'Gorgeous, spellbinding and important' Sunday Times

'Rampaging, brilliant, passionate history' Wall Street Journal

'Magnificent … Dalrymple has uncovered sources never used before' Guardian

'Vivid … unmatched … revolutionary … humane' Sunday Telegraph

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From multi-award-winning and bestselling historian William Dalrymple, a four-book collection chronicling the extraordinary story of the rise and fall of the East India Company.**

We still talk about the British conquering India, but that phrase disguises a much more sinister reality. For it was not the British government that began seizing chunks of India in the mid-eighteenth century, but a dangerously unregulated private company headquartered in one small office, five windows wide, in the city of London.

Bringing together two decades of meticulous research and masterful narration, 'The Company Quartet' tells the remarkable story of how the Mughal empire, which then generated just under half the world's wealth, disintegrated and came to be replaced by the first global corporate power: the East India Company.

William Dalrymple's epic, bestselling and multi-award-winning histories are now available in this magnificent paperback box set, presented in a stylish slipcase. Comprised of four individual books – The Anarchy, White Mughals, Return of a King**and***The Last Mughal*– this essential collection spans over two hundred years of tumultuous colonial history, covert political machinations and bloody resistance.

PRIZES & AWARDS:

Winner of the Wolfson Prize for History

Winner of the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize

Winner of the Hemingway Prize

Winner of the Ryzard Kapuscinski Prize

Winner of the Vodafone/Crossword Book award

Winner of the Scottish Book of the Year Prize

Winner of the Arthur Ross Medal of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Three times longlisted and once shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford

Winner of the Sykes Medal of the Royal Asiatic Society

Winner of the President's Medal of the British Academy

Finalist for the Cundil Prize for History