Edinburgh Book Festival round-up: William Dalrymple and Anita Anand | Maggie O’Farrell
Co-hosts of the Empire podcast William Dalrymple and Anita Anand had some fascinating insights to share about modern day mega corporations in their historical context on the final day of the Book Festival, while Land author Maggie O’Farrell was keeping her cards close to her chest, writes David Robinson.
“Corporations,” said Lord High Chancellor Edward Thurlow in 1788, “have neither bodies to be punished nor souls to be condemned. They may therefore do as they like.” And if you think that’s a boring, irrelevant quote, you clearly weren’t at the event at which William Dalrymple and Anita Anand lit up the last night of the Edinburgh Book festival.
One of the reasons the Empire podcast they co-host has been such a success (100 million downloads in four years) is the panache with which they bring the past to life. Only this decade, said Dalrymple, has the East India Company (EIC) - the subject of Thurlow’s complaint - any comparable corporate equivalent. And though their event included everything from Merle Oberon’s secret life, Britain’s responsibility for the Palestine conflict, the importance of ayahs, and Dalrymple’s discovery of his Indian ancestors, it is the East India Company’s size, Scottishness and ruthlessness that intrigued the most - at least those of us who didn’t realise why it may also have cost Britain its American colonies.
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Size first. True, the EIC’s 200,000-strong private army was twice the size of Britain’s, but the whole operation was run by 35 employees in a London property no bigger than the Georgian House in Charlotte Square. The comparison Dalrymple drew was with Nvidia, which has 40,000 employees and a market capitalisation more than the whole of Africa. “Apple’s is more than the entire GDP of the UK’s, Alphabet’s is bigger than Germany,” he said. “These corporations now, for the first time, have power in the way that the East India Company had to warp the democratic process. And the tech firms have one lobbyist for every two members of Congress.”
Scots, Dalrymple said, were rabid imperialists. If there were 25 EIC men round a table at the Delhi Residency, perhaps a quarter might be English but more than half would be Scots. This, along with Glasgow’s slave trade, was one of the reasons Scotland shot up from being second poorest in Europe in 1700 to second or third richest two centuries later.
Because the EIC ran India entirely for profit, grain hadn’t been set aside in the event of famine, so when one happened in Bengal in 1772, a fifth of its population died. The EIC's share price slumped, causing a banking crisis, which led to the company successfully lobbying Westminster to change the law and let it sell tea on the American market. Which led to the Boston Tea Party. The rest, as they say, is history.
Land, Maggie O’Farrell’s “most ambitious and most personal novel yet”, is set in the wake of another famine. “The Great Irish Famine sits in the middle of the nineteenth century like a huge dark storm cloud,” she said. “For almost 100 years nothing was written about it: as [critic] Terry Eagleton said, its enormity pushes you to the edge of inarticulacy.”
“What interested me was what happened to the people who survived and stayed. How does a population pick themselves up and carry on?” Or, specifically, what would life have been like for her own great-great-great grandfather and his son, who helped the British Army compile OS maps in 1850s and 1860s Ireland?
O’Farrell refused to be drawn on what parts are true to the historical record and what are fictionalised. Nor would she say which Irish counties it draws on most, or which “exciting” star is being lined up for a key role in the screenplay she is writing. Come to that, she also kept schtum on what her next novel will be about or even whether it will be set in the past or present.
No matter. We’ll just have to wait. Another Edinburgh book festival will be along before you know it, and with luck both O’Farrell and Dalrymple - North Berwick’s finest - will be back.
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