Dalrymple is a superb historian with a visceral understanding of India . A book of beauty' - Gerard DeGroot, The TimesIn 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.