New Delhi, May 12 (IANS): From multi-award-winning and bestselling historian William Dalrymple comes a four-book collection chronicling the thrilling 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" (Bloomsbury) tells the remarkable story of how the magnificent 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.

William Dalrymple is one of Britain's great historians and the bestselling author of the Wolfson Prize-winning "White Mughals", "The Last Mughal", which won the Duff Cooper Prize, and the Hemingway and Kapuscinski Prize-winning "Return of a King".

A frequent broadcaster, he has written and presented three television series, one of which won the Grierson Award for Best Documentary Series at BAFTA. He has also won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award, the Foreign Correspondent of the Year at the FPA Media Awards, and been awarded five honorary doctorates.

He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the Royal Asiatic Society and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and has held visiting fellowships at Princeton and Brown.

He writes regularly for the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker and the Guardian. In 2018 he was presented with the prestigious President's Medal by the British Academy for his outstanding literary achievement and for co-founding the Jaipur Literature Festival. Dalrymple lives with his wife and three children on a farm outside Delhi.