they came from a lower caste added fuel to that rivalry. But i did have to reference my notes to refresh my memory, which is what i meant by 'i didnt retain enough from this book'.  

Overall, this was one of the books that i will forget with the passage of time and can't recommend it for people interested in the Vijaynagar empire or medieval Indian history. 

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

Orbital is space poetry. No matter how many space videos you watch, there is a magnificence in space that no moving image can do justice do. But somehow words in the right person's control can begin to touch upon it. This book as a great example of that. 

Setting the story in the International Space Station gives the story a liberty to transcend micro problems like power cuts, regional boundaries, annoying mother-in-laws etc., and exist in an abstraction. This abstraction is beautiful. it allows the author to dwell on things like the beauty of the Earth from space, what it means to be human and a fragility of a tin can which is the ISS. 

But these are not abstract philosophical ramblings, which would have made the book boring. These are very specific but profound thoughts, articulated very crisply - which makes you feel like these are the right things to ponder upon if you have the privilege to ride the ISS. 

But not all of it is abstract pondering. The story involves 8 characters. There is no narrative. Things do not happen, there is no character arch. But each of the character brings their own story, their own problems and biases to the shared space of the ISS, and these mould the story. And think that humanises / makes real what the author wants to talk about. 

The abstraction in the premise of the book also enables one to look at the human civilization as a whole, and put in context the problems we face together - collective ones like climate change or personal ones like loss of your mother. This might have been the theme that pushed the book to be the winner of the Booker Prize 2024. And in a world which seems to be moving more away than towards each other, this is a relevant theme 

Careless People (a story of where i used to work) by Sarah-Wynn Williams

I had a naive belief that the new age technology companies are not as evil as the old time tobacco or oil companies. I believed that we as a society have evolved to have tighter regulations against how much a company can misbehave under selfish interests. That belief got shattered after the first round of layoffs in Google, while i was working there, in 2022.  Reading the stories of people who were laid off, even women on maternity leave, and the absolute ruthless and random handling of the situation planted a doubt in my mind against this pristine status of these big tech companies. 

In my first stint at Google, i had expected to come across extremely smart people who were keen to solve problems. I was prepared for my product manager craft to be brutally scrutinised, and in that process grow as a product manager. Not only did i not encounter these smart people, more disappointingly navigating the bureaucratic corridors seemed more important to most people than building something useful. This had already dented an idealistic image that i had in my mind. That image would completely break apart when i and my entire team would eventually get laid off as well, in March 2022. 

Donald Trump winning the US elections in 2024 seemed like a true test for the ideological principles (what did they stand for) of the big tech companies, with the ideological landscape in the US shifting right-wards. It looks like most tech companies caved in and were happy to let go of the 'inclusive' programs like DEI. Google for example dropped a caveat to not use AI for military technologies from their AI principles. Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg's 5 minutes video around some fundamental changes in Facebook is a great moment to highlight this change, or rather caving into the political pressures. 

In this context, Careless People articulates and re-iterates what seems to be emerging as plain facts, to me personally through my experience and to the broader world as well. Big tech companies are not so different from those old timey evil oil companies. They share a fundamental framework - that they are institutes for profit. Everything else is PR. In the context of the book for Meta, it could mean compromising of privacy of its user to enter into a new market (China), compromising on fact checking fake news which would lead to riots and deaths in Myanmar, or being open to be used by despots and dictators to win elections - as long as it makes ads dollars. 

If you abstract out the details of the busineeses, these organisations are nothing but a collection of type-A people who want to succeed no matter what. And there are not creative ways to define success here, its the same old better job, more money, brushing shoulders with celebrities. I dont know why it is not a surprise that the companies they build turn out the way they do. 

Of course, everything on the book can and should be taken as face value. I felt the book tends to simplify the narrative. The thing that didn't sit well with me throughout the book is the author's holier-than-thou tone, which suggests every top management person at Facebook is evil except for the her, and she tried her best to change things, and failed. Anyone who had worked in a large organisation knows it is not as black & white as that. A double click on why people were the way they were, and why they did not heed the writers advice would have been more useful, than 'Mark Zuckerberg bad'.

Despite that, the book captures an important truth of how big tech companies operate. And its a very engaging read. This is the fastest i have run through 300 pages. Maybe because it also reads like gossip for someone workin in big tech, and who does not like gossip. Except, this is a very harmful gossip. 

As a redemptive arch, i hope someone somewhere spits on a big tech HRs face the next time they ask the interviewee to 'think about the user first'.

The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle

The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle was a Christmas gift from my manager to the team during our product offsite. There were a lot of conversations around the 'team culture' during the offsite, and i was primed to read this book. 

Usually, I carry a healthy skepticism for popular books in the 'business' genre. While some of them are good, it is difficult to spot the good ones from the bad. And, even with the ones i like, i dont know how much of what one reads sticks - in other words, i am not sure if they make you a better business person.

But this book had a seed of a genuinely good idea. That idea, broadly, is that highly successfully groups are successfully more because of how they work with each other, how invested they are in the work, and how aligned with the goal - that is, the 'group culture' - than how skilled they are, or where they are based on any other factors typically associated with success. The author claims to have deep dove with various successful groups, including interestingly a group of successful thieves, and consistently came upon this same idea as a reason for their success. 

Its a genuine idea, and the author has document well his learnings from the various groups. But he ends up falling into this trope of popular non-fiction books - where the world is entirely explained by the core idea the book is proposing. In this case, the success of groups lay only at the doorstep of their 'group culture'. I feel thats a simplistic and hence incorrect argument. 

If you let go of that transgression, there are some good ideas in the book. I note here some ideas from the book that i liked:

Feeling safe and feeling like you belong to the group is a healthy pre-requisite for building a good culture. The author talks about how our primal brain still perceives 'safety' they way it would have when we lived in small communities - it needs continuous re-enforcement, and a steady accumulation of almost invisible cues to reassert safety and belongingness. 

Create a collision rich space - across hierarchies, roles and teams. Enable people to see each other, work in close proximity to each other. Accidental hallway conversations and bump ups are a great way for people to feel they belong and create cohesion. The book talks about one director who thought of his core job as connecting smart people with other smart people. This also highlights how you don't need to be an extrovert, life-of-the-party kind of person to create great belongingness and culture. It could almost be a science that way. 

Sunday mass at Church as a north star for team rituals. The mass is a gathering that people feel about so strongly. They participate willingly, invite other people willingly, and the rituals are designed to pull people in, especially the new comers. That should be the north star for a tea ritual. 

Pick up trash. The book talks about the McDonalds founder who'd pick up trash around the restaurant at the end of every day. While seeming not directly linked with culture, i felt housekeeping activities like that not only binds you closer to your work but also ceans out the rough edges from your work. 

Endorse catchphrases. This is about how you communicate culture. While i thought these were cheesy, i recently learnt how they could be used effectively. When my skip level boss joined the team, he said 'run to the fire' as one of the ways to handle problems in the product. That was his way of saying 'don't wait for the problem to grow or ignore it thinking you'd solve it later after your other prioritise, if there is a problem you tackle it right away'. But 'run to the fire' is just better, and it stuck with me. Creating catchphrase which are simple and capture you culture better, i believe now, is a great way to communicate culture. 

How might i take ideas from this book to my current team at Google?

Team rituals - We need to meet once a week, in person, talk a bit about work and a bit about us. We also need to meet outside of work to get to know each others lives. I always looked down on these 'team outings' but i come to realise how important they are (if done right). 

Common vision - Establish why the team is important and what they are working towards. Get a buy in from people on this goal. 

Problem's board - If the new team works on a bunch of quality problems, establish a problems board where every identified problem is written on a sticky note, and have people pick from the problems.

The Heart that Bleeds (Latin America Now) by Alma Guillermoprieto

The Heart that Bleeds by Alma Guillermoprieto is a great collection of essays ('dispatches' for New Yorker) from various Latin American cities by Alma Guillermoprieto, who is a Mexican writer. Having almost zero context on Latin America, this book was a perfect introduction to the culture, politics and people of the continent. Each chapter picks a theme within a city, and beautifully expands on it - with the right level of detail and context. And even when you don't know anything about Lima, lets say, you find yourself in the middle of a story building up in the city, intertwined in its politics and culture. And a lot of the stories are political. The writer set this up in the introduction of the book - which perhaps is the best written part of the book - touching up on the core theme of the book. 

She writes - 'The questions not yet answered in Latin America have to do with a coherent future vision, not only of how the hugely unequal sectors of Latin-American society can all modernize themselves into the same century, but of how they can modernize each other into the same ethical standards and a rough consensus regarding what it is that a modern society owes its citizens, and what those citizens owe each other'. 

I believe Amal is one of the best non-fiction writer i have read recently. Her writing just flows. This is a great example of how you engage readers in the most complex of issues when they have limited context about the place you are writing about. I felt like i was in the comunas while reading the Medellin essay on the drug infused densely populated hills or attending the Umbanda ceremonies while reading the Rio essay. The best chapters for me were the Mexico City ones, along with the ones set in Brazil and Peru. So much so, that i am looking to read more about these places and at some point maybe visit them as well. 

The writing is as beautiful as the material is depressing. Constantly, one encounters corrupt politicians, innocent civilians murdered, and drugs which have entered all aspects of the society. The one silver lining was the Managua essay highlighting the election victory of Violeta Chamorro against the long time president Daniel Ortega. And i cant help but draw parallels between these far away Latin American societies and the issues we face here in India. Here's hoping we all can come out of our century of solitude and see new light.  

First Stop in the New World by David Lida

 

The key hypothesis of this book by David Lida is - as nations steadily urbanize, across the globe, and as these urban centers  grow to accomodate the immigrants, these modern cities would not be based on the models of first world cities like Paris, London, New York or Amsterdam. But rather, they would be based on models of Delhi, Kolkata, Shanghai, Mexico City, Sao Paulo etc. - that is rapidly growing urban centers in the third world countries. And the writer posits that Mexico City, more than any other, is an ideal character of how the modern 21st Century city would look like, would feel like. That is why 'First Stop in the New World'. I was with the author till here, ready to believe this hypothesis if he says so, and ready to read explorations on how he arrived here. But this is where the book falters, for me. The author hasn't really put forward very convincing arguments to support his hypothesis. 

The books is a collection of broader themes about Mexico City and Mexican culture in general, along with some very specific observations and anecdotes to add some more flavor to the narrative. Some of these are very well written. I especially liked the deep dive into Mexican sexuality in a chapter titled 'Sex Capital' and also another into what is called 'Malinchismo' in a chapter titled 'Globalisation and Malinchismo'. I was surprised how relevantly the themes in these two chapters would apply to Indian culture and Indian men. Could it be that old cultures which were colonised for a significant period of time by an alien population behave have some common themes? It could be a coincidence as well. But i would love to explore more about the origin of these common themes that appear between the Indian and he Mexican cultures that otherwise are located so far away from each other. 

I was hoping these chapters, put together, conclude convincingly into the hypothesis posited by the author. They dont. The conclusion at the end of the book seems too short, too hasty, almost like an afterthought. This does not take away from the beauty of some of the chapters. But they stand alone, not as a part of a whole narrative.

The writer is a New Yorker who has has lived in Mexico City for the past few years. So the book is an outsiders perspective on Mexico City. Naturally, some generalisations and biases creep in. And i was fine with this. I did not necessarily want an authentic or inside out view at the city. On the contrary, knowing how an outsider looked the city made the book more interesting for me. Though, now that i have read this, i would love to know what a original residents narrative about the city might look. 

After i finished reading this book, i jumped right away (based on the recommendations at the end of the book) into a book called The Heart that Bleeds by Alma Guillermoprieto. She is a Mexican writer and the book is a collection of 'dispatches' form various South American cities for the New Yorker. I began with two chapters based in Mexico City. And right away, the thing that stood out for me is how much more tightly written these chapters were as compared to 'First Stop in the New World'. They had better flow, she was able to lay out a unique theme about Mexico City, and build on it convincingly. That, in hindsight, made First Stop in the New World pale in comparison to the Mexico City chapters of The Heart That Bleeds. 

I will write more about The Heart That Bleeds next.