War elephants. Dragoons. A king with a rotten nose replaced by a diamond prosthetic. Another king blinded with needles by an opponent, then somehow outliving them all and clinging to the throne into old age. Rastafarian naked warriors. War parties with jugglers and dancing girls. Cities looted and emptied. Factions switching sides with the weather.

A new season of Game of Thrones? A lost Mad Max script? No. Just the story of how the East India Company, not Britain at first, colonized India.

That is the basic effect of William Dalrymple’s The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company. It sounds too lurid, too neatly grotesque, too fiction-like to have happened. A few months ago I read Horus Rising, my introduction to the Warhammer 40,000 universe, and even there some of the warfare struck me as excessive, too simple-minded. Dalrymple’s book reminded me that reality can easily outdo fiction. Real history turns out to be every bit as cruel, theatrical, and blunt.

I picked up the book because I wanted to learn more about the East India Company, a name I knew but understood only vaguely. I did not expect it to become a lesson in colonialism. India was not first swallowed by some coherent British national project, but by a corporation. A trading company accumulated military force, political leverage, tax rights, territory, and eventually state functions.

The East India Company began as commerce with side hustles in violence and ended as violence with a thin commercial pretext. It reads less like a business than a prototype for dystopian sovereignty. I was not expecting to find that so far back in history. A corporation ruling like a state was something I had filed under science fiction, not colonial India. At times it felt less like history than the setting of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Instead, Blade Runner could open with the words: “Based on a true story.”

Dalrymple is good at showing the texture of that world. The armies are not just armies. They move as entire ecosystems: animals, servants, camp followers, traders, performers, laborers. One detail from the book captures the scale and strangeness of it:

In the end, the total body heading west amounted to more than 100,000 people, including mahouts and coolies, grass-cutters and horse-keepers, tent lascars and bullock-men, Banjarrah grain-collectors and money-changers, ‘female quacks, jugglers, groups of dancing girls, and votaries of pleasure’.

At the same time, the book is not perfect. There were stretches where I felt bogged down in battle-by-battle territorial shifts between Indian factions, while wanting more on the political dimension back in London. The distance mattered, of course. News moved slowly. But that only made me want more of that angle, not less. The same goes for Napoleon and the Boston Tea Party, both of which drift through the edges of the story and made me want a deeper treatment than the book gives them.

The book also leaves me with the impression that “trade” became almost a euphemism. It was never entirely clear to me how much was genuine trade and how much was enforced through military power. Much of it felt more like organized seizure. Again and again, the real focus seemed to be on building up armies. I wish the book had made that relationship a bit clearer.

Another weak point is that the story can become dense and repetitive. More than once I caught myself thinking, “Not another faction of Indians teaming up with the French to attack the Company.” Then the book ends somewhat abruptly, with the British state taking over and a short epilogue on what all of this means in the larger scheme of things. That part, in particular, could have been expanded.

What stayed with me was not just that jeweled nose forever imprinted in my mind, but the realization that corporate rule is not some futuristic fantasy. It already happened.