The Relentless Rise of the East India Company
By: William Dalrymple
Narrated by: Sid Sagar
Categories: History, Asia
4.4 out of 5 stars 4.4 (759 ratings)
The War that Ended Peace
By: Margaret MacMillan
Narrated by: Richard Burnip
The First World War followed a period of sustained peace in Europe during which people talked with confidence of prosperity, progress and hope. But in 1914, Europe walked into a catastrophic conflict which killed millions of its men, bled its economies dry, shook empires and societies to pieces, and fatally undermined Europe's dominance of the world. It was a war which could have been avoided up to the last moment - so why did it happen?
Excellent history
By Mister Peridot on 14-12-13
Return of a King
The Battle for Afghanistan
Narrated by: Sagar Arya
In the spring of 1839, Britain invaded Afghanistan for the first time. Nearly 20,000 British and East India Company troops poured through the high mountain passes and re-established on the throne Shah Shuja ul-Mulk. On the way in, the British faced little resistance. But after two years of occupation, the Afghan people rose in answer to the call for jihad and the country exploded into violent rebellion. The First Anglo-Afghan War ended in Britain's greatest military humiliation of the 19th century.
Excellent and Well Researched
By A. J. Taylor on 12-05-21
The History of the Ancient World
From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome
By: Susan Wise Bauer
Narrated by: John Lee
This is the first volume in a bold new series that tells the stories of all peoples, connecting historical events from Europe to the Middle East to the far coast of China, while still giving weight to the characteristics of each country. Susan Wise Bauer provides both sweeping scope and vivid attention to the individual lives that give flesh to abstract assertions about human history. This narrative history employs the methods of "history from beneath" - literature, epic traditions, private letters, and accounts - to connect kings and leaders with the lives of those they ruled.
obsessed with royalty
By Jason M Eshelby on 28-12-14
Churchill's Secret Warriors
The Explosive True Story of the Special Forces Desperadoes of WWII
By: Damien Lewis
Narrated by: Nigel Carrington
In the bleak moments after defeat on mainland Europe in winter 1939, Winston Churchill knew that Britain had to strike back hard. So Britain's wartime leader called for the lightning development of a completely new kind of warfare, recruiting a band of eccentric free-thinking warriors to become the first 'deniable' secret operatives to strike behind enemy lines, offering these volunteers nothing but the potential for glory and all-but-certain death.
Well, who'd have thunk it!
By Mark on 19-05-15
The Story of China
A Portrait of a Civilisation and Its People
By: Michael Wood
Narrated by: Michael Wood
China is the oldest living civilisation on earth, but its history is still surprisingly little known in the wider world. Michael Wood's sparkling narrative, which mingles the grand sweep with local and personal stories, woven together with the author's own travel journals, is an enthralling account of China's 4000-year-old tradition, taking in life stationed on the Great Wall or inside the Forbidden City.
Ruined by the narrator
By George on 20-12-20
Political Order and Political Decay
From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy
By: Francis Fukuyama
Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
Fukuyama examines the effects of corruption on governance, and why some societies have been successful at rooting it out. He explores the different legacies of colonialism in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, and offers a clear-eyed account of why some regions have thrived and developed more quickly than others. And he boldly reckons with the future of democracy in the face of a rising global middle class and entrenched political paralysis in the West.
Thought provoking read
Down and Out in Paris and London
By: George Orwell
Narrated by: Jeremy Northam
An autobiographical study, Down and Out in Paris and London follows Orwell as he tramps around both Paris and London. Pawning his belongings to buy food, unemployment, drinking heavily and jostling for a place in homeless hostels are but a few of the experiences related with candour and insight in this unabridged exclusive audiobook. Orwell was arguably one of the first 'gonzo' journalists.
By Richard Blant on 20-07-15
A People's Tragedy
By: Orlando Figes
Narrated by: Roger Davis
Opening with a panorama of Russian society, from the cloistered world of the Tsar to the brutal life of the peasants, A People's Tragedy follows workers, soldiers, intellectuals and villagers as their world is consumed by revolution and then degenerates into violence and dictatorship. Drawing on vast original research, Figes conveys above all the shocking experience of the revolution for those who lived it, while providing the clearest and most cogent account of how and why it unfolded.
Read all about it! Tula zemstvo! a peasant volost!
By North Yorkshire on 15-02-20
The Essential Chomsky
By: Noam Chomsky, Anthony Arnove - editor
Narrated by: Kevin Stillwell
In a single volume, the seminal writings of the world's leading philosopher, linguist, and critic, published to coincide with his 80th birthday. For the past 40 years Noam Chomsky's writings on politics and language have established him as a preeminent public intellectual and as one of the most original and wide-ranging political and social critics of our time. Among the seminal figures in linguistic theory over the past century, since the 1960s Chomsky has also secured a place as perhaps the leading dissident voice in the United States.
Some of the Essays are very interesting
By Honest Dude on 12-07-18
13 Things That Don't Make Sense: The Most Intriguing Scientific Mysteries
By: Michael Brooks
Narrated by: Matt Addis
Science starts to get interesting when things don''t make sense. Even today, there are experimental results that the most brilliant scientists can neither explain nor dismiss. In the past, similar anomalies have revolutionised our world: in the 16th century, a set of celestial irregularities led Copernicus to realise that the Earth goes around the sun and not the reverse. In 13 Things That Don''t Make Sense, Michael Brooks meets thirteen modern-day anomalies that may become tomorrow''s breakthroughs.
Really interesting listen!
By Lillian on 27-03-11
By: Thomas Piketty, Arthur Goldhammer - translator
Narrated by: L. J. Ganser
What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about the long-term evolution of inequality, the concentration of wealth, and the prospects for economic growth lie at the heart of political economy. But satisfactory answers have been hard to find for lack of adequate data and clear guiding theories. In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty analyzes a unique collection of data from 20 countries, ranging as far back as the 18th century, to uncover key economic and social patterns.
Great book - pity about the editing of the reading
By Jeannie on 16-08-15
A Biography
By: Ian Kershaw
Narrated by: Damian Lynch
Hailed as the most compelling biography of the German dictator yet written, Ian Kershaw's Hitler brings us closer than ever before to the heart of its subject's immense darkness. From his illegitimate birth in a small Austrian village to his fiery death in a bunker under the Reich chancellery in Berlin, Adolf Hitler left a murky trail, strewn with contradictory tales and overgrown with self-created myths. One truth prevails: the sheer scale of the evils that he unleashed on the world has made him a demonic figure without equal in the 20th century.
By Buzzzb on 15-09-16
The Wicked Boy
By: Kate Summerscale
Narrated by: Jot Davies
Early in the morning of Monday, 8 July 1895, 13-year-old Robert Coombes and his 12-year-old brother, Nattie, set out from their small, yellow-brick terraced house in East London to watch a cricket match at Lord's. Their father had gone to sea the previous Friday, the boys told their neighbours, and their mother was visiting her family in Liverpool. Over the next 10 days, Robert and Nattie spent extravagantly, pawning their parents' valuables to fund trips to the theatre and the seaside.
Superb listen
By Linda on 20-08-16
By: Daphné du Maurier
Narrated by: John Castle
Seeking peace of mind, Lady Donna de Colomb flees the stews of London and the Restoration court for remote Navaron. There she finds the boundless passion her spirit craves - daring to love the pirate hunted by all Cornwall.
A pure delight
By Anne on 25-05-11
1415: Henry V's Year of Glory
By: Ian Mortimer
Narrated by: James Cameron Stewart
In this ground-breaking audiobook, Ian Mortimer portrays Henry in the pivotal year of his reign. Recording the dramatic events of 1415, he offers the fullest, most precise and least romanticised view we have of Henry and what he did. At the centre of the narrative is the campaign which culminated in the battle of Agincourt: a slaughter ground intended not to advance England's interests directly but to demonstrate God's approval of Henry's royal authority on both sides of the Channel.
Impressively scholarly but dull at times
By Kirstine on 02-04-19
By: Bill Browder
Narrated by: Adam Grupper
November 2009. Sergei Magnitsky is led to an isolation cell in a Moscow prison and beaten to death by eight police officers. His crime? To testify against the Russian Interior Ministry officials involved in a conspiracy to steal $230 million in taxes. Magnitsky's brutal killing has remained uninvestigated to this day. Red Notice is a searing exposé of the Russian authorities responsible for the murder, slicing deep into the heart of the Kremlin to uncover its sordid truths.
Bare with it and it will provide.
By Plamen on 08-01-19
Napoleon the Great
By: Andrew Roberts
Narrated by: Stephen Thorne
Napoleon Bonaparte lived one of the most extraordinary of all human lives. In the space of just 20 years, from October 1795, when as a young artillery captain he cleared the streets of Paris of insurrectionists, to his final defeat at the (horribly mismanaged) battle of Waterloo in June 1815, Napoleon transformed France and Europe. After seizing power in a coup d'état, he ended the corruption and incompetence into which the revolution had descended.
Comprehensive and engaging book
By Garym213 on 27-12-16
Worth Dying For
The Power and Politics of Flags
By: Tim Marshall
Narrated by: Ric Jerom
When you see your nation's flag fluttering in the breeze, what do you feel? For thousands of years flags have represented our hopes and dreams. We wave them. Burn them. March under their colours. And still, in the 21st century, we die for them. Flags fly at the UN, on the Arab street, from front porches in Texas. They represent the politics of high power as well as the politics of the mob.
meh!
By mr r d eggels on 18-05-18
Bloomsbury presents The Anarchy by William Dalrymple, read by Sid Sagar.
The top five sunday times best seller.
One of Barack Obama's best books of 2019.
Longlisted for The Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction 2019.
A Financial Times, Observer, Daily Telegraph, Wall Street Journal and Times book of the year.
In 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. But the creation of this new government marked the moment that the East India Company ceased to be a conventional international trading corporation dealing in silks and spices and became something much more unusual: an aggressive colonial power in the guise of a multinational business. In less than four decades it had trained up a security force of around 200,000 men – twice the size of the British army – and had subdued an entire subcontinent, conquering first Bengal and finally, in 1803, the Mughal capital of Delhi itself. The Company's reach stretched until almost all of India south of the Himalayas was effectively ruled from a boardroom in London.
The Anarchy tells the remarkable story of how one of the world's most magnificent empires disintegrated and came to be replaced by a dangerously unregulated private company, based thousands of miles overseas in one small office, five windows wide and answerable only to its distant shareholders. In his most ambitious and riveting book to date, William Dalrymple tells the story of the East India Company as it has never been told before, unfolding a timely cautionary tale of the first global corporate power.
©2019 William Dalrymple (P)2019 Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
India Military Colonialism & Post-Colonialism
"Gloriously opulent...India is a sumptuous place. Telling its story properly demands lush language, not to mention sensitivity towards the country's passionate complexity. Dalrymple is a superb historian with a visceral understanding of India...A book of beauty." (Gerard DeGroot, The Times)
"Dalrymple is a superb historian with a visceral understanding of India...A book of beauty." (Gerard DeGroot, The Times)
"An energetic pageturner that marches from the counting house on to the battlefield, exploding patriotic myths along the way...Dalrymple's spirited, detailed telling will be reason enough for many readers to devour The Anarchy. But his more novel and arguably greater achievement lies in the way he places the company's rise in the turbulent political landscape of late Mughal India." (Maya Jasanoff, Guardian)
The Last Mughal
The Appeal
Healing Is the New High
The Taylor Turbochaser
What listeners say about The Anarchy
Interesting story spoilt by poor narration
I have never given up on an audio book before but gave up on this after about 3 hours. The narration is so poor that it makes the story line difficult to follow. Some of it is not the narrator's fault - who had the bright idea of reading out all the footnotes everytime there is a quotation from another writer? Everytime there is a mention of money (and given the subject that is frequently) he reads out the converstion into today' s money, that becomes maddening after a while.
But, in my view, the narrator is poor. He shows no empathy with the story he is reading and never varies the pace.
I am going to buy the book and read it as I am sure the story is interesting. Maybe the book deserves more than 3 stars but I have only listened to a portion of it.
Ms. Sheila A. Hyem Hunter
Ruined by Gabbling reader
I have long been a fan of William Dalrymple's books and have print copies of all but the present one which I hoped to enjoy as much as the previous ones by listening to the audio version. Alas, this has not been so. I value William Dalrymple's work for its detailed and meticulous research and the fact that the works are extremely dense in the sense that there is more information per sentence and per paragraph packed into each book than is usual. For this quality of densely-packed information, a more measured style of reading is, in my opinion anyway, obligatory if the poor listener is to be able to derive even a fraction of the information being presented. I appreciate that it has become a widespread phenomenon for the young to gabble - and to thus making their utterances completely incomprehensible to the listener. This is not important when it is their own utterances which cannot be heard. It is, however, of vital importance when the speed of delivery is such that the listener cannot hope to derive all the densely-packed meaning from sentences constructed with infinite care by a master of the written word such as William Dalrymple. I have no idea whether the reader of this book is young, and certainly clarity was not an issue, but the speed of delivery made it impossible for me to enjoy even the first chapter of this work. I gave up.
Wish it could have been better....
Whilst there are chapters to start with on EIC, the latter part of the book is all about the decline of the Mughals in particular tedious details of Sha Alam and his harem. The oft repeated present day fiscal values after sometime become monotonous. Mr Dalrymple seems to have skimmed over the rise and fall of Tippu who tormented the EIC, no end. The Company was inextricably linked with the affairs of Mysore and ensuing battles fought by Lord Cornwallis and Wellesley barely get a mention. There was true `Anarchy' in the Deccan which is largely missing. The book is mainly the story of Bengal and Delhi during the rise of the Company. Likewise, the Anglo-Maratha confrontations are superficially covered. I have read a better Dalrymple.
Audio-book:
One word: Excruciating. The author (Siddarth Sagar) presumably a second generation Asian could not or did not bother to get Indian names right. He only had to ask his elders at home, before he embarked on this project. This narrator is not alone in this foible. Audible MUST insist that readers do a bit of homework and engage with the relevant diaspora before tackling exotic words. The pronunciation of simple three syllable words like Yamuna, Marathas, Awadh amongst others was particularly agonizing. I believe that there is no excuse as he is an active thespian of our current times. There are sentences where words at the end get garbled which is frankly exasperating. Finally, which `Einstein' asked the narrator to mindlessly read out foot-notes and present day fiscal values which only deters the audience from appreciating the running story.
I am therefore returning the audio-book, sorry.
Amazing story, terrible recording
I loved the book.
There was clearly something badly wrong with the audio though. It deserves being re-recorded properly.
Interesting book.
Very interesting book, packed with information, but read at breakneck speed, which made it very hard to absorb the facts.
Buy it in print
I made it to the end but despite the beautiful Indian pronunciation, this epic tome was ruined by the kindergarten tone of the narrator. No feel for the text that made it just made it so many words and hard to follow (don't start me on the infuriating currency conversions) and I had to re-listen to great chunks of it. It really needs an accompanying pdf as the print version is full of interesting content.
I thought this was a very interesting book and very well read. I've seen some criticism of the narrator in other reviews but I thought he was very good. I have also seen some criticism of the book always converting monetary figures from the past into their modern day equivalences, but I didn't have a problem with this either, it helps to give some context to the amount being talked about.
excellent narrative ...
poor narration, largely due to mangled pronunciation of non-English nouns. The text itself flows smoothly and is a riveting listen.
The modern equivalencies
Really interesting tale, well told and full of interesting detail. However I nearly didn't get through it thanks to the authors insistence of converting money to the modern equivalencies at length every single time a sum was mentioned, this nearly drove me to distraction.
C. J. Cox
Good but quirky narrator
My only complaint is that the narrator mispronounces something or other, or places a strange emphasis on a word, regularly throughout the reading - I don't blame the performer, there should have been a studio director listening out and correcting him!
TexasVC
excellent book but awkward narration
I really loved the the book, but confused why the voice performer, Sid Sagar, horrendously mispronounced all of the South Asian names and places. Especially painful was his attempts to read Urdu poetry. For a book on South Asian history, a voice performer capable of pronouncing the local languages needs to be a requirement!
Fascinating but a little hard to follow on Audible
Really enjoyed this book. Contrary to popular belief, England did not colonize India; a private company did.
Might be better to read this one than listen to it. Hard to follow the people and place names without seeing them in print. At least for my ears.
Paul Ark
Great premise, wasted potential
Less a history of the East India Company, and more a history of India military history during the time of EIC's presence in India. Overwrought with pointless detail and irrelevant quotes & passages from historical letters and text, this book is a dry narrative of the history of various warlords in India during the 18th century, with the rise and fall of the EIC as context. Very short on analysis, and the implications of corporate imperialism. Great premise, but poor result and wasted potential.
A magnificent history and cautionary tale
A beautifully produced book with extraordinary color plates showing geographic scenes and contemporary art. It is a deep and learned dive into the history of the East India Company, very well written in an engaging and energetic style with much illustrative detail. The author does a fine job of balancing the amount of background detail needed to understand the context. He implies relevance to current times but does so with an appreciated subtlety.
The reader has a great narrative voice BUT mispronounces many words which is distracting.
Abandoned after 4 hours. Really wanted to like it. Loved the three other Darlymple history books I have read. Attributing it partly to the narrator who is flying through the words without seeming to understand what is being read, resulting in misplaced emphasis, like reading to children, exactly the opposite for this epic story. I think there is a good story here, but hard to follow. Might also be the nature of the book, anyway, doesn't make a good audiobook IMO but probably decent in book form if you take time checking out maps, looking up names, reading background etc.. not easy material for the uninitiated.
Michael Dawson
Superb, Authoritative
The review that complains about the performance is ignorant and exactly backwards. The reader is fluent in both English and Indian pronunciations, and does a mesmerizing job of making this hugely important story hum right along. The writer, meanwhile, clearly knows this topic and is able to blend serious sociological comments with gripping, well-told history.
Poor pronunciation
I am surprised to see that the narrator, Sid Sagar, read history at Bristol. I have never heard plague pronounced plag, people often get Samuel Pepys(Peeps) name wrong but honestly Worchester for Worcester. Spoiled the book for me. Presumably Mr. Dalrymple's editor is responsible.
Excellent, just excellent
The narration was perfect. He could properly pronounce the native names. He also could bring you into all of the scenes, all of the struggles, and of the beauty of India, and horror of war. I was moved at the effect a corporation could have, and how it relates to matters of this day. I may listen to this book again.
Fascinating, flawed
This book purports to study the rise of the first corporate multinational and its foundational role in the rapacious British colonization of India. I was expecting a thorough study of the structures and functions of the corporate beast, a social institutional economic history. But the meat of the book is a more traditional narrative history of battles and personalities between the EIC and the "anarchy" of waning Mughal rule. Since I am ignorant about this too, I enjoyed the read. Just expected more socio-economic history.
Neil Wilkinson
Very very well done.
If you've ever wondered what happened to General Cornwallis after the Battle of Yorktown . . .