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The Corporation That Changed the World: How the East India Company Shaped the Modern Multinational
This is the history of the East India Company and its enduring legacy as a corporation, dealing in exploitation and violence.The English East India Company was the mother of the modern multinational. Its trading empire encircled the globe, importing Asian luxuries such as spices, textiles and teas. But it also conquered much of India with its private army and broke open China's markets with opium. The Company’s practices shocked its contemporaries and still reverberate today. This expanded edition explores how the four forces of scale, technology, finance and regulation drove its spectacular rise and fall. This story provides vital lessons on both the role of corporations in world history and the steps required to make global business accountable today.
282 pages, Kindle Edition
First published July 20, 2006
About the author
Nick Robins
39 books13 followersNick Robins is a geologist by profession, is acknowledged for setting maritime history within the bigger social and political picture.
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October 4, 2018
كتاب رائع عن واحدة من أشهر الشركات في العالم وأسوأها وهي شركة الهند الشرقية، والتي قامت بانشائها المملكة المتحدة في أوج مدها الاستعماري لتتولي الكثير من العمليات الاقتصادية في المستعمرات البريطانية المختلفة
April 2, 2014
شركة الشر الشرقية! او شركة الهند الشرقية!
لم أتوقع ان يكون هناك بشر بهذه الأخلاق! التجار المسلمون بدأو تجارتهم في القرن الثالث عشر ميلاد مع بلاد البنغال وملايوي ( ماليزيا حاليا) وإندونيسيا جاءوا أساساً كتجار لكن حسن تعاملهم جذب الهندوس والبوذيين من السكان الأصليين الى الاسلام وبقوا حتى هذه اللحظة يمثلون أكبر الجماعات العرقية الاسلامية.
في القرن السابع عشر تأسست شركة الهند الشرقية الانجليزية بغرض التجارة، لكنهم بدأو تجارتهم بسفن تجارية حربية! لم يكتفوا بالتجارة مع أغنى مناطق العالم بذالك الوقت ( البنغال) ولكن أرادوا احتكار هذه التجارة مع أوروبا اولا. ثم احتلال البلاد وإجبار السكان الأصليين للعمل لمصلحتهم!
يقول المؤلف : في ذالك الوقت لم يكن هناك ما يحتاجه البنغاليين من المنتجات البريطانية سوى الفضة. بالمقابل شغف الأوروبيون عموما بالمنسوجات القطنية الهندية و البهارات. لذالك قررت شركة الهند الشرقية ان توقف تحوّل الثروة من أوروبا الى اسيا. احتلت الشركة اقليم البنغال وأصبح من كان يتاجر معها صار يشتغل بالسخرة عندها. فلا غرابة أن تضرب الهند خلال الحكم بريطاني ٣٤ مجاعة. احد هذه المجاعات قتلت ملايين البنغاليين. بينما لم تتأثر أرباح الشركة من هذه المجاعة! يقول جواهر لال نهرو:" ان أقوى مؤشر على الأذى الذي أصاب الهند بسبب التأثير المشترك للشركة والحكم البريطاني هو أن " تلك الأجزاء من الهند التي ظلت أطول من غيرها تحت الحكم البريطاني هي الافقر حتى يومنا هذا"
لم تكتفي الشركة بهذا ولكن لكي تعوض الميزان التجاري بذالك الوقت مع الصين بسبب تجارة الشاي. بداو بزراعة الأفيون في المناطق الخاضعة لهم بالبنغال وتهريبه الى الصين! وعندما تجرأت الصين وصادرة الأفيون المهرب. أعلنت بريطانيا الحرب على الصين، ولم توقف عدوانهاالا بعدما وافقت الصين على تعويض الشركة والسماح ببيع الأفيون في الصين!
أي جنون وأي جشع كان يقود هؤلاء البشر!
اخيراً الكتاب ينقصه التسلسل الزمني للأحداث. ويقفز بين الحوادث بشكل مربكة. ولكن لم يمنعني هذا من الاستمتاع بقراءته.
لم أتوقع ان يكون هناك بشر بهذه الأخلاق! التجار المسلمون بدأو تجارتهم في القرن الثالث عشر ميلاد مع بلاد البنغال وملايوي ( ماليزيا حاليا) وإندونيسيا جاءوا أساساً كتجار لكن حسن تعاملهم جذب الهندوس والبوذيين من السكان الأصليين الى الاسلام وبقوا حتى هذه اللحظة يمثلون أكبر الجماعات العرقية الاسلامية.
في القرن السابع عشر تأسست شركة الهند الشرقية الانجليزية بغرض التجارة، لكنهم بدأو تجارتهم بسفن تجارية حربية! لم يكتفوا بالتجارة مع أغنى مناطق العالم بذالك الوقت ( البنغال) ولكن أرادوا احتكار هذه التجارة مع أوروبا اولا. ثم احتلال البلاد وإجبار السكان الأصليين للعمل لمصلحتهم!
يقول المؤلف : في ذالك الوقت لم يكن هناك ما يحتاجه البنغاليين من المنتجات البريطانية سوى الفضة. بالمقابل شغف الأوروبيون عموما بالمنسوجات القطنية الهندية و البهارات. لذالك قررت شركة الهند الشرقية ان توقف تحوّل الثروة من أوروبا الى اسيا. احتلت الشركة اقليم البنغال وأصبح من كان يتاجر معها صار يشتغل بالسخرة عندها. فلا غرابة أن تضرب الهند خلال الحكم بريطاني ٣٤ مجاعة. احد هذه المجاعات قتلت ملايين البنغاليين. بينما لم تتأثر أرباح الشركة من هذه المجاعة! يقول جواهر لال نهرو:" ان أقوى مؤشر على الأذى الذي أصاب الهند بسبب التأثير المشترك للشركة والحكم البريطاني هو أن " تلك الأجزاء من الهند التي ظلت أطول من غيرها تحت الحكم البريطاني هي الافقر حتى يومنا هذا"
لم تكتفي الشركة بهذا ولكن لكي تعوض الميزان التجاري بذالك الوقت مع الصين بسبب تجارة الشاي. بداو بزراعة الأفيون في المناطق الخاضعة لهم بالبنغال وتهريبه الى الصين! وعندما تجرأت الصين وصادرة الأفيون المهرب. أعلنت بريطانيا الحرب على الصين، ولم توقف عدوانهاالا بعدما وافقت الصين على تعويض الشركة والسماح ببيع الأفيون في الصين!
أي جنون وأي جشع كان يقود هؤلاء البشر!
اخيراً الكتاب ينقصه التسلسل الزمني للأحداث. ويقفز بين الحوادث بشكل مربكة. ولكن لم يمنعني هذا من الاستمتاع بقراءته.
February 25, 2015
This is a fabulously hit and miss book.
The good:
* Probably the most highlighted book I currently own -- long stretches of the book, especially on Plassay and Clive, are pure gold.
* Incredibly well sources and referenced.
* Index and bibliography is amazing.
* Great detail on incredibly fine minutae, which I adore out of a history book.
* Hilariously opinionated.
The bad:
* Terribly organized. The chapters are in some kind of linear order but the book itself careens like a car out of control back and forth through time. I would read a paragraph and go "what century was this in?"
* Expects the reader already to be an expert on John Company. It just leaves out various and crucial details like who some of these people were and why we care -- it just is like "And X did Blah blah terrible thing."
* The last chapter is totally worthless.
* Can be a real dry read in places.
So if you're doing heavy research on the British East India Company yes, you should add this to your reference library. Absolutely. If this is your first book on the subject, more intro and readable books exist.
The good:
* Probably the most highlighted book I currently own -- long stretches of the book, especially on Plassay and Clive, are pure gold.
* Incredibly well sources and referenced.
* Index and bibliography is amazing.
* Great detail on incredibly fine minutae, which I adore out of a history book.
* Hilariously opinionated.
The bad:
* Terribly organized. The chapters are in some kind of linear order but the book itself careens like a car out of control back and forth through time. I would read a paragraph and go "what century was this in?"
* Expects the reader already to be an expert on John Company. It just leaves out various and crucial details like who some of these people were and why we care -- it just is like "And X did Blah blah terrible thing."
* The last chapter is totally worthless.
* Can be a real dry read in places.
So if you're doing heavy research on the British East India Company yes, you should add this to your reference library. Absolutely. If this is your first book on the subject, more intro and readable books exist.
April 5, 2015
كتاب مدعّم بالمصادر والمراجع يفضح ماقامت به شركة الهند الشرقية الذراع الإقتصادي للمملكة البريطانية أثناء استعمارها للهند من تجارتها في البشر الى تجارة الإفيون وتصديره الى الصين، أعجبني أن غالب المعلومات والمقولات التي ذكرت في الكتاب مرصودة بمراجع يستطيع القارئ التحقق منها
February 21, 2019
Better than Game of Thrones.
April 15, 2014
Eh. This was tough as I really wanted to like it but ultimately I discovered that I wanted a book about the colonizing effect the East India Company had on India but really, this was a book that just sort of bounced across dozens of years discussing only the shady and exploitative business dealings. Sure, that's somewhat interesting, but scant attention is given to the Indians. The most moving part is just that; a description of the locals who cut off their thumbs rather than weave in near slave labor. Again, the business and political aspect is interesting, but the book felt like it was only telling 1/3 of the story really.
March 14, 2015
This is a great critical introduction to what the Company was, what it did, and how it relates to the corporate malfeasance we are so familiar with today.
Modern too, its insatiable greed and the split between this shareholder demand for profits and responsibility for any of the consequences.
Essentially this is the story of how the East India Company forced this to change in search of profit. It is a harrowing story intertwined with English history in ways that this book doesn't always tease out but bookmarks for us. For example, the literary figures who worked there, were surely influenced by their work even when not being explicit about it. Like Charles Lamb, Thomas Love Peacock, James and John Stuart Mill, James Bentham. On James Mill in particular there is this awesome anecdote:
This also connects to other histories of Empire, like one of those that fascinates me most -- the evangelical project to settle Sierra Leone (read an early account here in relation to the Clapham Sect, another in relation to other trading companies here, and a later more fuller one here). I had as yet only ever heard of it as a way to resettle free Blacks from London to Africa, but here it is presented very briefly through the lens of the Lascars in London, noted because John Lemon, 29-year-old lascar and hairdresser and cook from Bengal married an Englishwoman named Elizabeth before they set off as part of the Sierra Leone expedition, surviving the passage but from there their future is unknown (21).
That is an aside however, a trail to follow. It's almost a relief from the overwhelming anger and sadness this tale of greed inspires. Structural greed, as it's three main flaws accoridng to Robins (and these remain unchanged today) are these, which lead to what can only be called villainy in the search for 'immediate and excessive returns':
Executives and shareholders can pursue own profit to the detriment of all others -- there is no higher purpose of the corporation.
Limitation of liability frees shareholders and to a great extent executives of responsibility for their actions in the pursuit of these profits.
The separation of ownership and control allows executives to pursue profit and exploit the company for their own ends.
Within this greater framework of greed and exploitation, individuals were also on the look out to make their own fortunes:
What separated this form of corporation from the present one is primarily the risk and the power. Because the risks were, of course, much higher -- the round trip from India to London could take up to two years and there was limited communication or control possible. The East India Company also had to continually renew its royal charter, which required regularly justifying its existence outside of its investors at regular intervals.
On this other hand this royal charter allowed it to mint coin in oversees holdings, exercise justice, and the right to wage war -- thus their army changed from private security to a tool for land acquisition. Robins quotes Niels Steengard as saying -- 'the principal export of the pre-industrial Europe to the rest of the world was violence.' (44)
The history of the EIC is this its efforts to maximise its power, and to minimise risks and controls. Its impact on the monarchy was one example -- after the Glorious Revolution brought William of Orange and Mary to the throne, commercial rights were high on the list of priorities in the minds of the British elite in drawing up the 'unprecedented Bill of Rights that would bind the new monarchs' (52).
This was matched by a long-standing and complex web of corruption and bribery in the interests of the company. Post 1688 it centered around the figure of Governor Sir Thomas Cooke, subject of a special inquiry. The sums are staggering for the time: £107, 013 paid out in 'special services', £80,468 to win a new charter. Another £90,000 used by Cooke to buy stock to shore up the chartering process.
A number of fortunes were made in autocratic bids to gain more power and profit -- that of director Sir Josiah Child ('Perhaps more than any other of the Company's executives before or since, Josiah Child had demonstrated where an appetite for corporate power could lead' (57)). The Pitt fortunes emerged, of course, from the 'Pitt Diamond', 410 carat rock obtained by Thomas Pitt, governor of Madras.
That would be another interesting distraction to follow. More inspiring perhaps, in terms of distractions, is the brief mention of a weavers' insurrection in 1696, and their march on the East India House after 5,000 marched on Parliament against imports of Indian cloth. Later they ransacked and threatened homes of Company officials and very nearly sacked the Company storerooms. In view of what happens to weavers, you wish they had.
because we are about to come to the most horrifying period of the EIC's fairly horrifying history. The period in which it caused Bengal to go from one of the richest areas in the world -- hard to imagine today because it continues to be what the EIC made of it -- one of the poorest.
The Battle of Plassey, 23 June 1757, is the turning point. Robert Clive attacked and defeated the nawab of Bengal, capturing Calcutta and thus 'enabling the Company to achieve its long desired monopoly over the export trade, expanding into the internal market and appropriating the public revenues of Bengal for its own benefit' (77).
One estimate states that in the decade after Plassey, Bengal lost 2/3 of revenues.
Bengal's weavers were devastated -- they were not rich but good evidence shows they lived and worked under much better standards of living than the weavers in England, with more control over their production terms and conditions. Any power they held over their labour was smashed. Their history says they cut off their own hands so they couldn't be forced to work under the conditions demanded by the company. Rather than exporting cloth, Bengal began to export cotton and import cloth, devastating industry and all the lives that depended on it.
A new era of exploitation with impunity became the rule: 'A new catchphrase entered the language -- "a lass and a lakh [a lakh being Rs100,000] a day--to describe the lifestyle of the Company's executives in Bengal' (86).
They did not just devastate weaving, but all other systems of support and livelihood. When famine hit they continued exporting grain, and raised their taxes. I had not, until recently, even heard of this famine, this terrible murder of millions of people in 1770 (ish). Governor Warren Hastings gave the number of 10 million, a third of the population of Bengal. A hundred years later, another famine:
Robins writes:
which seems to me to be a bit of an understatement, a bit missing the point perhaps. Besides, it depends how you define mismanagement, the point of a corporation is to make a profit, and the EIC continued to make a profit through these years, difficult as they found it. This is the damning indictment of our times.
Robins then points out the ideological inconsistencies of corporations and their neoliberal supporters -- but they are a bundle of inconsistencies. Still, it is good to remember:
And through all of it, there is a particular ridiculousness and in-fighting:
There is the spectre of Edmund Burke arguing for the Indian people in the trial of Governor Warren Hastings -- and I do love that he was brought to trial. I also appreciate this in Burke:
But I haven't even started on the account of China yet, the stealing of their secrets of tea production, the enforced opium trade through war and smuggling. And slowly the EIC was losing its corporate character, though none of its greed.
If anything good can be said of them it was that they were entirely secular, but with the increased blending of public and private interests this was to change. Driven through by Wilberforce:
These changes solidified by the need for military force after the uprising of 1857:
Robins later mentions the Company's practice of blasting captured rebels from cannons as lampooned in a cartoon in Punch. Such caricatures only work utilising common knowledge, and it is not mocking the practice itself, rather the Company's bungling and mismanagement and corruption. This is the brutal experience of conquest and Empire that goes unspoken by Colonel Pargiter in Virginia Woolf's The Years. I wonder where else it lurks, all the places I never imagined from the ways in which history and literature are taught so as to hide it.
But thus we come to the end of the EIC as company, and onto India as part of the British Empire. Robins states:
A key inversion I think, but I am not sure what else I think about it, what it might mean for how Empire is both narrated and understood. I don't know enough yet. I will ponder. By 1858 the Company is done, the Crown has negotiated a long process to buy out stock in a structured deal that makes sure no one loses money.
To finish this very long review you can read more here.
Established on a cold New Year's Eve, 1600, England's East India Company is the mother of the modern corporation. In its more than two and a half centuries of existence, it bridged the mercantilist world of chartered monopolies and the industrial age of corporations accountable solely to shareholders. The Company's establishment by royal charter, its monopoly of all trade between Britain and Asia and its semi-sovereign privileges to rule territories and raise armies certainly mark it out as a corporate institution from another time. Yet in its financing, structures of governance and business dynamics, the Company was undeniably modern (5).
Modern too, its insatiable greed and the split between this shareholder demand for profits and responsibility for any of the consequences.
From Roman times, Europe had always been Asia's commercial supplicant, shipping out gold ad silver in return for spices, textiles and other luxury goods. European traders were attracted to the East for its wealth and sophistication at a time when the western economy was a fraction of the size of Asia's. And for the first 150 years, the Company had to repeat this practice, as there was almost nothing that England could export that the East wanted to buy (7).
Essentially this is the story of how the East India Company forced this to change in search of profit. It is a harrowing story intertwined with English history in ways that this book doesn't always tease out but bookmarks for us. For example, the literary figures who worked there, were surely influenced by their work even when not being explicit about it. Like Charles Lamb, Thomas Love Peacock, James and John Stuart Mill, James Bentham. On James Mill in particular there is this awesome anecdote:
One account describes how "when particularly inspired he used, before sitting down to his desk, to not only strip himself of his coat and waistcoat, but of his trousers, and so set to work, alternately striding up and down the room and writing at great speed." (189)
This also connects to other histories of Empire, like one of those that fascinates me most -- the evangelical project to settle Sierra Leone (read an early account here in relation to the Clapham Sect, another in relation to other trading companies here, and a later more fuller one here). I had as yet only ever heard of it as a way to resettle free Blacks from London to Africa, but here it is presented very briefly through the lens of the Lascars in London, noted because John Lemon, 29-year-old lascar and hairdresser and cook from Bengal married an Englishwoman named Elizabeth before they set off as part of the Sierra Leone expedition, surviving the passage but from there their future is unknown (21).
That is an aside however, a trail to follow. It's almost a relief from the overwhelming anger and sadness this tale of greed inspires. Structural greed, as it's three main flaws accoridng to Robins (and these remain unchanged today) are these, which lead to what can only be called villainy in the search for 'immediate and excessive returns':
Executives and shareholders can pursue own profit to the detriment of all others -- there is no higher purpose of the corporation.
Limitation of liability frees shareholders and to a great extent executives of responsibility for their actions in the pursuit of these profits.
The separation of ownership and control allows executives to pursue profit and exploit the company for their own ends.
Within this greater framework of greed and exploitation, individuals were also on the look out to make their own fortunes:
For its executives, the purpose of a career with the Company was to achieve a 'competence', making enough money to be able to retire and adopt the conspicuous consumption patterns of the British landed gentry. This could bot be achieved by saving from the salaries received from the Company, which barely covered living expenses. As a result, the ambitious Company man had to use his position a a platform for patronage and private trade (29).
What separated this form of corporation from the present one is primarily the risk and the power. Because the risks were, of course, much higher -- the round trip from India to London could take up to two years and there was limited communication or control possible. The East India Company also had to continually renew its royal charter, which required regularly justifying its existence outside of its investors at regular intervals.
On this other hand this royal charter allowed it to mint coin in oversees holdings, exercise justice, and the right to wage war -- thus their army changed from private security to a tool for land acquisition. Robins quotes Niels Steengard as saying -- 'the principal export of the pre-industrial Europe to the rest of the world was violence.' (44)
The history of the EIC is this its efforts to maximise its power, and to minimise risks and controls. Its impact on the monarchy was one example -- after the Glorious Revolution brought William of Orange and Mary to the throne, commercial rights were high on the list of priorities in the minds of the British elite in drawing up the 'unprecedented Bill of Rights that would bind the new monarchs' (52).
This was matched by a long-standing and complex web of corruption and bribery in the interests of the company. Post 1688 it centered around the figure of Governor Sir Thomas Cooke, subject of a special inquiry. The sums are staggering for the time: £107, 013 paid out in 'special services', £80,468 to win a new charter. Another £90,000 used by Cooke to buy stock to shore up the chartering process.
A number of fortunes were made in autocratic bids to gain more power and profit -- that of director Sir Josiah Child ('Perhaps more than any other of the Company's executives before or since, Josiah Child had demonstrated where an appetite for corporate power could lead' (57)). The Pitt fortunes emerged, of course, from the 'Pitt Diamond', 410 carat rock obtained by Thomas Pitt, governor of Madras.
That would be another interesting distraction to follow. More inspiring perhaps, in terms of distractions, is the brief mention of a weavers' insurrection in 1696, and their march on the East India House after 5,000 marched on Parliament against imports of Indian cloth. Later they ransacked and threatened homes of Company officials and very nearly sacked the Company storerooms. In view of what happens to weavers, you wish they had.
because we are about to come to the most horrifying period of the EIC's fairly horrifying history. The period in which it caused Bengal to go from one of the richest areas in the world -- hard to imagine today because it continues to be what the EIC made of it -- one of the poorest.
The Battle of Plassey, 23 June 1757, is the turning point. Robert Clive attacked and defeated the nawab of Bengal, capturing Calcutta and thus 'enabling the Company to achieve its long desired monopoly over the export trade, expanding into the internal market and appropriating the public revenues of Bengal for its own benefit' (77).
One estimate states that in the decade after Plassey, Bengal lost 2/3 of revenues.
Bengal's weavers were devastated -- they were not rich but good evidence shows they lived and worked under much better standards of living than the weavers in England, with more control over their production terms and conditions. Any power they held over their labour was smashed. Their history says they cut off their own hands so they couldn't be forced to work under the conditions demanded by the company. Rather than exporting cloth, Bengal began to export cotton and import cloth, devastating industry and all the lives that depended on it.
A new era of exploitation with impunity became the rule: 'A new catchphrase entered the language -- "a lass and a lakh [a lakh being Rs100,000] a day--to describe the lifestyle of the Company's executives in Bengal' (86).
They did not just devastate weaving, but all other systems of support and livelihood. When famine hit they continued exporting grain, and raised their taxes. I had not, until recently, even heard of this famine, this terrible murder of millions of people in 1770 (ish). Governor Warren Hastings gave the number of 10 million, a third of the population of Bengal. A hundred years later, another famine:
Working in the midst of the terrible 1877 famine that he estimated had cost another 10 million lives, Cornelius Walford calculated that in the 120 years of British rule there had been 34 famines in India, compared with only 17 recorded famines in the entire previous two millenia (93).
Robins writes:
The Bengal Famine stands out as perhaps one of the worst examples of corporate mismanagement in history (97).
which seems to me to be a bit of an understatement, a bit missing the point perhaps. Besides, it depends how you define mismanagement, the point of a corporation is to make a profit, and the EIC continued to make a profit through these years, difficult as they found it. This is the damning indictment of our times.
Robins then points out the ideological inconsistencies of corporations and their neoliberal supporters -- but they are a bundle of inconsistencies. Still, it is good to remember:
Reading Smith afresh...it is shocking how his penetrating critique of the corporation has been so comprehensively suppressed. Nothing of his scepticism of corporations, their pursuit of monopoly and their faulty system of governance, enters into the speeches of today's neo-liberal advocates. Promoting his vision of free trade, they conveniently ignore that this can only be achieved with steadfast curbs on corporate power (119).
And through all of it, there is a particular ridiculousness and in-fighting:
General John Clavering, Philip Francis and George Monson--arrived in Calcutta in October 1774, tensions arose. Instead of the 21-gun salute they were expecting, Hastings had organised only 17 cannon to fire as they landed (126).
There is the spectre of Edmund Burke arguing for the Indian people in the trial of Governor Warren Hastings -- and I do love that he was brought to trial. I also appreciate this in Burke:
'Rather than viewing history as a civilisational contest between primitive and progressive nations, Burke believed that each society had its own intrinsic value, which should not be sacrificed to the interests of profit or power (141)
But I haven't even started on the account of China yet, the stealing of their secrets of tea production, the enforced opium trade through war and smuggling. And slowly the EIC was losing its corporate character, though none of its greed.
Military victory alone was insufficient to restore British fortunes in India. A new regime had to be introduced to confront the extreme oddities created by a sharehold-owned corporation ruling over tens of millions of people. The reforms of the 1770s and 1780s had punctured the Company's autonomy as a business, and the 1784 India Act had introduced a two-tier system -- a 'double government' -- with the Company maintaining a facade of authority, behind which the state pulled the strings through the Board of Control (173).
If anything good can be said of them it was that they were entirely secular, but with the increased blending of public and private interests this was to change. Driven through by Wilberforce:
After years of campaigning, Wilberforce and others managed to include in the 1813 charter Act provisions for the establihsmnet of a Church of England bishopric in India, as well as the removal of the Company's longstanding ban on missionary activity (182).
These changes solidified by the need for military force after the uprising of 1857:
When the company retook Kanpur...where rebel troops had slaughtered European women and children, captured sepoys were made to lick the blood from the floors before being hanged. Summary executions became the norm. According to one officer, "we hold court-martials on horseback, and every nigger we meet with we either string up or shoot." The Company's recapture of Delhi was followed by systematic sacking, and the surviving inhabitants were tured out of its gates to starve (195).
Robins later mentions the Company's practice of blasting captured rebels from cannons as lampooned in a cartoon in Punch. Such caricatures only work utilising common knowledge, and it is not mocking the practice itself, rather the Company's bungling and mismanagement and corruption. This is the brutal experience of conquest and Empire that goes unspoken by Colonel Pargiter in Virginia Woolf's The Years. I wonder where else it lurks, all the places I never imagined from the ways in which history and literature are taught so as to hide it.
But thus we come to the end of the EIC as company, and onto India as part of the British Empire. Robins states:
The Company is often regarded as an inevitable stepping-stone to the British Raj. Instead, the British Empire in India is better thought of as the product of the Company's failure (196).
A key inversion I think, but I am not sure what else I think about it, what it might mean for how Empire is both narrated and understood. I don't know enough yet. I will ponder. By 1858 the Company is done, the Crown has negotiated a long process to buy out stock in a structured deal that makes sure no one loses money.
To finish this very long review you can read more here.
March 20, 2019
This is a history of the British East India Company, a corporate biography if you will. The author is a Professor of Practice at the London School of Economics and a prolific naval and maritime historian. I do not know the detailed history of the firm but the book reads as a careful study of the firm by a knowledgeable author and a superb writer.
The history of the East India Company is tied together with the heart of the British Imperial experience in India. While the firm dates from the early 17th century, it becomes most distinctive after 1757 when it becomes the ruler of India exercising primary governmental authority on behalf of the British Crown, including the exercise of military force, up through the commencement of direct British rules under the Raj following the Sepoy Mutiny/Indian Rebellion of 1857-58. So it is a corporation that exercised governmental authority of a huge land area and large population. Think about that - the rule of India outsourced to a profit making firm. This was the direction that the British Empire took after the loss of the American colonies and the rule of India was arguably the central foundation of the global reach of the British Empire under Victoria and into the 20th century. That is some company - there may be a few similar cases, such as De Beers, but not many.
This book is filled with interesting story lines and profiles. The firm was central to the rise of trade in tea, opium, and textiles for Britain. These were developments that shaped the history of India and China through various wars and campaigns of conquest as well as the British industrial revolution and subsequent dominance in global trade. The characters involved in the firm are the major actors in British politics and intellectual life at the time.
The history of the firm is tied up with triumphs and catastrophes. Recent histories of imperialism have not been kind to the British, with a few exceptions, and that comes across in Mr. Robins book. Fortunes were made, but this was hardly free market dynamics rather than the workings of a monopoly that plundered the colonies. The section on the 1770 Bengal famine is especially stark, although that was not the only Indian famine under British rule.
Perhaps the strongest part of the book is its treatment of corruption and “agency problems” in the management of the firm. These are huge problems in policy making towards corporations today and they were present from the start with the East India Company. On the one hand, shareholders and managers wanted a return on their investment and efforts. On the other hand, the lack of accountability to corporate standards coupled with the vast opportunities for self-dealing by agents of the firm made corruption certain. The parts of India that were under the rule of the firm for the longest time suffered the greatest economic impact and remain economically impaired to this day.
It is hard to read this history and not take note of the real deficiencies of corporate governance, the hundreds of millions of people who were affected by it, and the lasting consequences it has had in international politics and economics. No wonder there is such opposition to globalization today.
Robins also argues that the history of the East India Company has implications for corporate governance problems among contemporary corporations and he provides a nice discussion with lots of references for those wishing to read more.
This is not just of history of corporate excess but it is there and must be noted. For anyone wishing to learn more about the ways in which political economy has developed in India, Pakistan, and China, this book is highly informative, well-written, and should be required reading.
The history of the East India Company is tied together with the heart of the British Imperial experience in India. While the firm dates from the early 17th century, it becomes most distinctive after 1757 when it becomes the ruler of India exercising primary governmental authority on behalf of the British Crown, including the exercise of military force, up through the commencement of direct British rules under the Raj following the Sepoy Mutiny/Indian Rebellion of 1857-58. So it is a corporation that exercised governmental authority of a huge land area and large population. Think about that - the rule of India outsourced to a profit making firm. This was the direction that the British Empire took after the loss of the American colonies and the rule of India was arguably the central foundation of the global reach of the British Empire under Victoria and into the 20th century. That is some company - there may be a few similar cases, such as De Beers, but not many.
This book is filled with interesting story lines and profiles. The firm was central to the rise of trade in tea, opium, and textiles for Britain. These were developments that shaped the history of India and China through various wars and campaigns of conquest as well as the British industrial revolution and subsequent dominance in global trade. The characters involved in the firm are the major actors in British politics and intellectual life at the time.
The history of the firm is tied up with triumphs and catastrophes. Recent histories of imperialism have not been kind to the British, with a few exceptions, and that comes across in Mr. Robins book. Fortunes were made, but this was hardly free market dynamics rather than the workings of a monopoly that plundered the colonies. The section on the 1770 Bengal famine is especially stark, although that was not the only Indian famine under British rule.
Perhaps the strongest part of the book is its treatment of corruption and “agency problems” in the management of the firm. These are huge problems in policy making towards corporations today and they were present from the start with the East India Company. On the one hand, shareholders and managers wanted a return on their investment and efforts. On the other hand, the lack of accountability to corporate standards coupled with the vast opportunities for self-dealing by agents of the firm made corruption certain. The parts of India that were under the rule of the firm for the longest time suffered the greatest economic impact and remain economically impaired to this day.
It is hard to read this history and not take note of the real deficiencies of corporate governance, the hundreds of millions of people who were affected by it, and the lasting consequences it has had in international politics and economics. No wonder there is such opposition to globalization today.
Robins also argues that the history of the East India Company has implications for corporate governance problems among contemporary corporations and he provides a nice discussion with lots of references for those wishing to read more.
This is not just of history of corporate excess but it is there and must be noted. For anyone wishing to learn more about the ways in which political economy has developed in India, Pakistan, and China, this book is highly informative, well-written, and should be required reading.
June 22, 2010
If anyone thought Enron or BP have misbehaved at an historic level, try starving millions of people for the sake of a dividend.
September 18, 2019
ان تاريخ شركة الهند الشرقية الانجليزية والذى لا يتجزأ عن تاريخ انجلترا هو تاريخ من الغزو باسم التجارة - كما كانت الحروب الصليبية تغزو باسم المسيح - تاريخ من السلب والنهب والقتل والحصار والتجويع والاستعباد .
الشركة التى تأسست مع بداية القرن السابع عشر الذى شهد بداية جولات السفن الأوروبية الاستكشافية فى مياه العالم باحثة عن الطرق التجارية المختصرة ، الأراضى الجديدة الغير مستكشفة او الغير مأهولة ، مصادر الثروات الطبيعية و عن الأسواق التجارية ومناطق جلب العبيد .
العديد من مثل هذه الشركات الاوروبية نشأت فى ذات الوقت بحثا عن الثروة الا ان اغلبها لم يستطع الصمود امام تقلب الاسواق التجارية او الحالات الجوية فى قلب البحار والتى ادت لغرق السفن التجارية الاولى لهذه الشركات . اما الاغلبية فقد انسحبت او افلست بسبب هجمات سفن شركة الهند الشرقية الانجليزية والتى كانت نوعا من السفن التجارية الحربية والتى عززتها المملكة فيما بعد بالاساطيل فى بعض حالات غزو الاسواق كحرب الافيون فى الصين .
وكان الأساس الإقتصادى الذى اعتمدت عليه الدولة هو سياسة الاحتكارات التجارية فى أسواقها وهو ما سعت اليه فى الهند مبكراً فى عملها الى ان اعماها الجشع لتقوم بالغزو والتحريض على الثورات والرشوة لتصبح الشركة هى اكبر سلطة فى اراضى البلدان التى تقوم فيها بالتجارة وهو الامر الذى بدأ فى إقليم البنغال فى الهند حتى اصبح للشركة الحق فى جباية الضرائب مقابل جزية باسم الامبراطور الهندى فى دلهى ثم قاموا بمحاربته والامتناع عن تقديم الجزية . كما قاموا بالاستيلاء على منتجات الهنود وبيعها فى اسواق الشركة فى مختلف بقاع العالم بأعلى الاسعار وتم تحويل اثمن المنتجات واموال الضرائب من ذهب الهند وفضته الى انجلترا . كما كانوا يجبرون المزارعين على زراعة الافيون لتبيعه الشركة لحسابها وكان الافيون من أعلى مصادر الربح للشركة .
ورغم مصادر ثروات الشركة المتعددة فى الاقليم الواحد نجدها تتعثر كثيرا وتغرق فى الديون وتتعرض بعنف لتقلبات سوق الاوراق المالية ( بورصة لندن ) فهذا كان مؤشرا كبيرا على فساد مديرين الشركة الذين اصبحوا من الثراء لدرجة تنافس الملوك والامراء . الا ان عثرات الشركة هذه كانت تقيلها الحكومة الانجليزية بتقديم القروض الضخمة طويلة الامد او غيرها من القروض فالشركة أغرقت الحكومة وحتى الملك - جورج الثانى والثالث على الاخص - فى بحور مكاسبها وفسادها فأصبح استمرار اسم الشركة فى الاسواق هو استمرار لثراء هؤلاء الفاسدين. واما المساهمين الانجليز فلم يكن يهمهم الا قرارات اعضاء البرلمان بزيادة حصتهم فى الربح والتى وصلت احيانا الى ٢٠ ٪ من القيمة الاسمية للأسهم .
الا ان باست��رار هذه الازمات المالية وعدم قدرة الشركة على الوفاء بديونها نتيجة لتعاظم حجم الفساد داخلها ونتيجة لسوء الادارة والسياسة التجارية فى الخارج والداخل وتحول الشركة التدريجى من المهام التجارية الى المهام العسكرية وغزوات السلب الونهب والتجارة الغير مشروعة نتيجة لهذه الأمور اوقفت المملكة تجديد عقد تأسيس الشركة - والتى كانت تجدده الشركة مع المملكة كل عشرين عاما تقريبا مقابل دفعة من المال وحصة من الارباح - وتسلمت المملكة ادارة الشركة بشكل نهائى عام ١٨٧٤ تزامناً مع سطوع نجم الامبراطورية البريطانية وانتشار التنافس فى مجال السياسة الاستعمارية فى أوروبا . لتصبح الهند بذلك لا سوقاً تجارياً للإنجليز بل جوهرة ثمينة فى تاج إمبراطوريتهم .
الشركة التى تأسست مع بداية القرن السابع عشر الذى شهد بداية جولات السفن الأوروبية الاستكشافية فى مياه العالم باحثة عن الطرق التجارية المختصرة ، الأراضى الجديدة الغير مستكشفة او الغير مأهولة ، مصادر الثروات الطبيعية و عن الأسواق التجارية ومناطق جلب العبيد .
العديد من مثل هذه الشركات الاوروبية نشأت فى ذات الوقت بحثا عن الثروة الا ان اغلبها لم يستطع الصمود امام تقلب الاسواق التجارية او الحالات الجوية فى قلب البحار والتى ادت لغرق السفن التجارية الاولى لهذه الشركات . اما الاغلبية فقد انسحبت او افلست بسبب هجمات سفن شركة الهند الشرقية الانجليزية والتى كانت نوعا من السفن التجارية الحربية والتى عززتها المملكة فيما بعد بالاساطيل فى بعض حالات غزو الاسواق كحرب الافيون فى الصين .
وكان الأساس الإقتصادى الذى اعتمدت عليه الدولة هو سياسة الاحتكارات التجارية فى أسواقها وهو ما سعت اليه فى الهند مبكراً فى عملها الى ان اعماها الجشع لتقوم بالغزو والتحريض على الثورات والرشوة لتصبح الشركة هى اكبر سلطة فى اراضى البلدان التى تقوم فيها بالتجارة وهو الامر الذى بدأ فى إقليم البنغال فى الهند حتى اصبح للشركة الحق فى جباية الضرائب مقابل جزية باسم الامبراطور الهندى فى دلهى ثم قاموا بمحاربته والامتناع عن تقديم الجزية . كما قاموا بالاستيلاء على منتجات الهنود وبيعها فى اسواق الشركة فى مختلف بقاع العالم بأعلى الاسعار وتم تحويل اثمن المنتجات واموال الضرائب من ذهب الهند وفضته الى انجلترا . كما كانوا يجبرون المزارعين على زراعة الافيون لتبيعه الشركة لحسابها وكان الافيون من أعلى مصادر الربح للشركة .
ورغم مصادر ثروات الشركة المتعددة فى الاقليم الواحد نجدها تتعثر كثيرا وتغرق فى الديون وتتعرض بعنف لتقلبات سوق الاوراق المالية ( بورصة لندن ) فهذا كان مؤشرا كبيرا على فساد مديرين الشركة الذين اصبحوا من الثراء لدرجة تنافس الملوك والامراء . الا ان عثرات الشركة هذه كانت تقيلها الحكومة الانجليزية بتقديم القروض الضخمة طويلة الامد او غيرها من القروض فالشركة أغرقت الحكومة وحتى الملك - جورج الثانى والثالث على الاخص - فى بحور مكاسبها وفسادها فأصبح استمرار اسم الشركة فى الاسواق هو استمرار لثراء هؤلاء الفاسدين. واما المساهمين الانجليز فلم يكن يهمهم الا قرارات اعضاء البرلمان بزيادة حصتهم فى الربح والتى وصلت احيانا الى ٢٠ ٪ من القيمة الاسمية للأسهم .
الا ان باست��رار هذه الازمات المالية وعدم قدرة الشركة على الوفاء بديونها نتيجة لتعاظم حجم الفساد داخلها ونتيجة لسوء الادارة والسياسة التجارية فى الخارج والداخل وتحول الشركة التدريجى من المهام التجارية الى المهام العسكرية وغزوات السلب الونهب والتجارة الغير مشروعة نتيجة لهذه الأمور اوقفت المملكة تجديد عقد تأسيس الشركة - والتى كانت تجدده الشركة مع المملكة كل عشرين عاما تقريبا مقابل دفعة من المال وحصة من الارباح - وتسلمت المملكة ادارة الشركة بشكل نهائى عام ١٨٧٤ تزامناً مع سطوع نجم الامبراطورية البريطانية وانتشار التنافس فى مجال السياسة الاستعمارية فى أوروبا . لتصبح الهند بذلك لا سوقاً تجارياً للإنجليز بل جوهرة ثمينة فى تاج إمبراطوريتهم .
June 29, 2020
Each section is in itself informative, wonderfully written and engaging. However, as others have notes, it suffers from an extremely confused structure, and a lack of focus.
It tries to be both a history of the East India Company and a manifesto of radical change in corporate practice. It succeeds to a limited extent in both these matters, and is useful, but not mandatory, reading for anyone interested in these subjects.
It tries to be both a history of the East India Company and a manifesto of radical change in corporate practice. It succeeds to a limited extent in both these matters, and is useful, but not mandatory, reading for anyone interested in these subjects.
October 5, 2010
Interesting revisionist take on the history of the British in India, centring on one of the earliest corporations, the Honourable East India Company.
I read this primarily as a quick overview of the history of the Company, needing a primer for some more detailed research on family members who served in the Company's hybrid private/public military force, the Bengal Army.
Robins has something of an agenda - his thesis is that the EIC is the template for the modern amoral corporation, and that a failure to remember the lessons of its history led inevitably to the 21st century corporate malfeasances of Enron and others. More deeply, he suggests that large corporations are inherently corrupting of markets, of their own executives, and ultimately of themselves. That they are, essentially, not a useful construct.
In passing he also makes a case that British imperialism in India was almost an afterthought - an artifact of the British state trying clumsily to deal with the aftermath of the EIC imploding. An interesting idea, rather at odds with the traditional historical model of the British Empire, but not without merit.
Well written, with a reasonably straight narrative of the main historical points, embellished with the theses noted above.
I read this primarily as a quick overview of the history of the Company, needing a primer for some more detailed research on family members who served in the Company's hybrid private/public military force, the Bengal Army.
Robins has something of an agenda - his thesis is that the EIC is the template for the modern amoral corporation, and that a failure to remember the lessons of its history led inevitably to the 21st century corporate malfeasances of Enron and others. More deeply, he suggests that large corporations are inherently corrupting of markets, of their own executives, and ultimately of themselves. That they are, essentially, not a useful construct.
In passing he also makes a case that British imperialism in India was almost an afterthought - an artifact of the British state trying clumsily to deal with the aftermath of the EIC imploding. An interesting idea, rather at odds with the traditional historical model of the British Empire, but not without merit.
Well written, with a reasonably straight narrative of the main historical points, embellished with the theses noted above.
September 5, 2018
واضح كم المجهود الرهيب الذي بذله المؤلف في تأليف كتاب يعد مرجع في تاريخ شركة الهند الشرقية .
المجهود واضح في كم التفاصيل المذكورة و محاولة الكاتب لتوثيقها ...تفاصيل الكثير منها مؤلم في محاولة من الكاتب لإدانة الشركة بعد كل هذه القرون و فشل معظم المحاولات لإدانة مديريها في محاكمات استمرت لسنوات ! مدارء مازال يحتفى بذكرهم على إنهم فاتحين و مازالت تماثيلهم تزين شوارع إنجلترا .
كتاب مرهق انقطعت فترة عن قراءته و لكن لم أستطع تركه خاصًة أنني كنت أتطلع للقراءة عن حرب الأفيون الأولى و الثانية التى خاضتها الشركة لتجبر الصين على مبادلة الشاي بالأفيون ... و التى تناولها الكاتب في الفصول الأخيرة .
الكتاب يعطي فكرة عميقة عن أثر حكم الشركات في محاولة للتحذير من مستقبل كمستقبل شركة الهند .. في ظل وجود الكثير من نسخ شبيهة لشركة الهند الشرقية حاليًا خاصًة في إفريقيا و آسيا .
أكثر ما أثار إستغرابي ان الشركة حكمت الهند و من بعدها التاج البريطاني لمدة ثلاثة قرون إلا ربع .. و لم يتبين أحد خطرها كل هذه الفترة !! و ان الشركة كانت تحارب في الهند بمساعدة جنود هنود !! شئ مثير و يدعو للبؤس .
لولا السرد المبالغ فيه جدًا للكاتب لبعض التفاصيل كنت أعطيت الكتاب خمسة نجوم عن جدارة .
المجهود واضح في كم التفاصيل المذكورة و محاولة الكاتب لتوثيقها ...تفاصيل الكثير منها مؤلم في محاولة من الكاتب لإدانة الشركة بعد كل هذه القرون و فشل معظم المحاولات لإدانة مديريها في محاكمات استمرت لسنوات ! مدارء مازال يحتفى بذكرهم على إنهم فاتحين و مازالت تماثيلهم تزين شوارع إنجلترا .
كتاب مرهق انقطعت فترة عن قراءته و لكن لم أستطع تركه خاصًة أنني كنت أتطلع للقراءة عن حرب الأفيون الأولى و الثانية التى خاضتها الشركة لتجبر الصين على مبادلة الشاي بالأفيون ... و التى تناولها الكاتب في الفصول الأخيرة .
الكتاب يعطي فكرة عميقة عن أثر حكم الشركات في محاولة للتحذير من مستقبل كمستقبل شركة الهند .. في ظل وجود الكثير من نسخ شبيهة لشركة الهند الشرقية حاليًا خاصًة في إفريقيا و آسيا .
أكثر ما أثار إستغرابي ان الشركة حكمت الهند و من بعدها التاج البريطاني لمدة ثلاثة قرون إلا ربع .. و لم يتبين أحد خطرها كل هذه الفترة !! و ان الشركة كانت تحارب في الهند بمساعدة جنود هنود !! شئ مثير و يدعو للبؤس .
لولا السرد المبالغ فيه جدًا للكاتب لبعض التفاصيل كنت أعطيت الكتاب خمسة نجوم عن جدارة .
May 14, 2019
‘no civilised government ever existed on the face of this earth which was more corrupt, more perfidious, and more rapacious’ - George Cornewall Lewis MP speaking about the East India Company
WHAT IS THE GOAL OF THIS BOOK?
- This book is an attempt to...examine the meaning of the Company’s legacy for the global economy of the twenty-first century.
WHAT IS THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE EAST INDIA COMPANY?
- The Company pioneered the shareholder model of corporate ownership and built the foundations for modern business administration.
CAUSED A GREAT DEAL OF SUFFERING
- The East India Company deserves to be looked at as it was –a profit-making company that generated great wealth, but one that also contributed to immense suffering.
ONE OF MANY COMPANIES
- The East India Company was one of a number of companies granted a royal charter by the British state to take advantage of the opportunities opened up by the age of European expansion and exploration. Some of these directed their attentions eastwards, such as the Muscovy (1555) and Levant (1581) Companies. A succession of companies –including the Company of Royal Adventurers (1663) and the Royal African Company (1672) –were also founded to exploit the slave trade. Others focused on settlement and commerce in the New World, notably the Virginia (1606) and Hudson Bay (1670) Companies.
WHAT MADE IT SPECIAL IN NATURE?
- Unlike the pioneers of the Asia trade, the Portuguese, who adopted a wholly state-led strategy, or the Dutch, who introduced a mixed public–private model, the English pushed forward a private sector strategy for tapping the wealth of the East. What makes the English East India Company special is the way it bridged the medieval concept of the corporation as an essentially public body with the industrial model of an enterprise acting primarily in the interests of its shareholders.
- Where the East India Company differed was in its fusion of the institutional structure of the public corporation with the financial mechanism of joint stock ownership.
A COMPANY WITH UNUSUAL RIGHTS, CAPABILITIES
- As part of its charter, the Company gained a whole series of special rights, including the right to mint coin in its overseas subsidiaries, to exercise justice in its settlements and, crucially, the right to wage war.
- Violence was intrinsic to the Company’s success, with its superiority at sea matched by an increasingly acquisitive army.
MONOPOLY
- The most valuable privilege of all, however, was the monopoly awarded to this London-based corporation of all trade between England and the lands beyond the Cape of Good Hope.
- The Company jealously guarded its exclusive rights over imports from Asia, lobbying and bribing the authorities to retain the barriers to entry that defined its charter. It also wanted to eliminate competition in Asia so that it could force down the costs of supply.
NOT MUCH COMPETITION IN OUR CURRENT SETTING EITHER
- Over 60 per cent of international commerce now takes place within corporations rather than in the open marketplace, making it idle to talk of free markets.
MADE QUITE THE PROFIT FOR THE BRITISH CROWN
- The Company was a corporate colossus, alone accounting for between 13 and 15 per cent of all Britain’s imports between 1699 and 1774.
STARTED WITH A NEED FOR PEPPER...
- had a strikingly simple mission –‘let us be sole masters of the pepper trade’,
INDIA WAS NOT ORIGINALLY PART OF THE PLAN
- Their focus was the spice islands that now form modern Indonesia –pepper from Java, cloves from the Moluccas, as well as mace and nutmeg from the Banda Islands; India played no part in its early commercial strategy.
INDIA WAS QUITE INDUSTRIOUS
- The Indian subcontinent was then the workshop of the world, accounting for almost a quarter of global manufacturing output in 1750,
NOT SO MUCH TRADE WITH INDIA, MORE LIKE THEFT
- ‘Your trade from hence may be considered more as a channel for conveying your revenues to Britain, than as only a mercantile system.’
INDIA 'GOT SCREWED'
- Burke described this model of exchange as ‘Intercourse –for it is not Commerce’, with India suffering ‘what is tantamount to an Annual Plunder of its Manufactures and its Produce to the Value of Twelve hundred thousand Pounds’. In effect, India was being screwed.
ENGLISH BRUTALITY IN INDIA, FAMINE
- More brutally, if merchants were found to have short-changed peasants during famines, an equivalent weight in human flesh would be taken from them in exchange.
- eye-witness accounts of the living feeding off the dead,
- Not only did the Company continue to collect its land revenues throughout the famine –instead of introducing some form of relief in the Mughal fashion –but it actually increased the rate.
- In 1772, Warren Hastings estimated that 10 million Bengalis had starved to death, equating to perhaps a third of the population. Hastings also concluded that the famine was caused by an artificial shortage of food supplies caused by market manipulation.
GETTING CHINA HOOKED ON OPIUM
- the Company endured a persistent balance of payments deficit with China. But after repeated efforts to liberalise the trade and expand the flow of British manufactured goods, the Company fell back on the one product that the Chinese would pay for: opium.
- In 1799, the Qing issued a definitive prohibition on opium, complaining of the spread of this ‘destructive and ensnaring vice’. But down in Canton, local officials were receiving a fixed fee per chest to look the other way.
TRADE WITH CHINA HIGHLY REGULATED
- A highly restrictive set of trading terms was then put in place to govern the Company’s trade in Canton,
- This arrangement was not the result of careful two-way negotiation, but simply the expression of the Qing Empire’s unilateral will.
TEA WAS HIGHLY LUCRATIVE
- The reason why the Company put up with all these indignities was simple: China was the world’s only source of tea.
USE THE NAVY TO ENABLE OPIUM TRADE
- In the Atlantic, the Royal Navy was proudly suppressing the slave trade; in the China seas, it would be deployed to enforce the rights of British traders to deal in opium.
STEAL FROM THE DEFEATED CHINESE
- Queen Victoria was amongst those who welcomed the victorious troops on their return to Britain in December 1860, and was delighted with her own trophy of the Summer Palace, a Pekinese dog, promptly nicknamed ‘Looty’,
EAST INDIA COMPANY BECOMES A FACADE FOR THE CROWN
- the 1784 India Act had introduced a two-tier system –a ‘double government’ –with the Company maintaining a façade of authority, behind which the state pulled the strings through the Board of Control.
LESSONS TO BE LEARNED FROM THE EAST INDIA COMPANY
- If there is one clear lesson that the Company’s history can bring to the twenty-first century, it is that the corporate form is not fixed, but eternally mutable.
- From this continual metamorphosis, four facets emerge most clearly for our times: the Company as entrepreneur, its role as a revolutionary force in world affairs, its tendency to imperial dominion and the struggle to make it accountable for its actions.
- a trinity of design flaws unite the Company with contemporary global corporations: the speculative temptations of executives and investors, the drive for monopoly control, and the absence of automatic remedy for corporate abuse.
KARMA: EAST INDIA COMPANY BOUGHT BY AN INDIAN
- In 2010, the right to use the East India Company trademarks was bought by Sanjiv Mehta, an Indian entrepreneur.
- For Mehta, ‘as an Indian, I had this huge feeling of redemption –this indescribable feeling of owning a company that once owned us’.
***
FACTOIDS
- By the end of the eighteenth century, the average length of the voyage from India or China back to London was 114 days.
- ‘it is significant that one of the Hindustani words which has become part of the English language is “loot”’.
- Feringhis (foreigners)
- Indian names for cloth also entered the English language, not least bandana, calico and chintz, dungaree, gingham, seersucker and taffeta.
- perquisites (or perks)
- From Italy came the invention of the compagnia, a name deriving from the Latin phrase for the act of sharing bread, cum panis. This was essentially a family firm, where fathers, brothers, sons and other relatives would pool their labour and capital.
- One of the few surviving examples of this model of the chartered corporation is the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), whose charter was renewed in 2007.
- Known today for his desert island story of Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe was also a leading economic analyst of his age,
BONUS
- Brief animated history of how British conquered India: https://youtu.be/DzDwz18ng7w
- NPR Innovation Hub podcast (3 May 2019) ‘The Company That Sparked Our Corporate World’: http://blogs.wgbh.org/innovation-hub/...
- Stuff You Missed in History Class podcast (30 Mar 2009) ‘How did the East India Company change the world?’ : https://www.missedinhistory.com/podca...
- East India Company walks: https://platformlondon.org/2012/12/21...
- ‘Relaunch’ of East India Company in 2010 as luxury food store in London: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-south-...
- Union Carbide toxic gas release in Bhopal, India (1984), 22,000 killed: https://youtu.be/FHJs3TwgsUQ
- Plassey / Clive: https://youtu.be/f1T36J92bf0
- 'Tipu's Tiger' (an organ in the shape of a tiger eating a European): https://www.futilitycloset.com/2015/0...
- National Maritime Museum exhibit on East India Company: https://www.rmg.co.uk/see-do/we-recom...
WHAT IS THE GOAL OF THIS BOOK?
- This book is an attempt to...examine the meaning of the Company’s legacy for the global economy of the twenty-first century.
WHAT IS THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE EAST INDIA COMPANY?
- The Company pioneered the shareholder model of corporate ownership and built the foundations for modern business administration.
CAUSED A GREAT DEAL OF SUFFERING
- The East India Company deserves to be looked at as it was –a profit-making company that generated great wealth, but one that also contributed to immense suffering.
ONE OF MANY COMPANIES
- The East India Company was one of a number of companies granted a royal charter by the British state to take advantage of the opportunities opened up by the age of European expansion and exploration. Some of these directed their attentions eastwards, such as the Muscovy (1555) and Levant (1581) Companies. A succession of companies –including the Company of Royal Adventurers (1663) and the Royal African Company (1672) –were also founded to exploit the slave trade. Others focused on settlement and commerce in the New World, notably the Virginia (1606) and Hudson Bay (1670) Companies.
WHAT MADE IT SPECIAL IN NATURE?
- Unlike the pioneers of the Asia trade, the Portuguese, who adopted a wholly state-led strategy, or the Dutch, who introduced a mixed public–private model, the English pushed forward a private sector strategy for tapping the wealth of the East. What makes the English East India Company special is the way it bridged the medieval concept of the corporation as an essentially public body with the industrial model of an enterprise acting primarily in the interests of its shareholders.
- Where the East India Company differed was in its fusion of the institutional structure of the public corporation with the financial mechanism of joint stock ownership.
A COMPANY WITH UNUSUAL RIGHTS, CAPABILITIES
- As part of its charter, the Company gained a whole series of special rights, including the right to mint coin in its overseas subsidiaries, to exercise justice in its settlements and, crucially, the right to wage war.
- Violence was intrinsic to the Company’s success, with its superiority at sea matched by an increasingly acquisitive army.
MONOPOLY
- The most valuable privilege of all, however, was the monopoly awarded to this London-based corporation of all trade between England and the lands beyond the Cape of Good Hope.
- The Company jealously guarded its exclusive rights over imports from Asia, lobbying and bribing the authorities to retain the barriers to entry that defined its charter. It also wanted to eliminate competition in Asia so that it could force down the costs of supply.
NOT MUCH COMPETITION IN OUR CURRENT SETTING EITHER
- Over 60 per cent of international commerce now takes place within corporations rather than in the open marketplace, making it idle to talk of free markets.
MADE QUITE THE PROFIT FOR THE BRITISH CROWN
- The Company was a corporate colossus, alone accounting for between 13 and 15 per cent of all Britain’s imports between 1699 and 1774.
STARTED WITH A NEED FOR PEPPER...
- had a strikingly simple mission –‘let us be sole masters of the pepper trade’,
INDIA WAS NOT ORIGINALLY PART OF THE PLAN
- Their focus was the spice islands that now form modern Indonesia –pepper from Java, cloves from the Moluccas, as well as mace and nutmeg from the Banda Islands; India played no part in its early commercial strategy.
INDIA WAS QUITE INDUSTRIOUS
- The Indian subcontinent was then the workshop of the world, accounting for almost a quarter of global manufacturing output in 1750,
NOT SO MUCH TRADE WITH INDIA, MORE LIKE THEFT
- ‘Your trade from hence may be considered more as a channel for conveying your revenues to Britain, than as only a mercantile system.’
INDIA 'GOT SCREWED'
- Burke described this model of exchange as ‘Intercourse –for it is not Commerce’, with India suffering ‘what is tantamount to an Annual Plunder of its Manufactures and its Produce to the Value of Twelve hundred thousand Pounds’. In effect, India was being screwed.
ENGLISH BRUTALITY IN INDIA, FAMINE
- More brutally, if merchants were found to have short-changed peasants during famines, an equivalent weight in human flesh would be taken from them in exchange.
- eye-witness accounts of the living feeding off the dead,
- Not only did the Company continue to collect its land revenues throughout the famine –instead of introducing some form of relief in the Mughal fashion –but it actually increased the rate.
- In 1772, Warren Hastings estimated that 10 million Bengalis had starved to death, equating to perhaps a third of the population. Hastings also concluded that the famine was caused by an artificial shortage of food supplies caused by market manipulation.
GETTING CHINA HOOKED ON OPIUM
- the Company endured a persistent balance of payments deficit with China. But after repeated efforts to liberalise the trade and expand the flow of British manufactured goods, the Company fell back on the one product that the Chinese would pay for: opium.
- In 1799, the Qing issued a definitive prohibition on opium, complaining of the spread of this ‘destructive and ensnaring vice’. But down in Canton, local officials were receiving a fixed fee per chest to look the other way.
TRADE WITH CHINA HIGHLY REGULATED
- A highly restrictive set of trading terms was then put in place to govern the Company’s trade in Canton,
- This arrangement was not the result of careful two-way negotiation, but simply the expression of the Qing Empire’s unilateral will.
TEA WAS HIGHLY LUCRATIVE
- The reason why the Company put up with all these indignities was simple: China was the world’s only source of tea.
USE THE NAVY TO ENABLE OPIUM TRADE
- In the Atlantic, the Royal Navy was proudly suppressing the slave trade; in the China seas, it would be deployed to enforce the rights of British traders to deal in opium.
STEAL FROM THE DEFEATED CHINESE
- Queen Victoria was amongst those who welcomed the victorious troops on their return to Britain in December 1860, and was delighted with her own trophy of the Summer Palace, a Pekinese dog, promptly nicknamed ‘Looty’,
EAST INDIA COMPANY BECOMES A FACADE FOR THE CROWN
- the 1784 India Act had introduced a two-tier system –a ‘double government’ –with the Company maintaining a façade of authority, behind which the state pulled the strings through the Board of Control.
LESSONS TO BE LEARNED FROM THE EAST INDIA COMPANY
- If there is one clear lesson that the Company’s history can bring to the twenty-first century, it is that the corporate form is not fixed, but eternally mutable.
- From this continual metamorphosis, four facets emerge most clearly for our times: the Company as entrepreneur, its role as a revolutionary force in world affairs, its tendency to imperial dominion and the struggle to make it accountable for its actions.
- a trinity of design flaws unite the Company with contemporary global corporations: the speculative temptations of executives and investors, the drive for monopoly control, and the absence of automatic remedy for corporate abuse.
KARMA: EAST INDIA COMPANY BOUGHT BY AN INDIAN
- In 2010, the right to use the East India Company trademarks was bought by Sanjiv Mehta, an Indian entrepreneur.
- For Mehta, ‘as an Indian, I had this huge feeling of redemption –this indescribable feeling of owning a company that once owned us’.
***
FACTOIDS
- By the end of the eighteenth century, the average length of the voyage from India or China back to London was 114 days.
- ‘it is significant that one of the Hindustani words which has become part of the English language is “loot”’.
- Feringhis (foreigners)
- Indian names for cloth also entered the English language, not least bandana, calico and chintz, dungaree, gingham, seersucker and taffeta.
- perquisites (or perks)
- From Italy came the invention of the compagnia, a name deriving from the Latin phrase for the act of sharing bread, cum panis. This was essentially a family firm, where fathers, brothers, sons and other relatives would pool their labour and capital.
- One of the few surviving examples of this model of the chartered corporation is the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), whose charter was renewed in 2007.
- Known today for his desert island story of Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe was also a leading economic analyst of his age,
BONUS
- Brief animated history of how British conquered India: https://youtu.be/DzDwz18ng7w
- NPR Innovation Hub podcast (3 May 2019) ‘The Company That Sparked Our Corporate World’: http://blogs.wgbh.org/innovation-hub/...
- Stuff You Missed in History Class podcast (30 Mar 2009) ‘How did the East India Company change the world?’ : https://www.missedinhistory.com/podca...
- East India Company walks: https://platformlondon.org/2012/12/21...
- ‘Relaunch’ of East India Company in 2010 as luxury food store in London: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-south-...
- Union Carbide toxic gas release in Bhopal, India (1984), 22,000 killed: https://youtu.be/FHJs3TwgsUQ
- Plassey / Clive: https://youtu.be/f1T36J92bf0
- 'Tipu's Tiger' (an organ in the shape of a tiger eating a European): https://www.futilitycloset.com/2015/0...
- National Maritime Museum exhibit on East India Company: https://www.rmg.co.uk/see-do/we-recom...
June 3, 2018
İnsan toplumu için "gelişmenin" anlamı, yaşam boyu karşılaştığı kısıtlardan kurtulmak; başlangıçtan bugüne "bir gün daha yaşamak", gelişmenin günlük yaşamına etkisi belirgin oldukça buna eklenen bir diğeri de "yarın bugünden daha rahat yaşamak".
İnsan, bunları "birlikte" daha kolay yapabileceğini fark ettiğinden beri (ki muhtemelen en baştan beri), önce topluluklar, gelişmeye paralel hem topluluklar büyüyüp hem de ilişkiler çeşitlendikçe de topluluk içi -ama ayrıca- kurumlar oluşturmuş.
Yönetim işleri için "devlet", savunma -ya da zorla alma- için "ordu", ticareti keşfedince de "şirket"... Hepsi topluluk içinde oluşmuş kurumlar. Ortak özellikleri, birbiriyle kolay ilişki kurulabilir geçişkenli coğrafya parçalarında gevşekçe yaşayan topluluklar içerisinde, amaç odaklı donanıma sahip daha sıkı örgütlenmeler olması.
Sanayi gelişip de sahip oldukları "antik asil kandan" dolayı yönetme hakkına sahip olduğunu savunan soylulara rakip burjuva sınıf ortaya çıkıp da serpildikçe, burjuvazinin kurumsallaştırdığı yapının içerisinden bir de proleterya çıktı. Çıkmakla da kalmadı, hem burjuvazinin yarattığı kurumların hem de artık iyiden burjuvazinin yönetimine girdiğini düşündüğü devletin yönetimine de talip oldu.
Başta yenilikçi olanın sonrasında geleneksel olması ve sonraki yenilikçiyle çatışması, insanlık tarihinin gelişme pratiğinin bir özeti aslında. Çatışma bir önceki dengeyi yıkıp yeni bir düzlemde yeniden dengeyi bulana kadar sürüyor ama o yeni denge de, yeni bir çatışmanın başlama noktası sadece.
Burjuvazi ile proleteryanın çatışmasının 20. yy.'ın başında vardığı nokta, ilkinin Batı Avrupa ile Amerika'da, ikincinin Doğu Avrupa ve Asya'da kendi yönetim modellerini devletleştirmeleri oldu. Birbirini askeri olarak ezemeyen ama birbirlerinin kontrol alanlarında fikrî varlıklarını da sürdürebilen iki rakip güç haline gelmeleri ise soğuk savaş dönemini oluşturdu.
Askeri savaşın yerini propaganda savaşlarının aldığı bu dönemin, bu yazıya kısmen konu olan karşılıklı savları özetle şöyleydi; batı doğu'yu, planlı ekonomiyle piyasa dinamizmini bastırmak ve dolayısıyla toplumun gelişmesinin önüne geçmekle; doğu batı'yı, piyasanın kâr hırsını dizginlememek ve refahını çalışanların ve başka ülkelerin insanlarının ezilmesi pahasına sürdürmekle suçladı.
Batı'nın entelektüellerinin buna verdiği yanıtsa, refah devletinin ekonomik alt yapısının hisseleri halka açık şirketler olduğuydu. Bu sayede kâr topluma geri dönebiliyor ve de piyasa dinamizmi de devam edebiliyordu.
Nick Robins'in "Dünyayı Değiştiren Şirket, Doğu Hindistan Kumpanyası'nın Modern Çokulusluluğu Şekillendirmesi" kitabı, bir yandan piyasa dinamizminin gelişmede nelere kadir olduğunu ama öte yandan dizginsiz ve etik sınırları çizilmemiş kâr hırsının da nelere sebep olabileceğini, bir yandan günümüzde Londra'nın "unutmaya çalıştığı" Kumpanya tarihinden, diğer yandan da arada geçişler yaptığı günümüz şirketlerinden örneklerle aktarıyor -ve bu haliyle Londra tarihsel arka planda "unutmaya" çalışsa da modern şirketlerin "unutmamış" olabileceklerini kulağımıza seslendiriyor.
Bir anlamda Robins (niyeti bu olmamasına rağmen) Doğu'nun eleştirilerinde haklı olmuş olabileceğini, geniş tabanlı sermaye yapısına sahip şirketlerin dağıttığı kâr, temettü, hisse değerlerinde ki kârla orantılı yükselişlerden faydalanan insanların, sahip oldukları refah seviyesi devam ettiği sürece kendilerinden uzakta yaşanan olumsuzlukları... pek de dert etmediklerini ortaya koyuyor.
İki yüzyıl öncesine kıyasla bilginin dolaşım hızı bugün muazzam artmış durumda. O zamanlar Londra'daki hissedarlar, kâr hırsıyla hareket eden Kumpanya'nın kıtlık zamanında Bengal'deki tahıl ürünlerini stoklayıp birkaç misli fiyatla sattığını ve bu yüzden tahminen iki milyon kişinin açlıktan ölmesine yol açtığını ancak birkaç ay sonra öğrenebilmişlerdi ve pek dişe dokunur bir tepki de vermemişlerdi. Bugünse dünyanın herhangi bir yerinden haber almak saniyeler içerisinde mümkün ama toplumların savaşlardan kaçan mültecilere bakışını düşünürsek, insan doğasında pek bir değişiklik olduğunu henüz söyleyemeyiz herhalde.
İnsan, bunları "birlikte" daha kolay yapabileceğini fark ettiğinden beri (ki muhtemelen en baştan beri), önce topluluklar, gelişmeye paralel hem topluluklar büyüyüp hem de ilişkiler çeşitlendikçe de topluluk içi -ama ayrıca- kurumlar oluşturmuş.
Yönetim işleri için "devlet", savunma -ya da zorla alma- için "ordu", ticareti keşfedince de "şirket"... Hepsi topluluk içinde oluşmuş kurumlar. Ortak özellikleri, birbiriyle kolay ilişki kurulabilir geçişkenli coğrafya parçalarında gevşekçe yaşayan topluluklar içerisinde, amaç odaklı donanıma sahip daha sıkı örgütlenmeler olması.
Sanayi gelişip de sahip oldukları "antik asil kandan" dolayı yönetme hakkına sahip olduğunu savunan soylulara rakip burjuva sınıf ortaya çıkıp da serpildikçe, burjuvazinin kurumsallaştırdığı yapının içerisinden bir de proleterya çıktı. Çıkmakla da kalmadı, hem burjuvazinin yarattığı kurumların hem de artık iyiden burjuvazinin yönetimine girdiğini düşündüğü devletin yönetimine de talip oldu.
Başta yenilikçi olanın sonrasında geleneksel olması ve sonraki yenilikçiyle çatışması, insanlık tarihinin gelişme pratiğinin bir özeti aslında. Çatışma bir önceki dengeyi yıkıp yeni bir düzlemde yeniden dengeyi bulana kadar sürüyor ama o yeni denge de, yeni bir çatışmanın başlama noktası sadece.
Burjuvazi ile proleteryanın çatışmasının 20. yy.'ın başında vardığı nokta, ilkinin Batı Avrupa ile Amerika'da, ikincinin Doğu Avrupa ve Asya'da kendi yönetim modellerini devletleştirmeleri oldu. Birbirini askeri olarak ezemeyen ama birbirlerinin kontrol alanlarında fikrî varlıklarını da sürdürebilen iki rakip güç haline gelmeleri ise soğuk savaş dönemini oluşturdu.
Askeri savaşın yerini propaganda savaşlarının aldığı bu dönemin, bu yazıya kısmen konu olan karşılıklı savları özetle şöyleydi; batı doğu'yu, planlı ekonomiyle piyasa dinamizmini bastırmak ve dolayısıyla toplumun gelişmesinin önüne geçmekle; doğu batı'yı, piyasanın kâr hırsını dizginlememek ve refahını çalışanların ve başka ülkelerin insanlarının ezilmesi pahasına sürdürmekle suçladı.
Batı'nın entelektüellerinin buna verdiği yanıtsa, refah devletinin ekonomik alt yapısının hisseleri halka açık şirketler olduğuydu. Bu sayede kâr topluma geri dönebiliyor ve de piyasa dinamizmi de devam edebiliyordu.
Nick Robins'in "Dünyayı Değiştiren Şirket, Doğu Hindistan Kumpanyası'nın Modern Çokulusluluğu Şekillendirmesi" kitabı, bir yandan piyasa dinamizminin gelişmede nelere kadir olduğunu ama öte yandan dizginsiz ve etik sınırları çizilmemiş kâr hırsının da nelere sebep olabileceğini, bir yandan günümüzde Londra'nın "unutmaya çalıştığı" Kumpanya tarihinden, diğer yandan da arada geçişler yaptığı günümüz şirketlerinden örneklerle aktarıyor -ve bu haliyle Londra tarihsel arka planda "unutmaya" çalışsa da modern şirketlerin "unutmamış" olabileceklerini kulağımıza seslendiriyor.
Bir anlamda Robins (niyeti bu olmamasına rağmen) Doğu'nun eleştirilerinde haklı olmuş olabileceğini, geniş tabanlı sermaye yapısına sahip şirketlerin dağıttığı kâr, temettü, hisse değerlerinde ki kârla orantılı yükselişlerden faydalanan insanların, sahip oldukları refah seviyesi devam ettiği sürece kendilerinden uzakta yaşanan olumsuzlukları... pek de dert etmediklerini ortaya koyuyor.
İki yüzyıl öncesine kıyasla bilginin dolaşım hızı bugün muazzam artmış durumda. O zamanlar Londra'daki hissedarlar, kâr hırsıyla hareket eden Kumpanya'nın kıtlık zamanında Bengal'deki tahıl ürünlerini stoklayıp birkaç misli fiyatla sattığını ve bu yüzden tahminen iki milyon kişinin açlıktan ölmesine yol açtığını ancak birkaç ay sonra öğrenebilmişlerdi ve pek dişe dokunur bir tepki de vermemişlerdi. Bugünse dünyanın herhangi bir yerinden haber almak saniyeler içerisinde mümkün ama toplumların savaşlardan kaçan mültecilere bakışını düşünürsek, insan doğasında pek bir değişiklik olduğunu henüz söyleyemeyiz herhalde.
January 12, 2019
Excellent - but wouldn’t recommend for the uninitiated on the East India Company and the history of the period.
December 27, 2020
مقدمات الحكايات هي معرفة النهايات بشكل ما، ولعل هذا الكتاب يحكي المقدمة، المقدمة التي نعيشها كل لحظة، لذلك لم يكن للكتاب عنوان واحد، فكل العناوين التي وضعت لهذا الكتاب تلخص مصطلحا واحدا: وهي بداية سيطرة الرأسمالية البشعة على العالم...
لقد نشئت الشركة في الوقت الذي انطلقت فيه النظريتين الحاكمتين للاقتصاد العالمي ومع ذلك هاجمها أصحاب النظريتين، فأدم سميث صاحب اليد الخفية التي ستضبط السوق من حالة سيولته وجد في الشركة الوجه السيء لنظرية السوق الحر والليبرالية السوقية، وكارل ماركس في مجلده الأول رأس المال اعتمد على التحليل الطبقي الذي أصبغ كل شيء قائلا: كان النبلاء يريدون غزو الهند، والأثرياء نهبها، وأصحاب المصانع بيعها بسعر بخس!
والحقيقة أن موقع الكتاب أنه يوضح حلقة في سلسلة كيف حطم الغرب العالم، وكيف سيطر على مقدرات الشعوب ونهب ثرواتها لكي يصنع ماديته الحمقاء التي يسير بها على أجساد البشرية الضعيفة ..
كل فصل في هذا الكتاب هو دليل على أن جذور تلك الرأسمالية لم تكن وليدة اليوم، فقط الصورة تجملت، فالبنغال التي جاعت حتى الموت من أجل تكديس الثروات في البنوك الانجليزية لا يوجد فرق بينها وبين سوريا المنكوبة من أجل الحفاظ على سوق بيع السلاح والصراع الجيوبوليتيك بين العروش المهتزة...
الغريب أن لا أحد يدفع الثمن وأن أحد رؤساء هذه الشركة مازال تمثاله متربعا في ليندهول في لندن ولم يدفع أحد الثمن قط !
لقد كنت أدرس الكتاب بغرض معرفة حالة اللاوعي التي أدت إلى زيادة قابلية الاستعمار في الشرق الإسلامي لكي اكتشف أن الأمر أكبر، الأمر أن هذا الاستعمار كل مافعله هو التحول لصور آخرى بصورة بورتيريهات مختلفة تماما كالعاهرة التي تتجمل كل مرة من أجل سرقة أموال الزبائن !
لقد نشئت الشركة في الوقت الذي انطلقت فيه النظريتين الحاكمتين للاقتصاد العالمي ومع ذلك هاجمها أصحاب النظريتين، فأدم سميث صاحب اليد الخفية التي ستضبط السوق من حالة سيولته وجد في الشركة الوجه السيء لنظرية السوق الحر والليبرالية السوقية، وكارل ماركس في مجلده الأول رأس المال اعتمد على التحليل الطبقي الذي أصبغ كل شيء قائلا: كان النبلاء يريدون غزو الهند، والأثرياء نهبها، وأصحاب المصانع بيعها بسعر بخس!
والحقيقة أن موقع الكتاب أنه يوضح حلقة في سلسلة كيف حطم الغرب العالم، وكيف سيطر على مقدرات الشعوب ونهب ثرواتها لكي يصنع ماديته الحمقاء التي يسير بها على أجساد البشرية الضعيفة ..
كل فصل في هذا الكتاب هو دليل على أن جذور تلك الرأسمالية لم تكن وليدة اليوم، فقط الصورة تجملت، فالبنغال التي جاعت حتى الموت من أجل تكديس الثروات في البنوك الانجليزية لا يوجد فرق بينها وبين سوريا المنكوبة من أجل الحفاظ على سوق بيع السلاح والصراع الجيوبوليتيك بين العروش المهتزة...
الغريب أن لا أحد يدفع الثمن وأن أحد رؤساء هذه الشركة مازال تمثاله متربعا في ليندهول في لندن ولم يدفع أحد الثمن قط !
لقد كنت أدرس الكتاب بغرض معرفة حالة اللاوعي التي أدت إلى زيادة قابلية الاستعمار في الشرق الإسلامي لكي اكتشف أن الأمر أكبر، الأمر أن هذا الاستعمار كل مافعله هو التحول لصور آخرى بصورة بورتيريهات مختلفة تماما كالعاهرة التي تتجمل كل مرة من أجل سرقة أموال الزبائن !
June 3, 2015
My first book-length history of the East India Company. Since my only previous information of this period of Indian history came from school history books, I have literally nothing to compare this with.
A fascinating story, badly told. The book is often repetitive and pays scant attention to chronology or narrative structure. Feels more like an info dump with little editing. On the positive side, I like the fact that the book does not let you forget that the EIC was a commercial enterprise and strives to never let you lose sight of the absurdity of its role as administrator to countries and arbiter of the lives of millions.
Moving on to 'The Honourable Company' by John Keay. The first few pages already feel refreshingly well written in comparison to 'The Corporation that Changed the World'.
A fascinating story, badly told. The book is often repetitive and pays scant attention to chronology or narrative structure. Feels more like an info dump with little editing. On the positive side, I like the fact that the book does not let you forget that the EIC was a commercial enterprise and strives to never let you lose sight of the absurdity of its role as administrator to countries and arbiter of the lives of millions.
Moving on to 'The Honourable Company' by John Keay. The first few pages already feel refreshingly well written in comparison to 'The Corporation that Changed the World'.
July 21, 2020
WOW! What an interesting read. After reading this I was lead to read Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. Three hundred years of commercial and political corruption; social repression; piracy; financial misdeeds; war; murder; the list goes on. But it gives tremendous insight into how the world has organized itself around wealth acquisition.
January 12, 2021
Robins has taken a really interesting chapter of English history and made it a dry and mostly unreadable analysis of shareholder value, comparative stock prices and worse. I have an MBA and still found it boring as watching paint dry and did not finish the book. Disappointing.
October 2, 2021
كتاب مهم، يدفعك لإعادة النظر في الطريقة التي يدار بها العالم، وغالباً ستدرك أن المحرك الرئيسي للدول ليس السياسة أو الاقتصاد بمفهومه العام، وإنما المصالح الاقتصادية الخاصة بملاك الشركات الكبرى أو المساهمين الكبار فيها.
September 4, 2014
Amazing read! An as an Indian, you feel this intense rage....
September 10, 2022
شئ من تاريخ الإبادة الغربية لشعوب شرق آسيا وكيف يستحكم الجشع المالي. على الإنسان مقابل إبادة شعوب بأكملها
May 15, 2020
....لا تجارة بدون حرب ولا حرب بدون تجارة .... هذه فكرة لأي زمان ومكان
ما لم أستصغه في الكتاب عدم ترتيب الأفكار مما أدى إلى المثير من التكرار الممل
ما لم أستصغه في الكتاب عدم ترتيب الأفكار مما أدى إلى المثير من التكرار الممل
January 26, 2021
This book by Nick Robins could have been a classic. However, the author lets slip of the opportunity. The timing was also a crucial factor as the book released just before the crisis in 2006. If the book was written around the crisis time. am sure the author would have got a much better perspective and publicity. After all, the recent crisis has shown us the evil side of many a corporation, which the book also discusses on East India Company.
This book offers a fascinating account of the forerunner of the modern multinational: the British East India Company (1600-1874). Nick Robins shows how the East India Company pioneered the model of the corporation that we see today. Its innovations included the shareholder model of ownership, and the administrative framework of the modern firm. Global in reach, it achieved market dominance in Asia, trailblazing the British Empire in the East. In the process, the company shocked its age with the scale of its executive malpractice, stock market excess, and human rights abuse.
Offering a popular history of one of the world’s most famous companies, Nick Robins shows what it teaches us about corporations today. Ultimately, the East India Company succumbed to popular protest and outright rebellion, first in the Boston Tea Party and then in the Indian Mutiny. For Robins, the Company’s legacy shows how essential it is to break-up today’s over-mighty corporations, introduce new legal duties on corporate executives and establish effective mechanisms to hold companies to account wherever they operate
East India Company remains a topic for continued interest for most people, especially in India. India lost much of its glorious past due to this privately held company. There are many books that have gone onto document how the company marshaled by a few highly ambitious people turned a trading company into an imperialist superpower. The book has a really interesting account of how EIC went about its business and the way it manipulated politics on its rise to the top. The players which shaped EIC to the top and the critics who tried to pull it down.
This book takes a backseat and says EIC was just like a modern multinational of today’s times. EIC was very clear in its objective – make money for the shareholders (we give undue credit to Milton Friedman for this). This is the same passion shared by most multinationals as well. In this grand pursuit of profits, EIC committed some equally grand crimes as well.
There was huge criticism regarding EIC’s actions and by none other than Adam Smith. The author says this aspect of Adam Smith is skipped by most experts. Large corporations are considered as part and parcel of the Invisible hand and free markets world. Smith clearly disagreed and was shocked to see the conduct of EIC. He is a later edition of his Wealth of Nations tome wrote a critique of large corporations keeping EIC in mind.
Where the book misses out is to draw comparisons with modern multinationals in a more detailed manner. There is some discussion in the beginning but misses it in the middle and the end. A more nuanced discussion could have made the book a must-read classic.
Nevertheless, an interesting account. And it is a short one too (just about 190 pages).
This book offers a fascinating account of the forerunner of the modern multinational: the British East India Company (1600-1874). Nick Robins shows how the East India Company pioneered the model of the corporation that we see today. Its innovations included the shareholder model of ownership, and the administrative framework of the modern firm. Global in reach, it achieved market dominance in Asia, trailblazing the British Empire in the East. In the process, the company shocked its age with the scale of its executive malpractice, stock market excess, and human rights abuse.
Offering a popular history of one of the world’s most famous companies, Nick Robins shows what it teaches us about corporations today. Ultimately, the East India Company succumbed to popular protest and outright rebellion, first in the Boston Tea Party and then in the Indian Mutiny. For Robins, the Company’s legacy shows how essential it is to break-up today’s over-mighty corporations, introduce new legal duties on corporate executives and establish effective mechanisms to hold companies to account wherever they operate
East India Company remains a topic for continued interest for most people, especially in India. India lost much of its glorious past due to this privately held company. There are many books that have gone onto document how the company marshaled by a few highly ambitious people turned a trading company into an imperialist superpower. The book has a really interesting account of how EIC went about its business and the way it manipulated politics on its rise to the top. The players which shaped EIC to the top and the critics who tried to pull it down.
This book takes a backseat and says EIC was just like a modern multinational of today’s times. EIC was very clear in its objective – make money for the shareholders (we give undue credit to Milton Friedman for this). This is the same passion shared by most multinationals as well. In this grand pursuit of profits, EIC committed some equally grand crimes as well.
There was huge criticism regarding EIC’s actions and by none other than Adam Smith. The author says this aspect of Adam Smith is skipped by most experts. Large corporations are considered as part and parcel of the Invisible hand and free markets world. Smith clearly disagreed and was shocked to see the conduct of EIC. He is a later edition of his Wealth of Nations tome wrote a critique of large corporations keeping EIC in mind.
Where the book misses out is to draw comparisons with modern multinationals in a more detailed manner. There is some discussion in the beginning but misses it in the middle and the end. A more nuanced discussion could have made the book a must-read classic.
Nevertheless, an interesting account. And it is a short one too (just about 190 pages).
July 1, 2023
في 9 فصول يقدم الجيولوجي البريطاني نيك روبنز دراسة حول شركة الهند الشرقية ودورها في احتلال الهند وتدمير الصين ونهب وتخريب البصرة (في وقت كانت الاصقاع فيه تباع وتشترى مثل السلع)
رأي شخصي: ( يبين هذا الكتاب الجانب المظلم للدول الأوروبية ودورها القذر خلال سنوات الاستعمار ونهبها لخيرات الشعوب وسوف يتضح لك كيف لعبت السياسة جنبا الى جنب مع التجارة لعبة هي ابعد ما تكون عن الإنسانية ويقول نا ارتفاه - جيش الشركة- من 18 الف الى 158 الف موظف يقومون بكل ما في وسعهم لاستغلال نفوذ او قتل طموح لدى الشعوب او نهب خيرات لأرض ما وهذا ينجلي في انها أصبحت السبيل الوحيد لنهب خيرات الهند.. على سبيل المثال ,, وأقول ان هذا الامر تكرر أيضا في 2003 عندما غزت أمريكا وبريطانيا العراق ذاك الغزو المغولي البربري الهمجي الذي جعل العراق يغط في ازمة لم يخرج منها حتى الان والكثيرين يعتقدون انه يحتاج لعقود ليخرج من ازمته وينتفع من نفطه وخيراته، وما سوف تقرأه هنا ليس ببعيد، لكنه في أماكن متفرقة ، ولعل المجرم روبت كلايف الذي اعتصر بلاد البنغال ليخرج ما مجموعة 38 مليون جنية إسترليني عام 1758 الى 1780 توفي هو قبل ذلك ولكن السياسة التي اقرها كانت مستمرة في نهب الهند وبلاد البنغال بطريقة متوحشة لتغذية الخزينة البريطانية في (حرب السنوات السبع) كتاب مرعب يوضح جانب من التاريخ لم يتطرق اليه الا القليل ولكن الكاتب أوضح ما نريد ان نعرفه وما يمكن ان يعطينا كقرا صورة بانورامية عن الأوضاع هناك خلال فترة مظلمة من تاريخ الهند كما لا يمكن ان يتم اغفال انه في عام 1695م تم اجراء تحقيق من قبل البرلمان الإنجليزي في فساد الشركة).
قراءة ممتعة ومؤلمة في الوقت نفسه تبدأ من ميناء كروسبي ( لا تبحث في جوجل عنه احترق في حريق لندن 1666م) والاهتمام السياسي والاجتماعي والتجاري ��ما يمكن ان يتم في الهند من استغلال لابعد مدى.
رأي شخصي: ( يبين هذا الكتاب الجانب المظلم للدول الأوروبية ودورها القذر خلال سنوات الاستعمار ونهبها لخيرات الشعوب وسوف يتضح لك كيف لعبت السياسة جنبا الى جنب مع التجارة لعبة هي ابعد ما تكون عن الإنسانية ويقول نا ارتفاه - جيش الشركة- من 18 الف الى 158 الف موظف يقومون بكل ما في وسعهم لاستغلال نفوذ او قتل طموح لدى الشعوب او نهب خيرات لأرض ما وهذا ينجلي في انها أصبحت السبيل الوحيد لنهب خيرات الهند.. على سبيل المثال ,, وأقول ان هذا الامر تكرر أيضا في 2003 عندما غزت أمريكا وبريطانيا العراق ذاك الغزو المغولي البربري الهمجي الذي جعل العراق يغط في ازمة لم يخرج منها حتى الان والكثيرين يعتقدون انه يحتاج لعقود ليخرج من ازمته وينتفع من نفطه وخيراته، وما سوف تقرأه هنا ليس ببعيد، لكنه في أماكن متفرقة ، ولعل المجرم روبت كلايف الذي اعتصر بلاد البنغال ليخرج ما مجموعة 38 مليون جنية إسترليني عام 1758 الى 1780 توفي هو قبل ذلك ولكن السياسة التي اقرها كانت مستمرة في نهب الهند وبلاد البنغال بطريقة متوحشة لتغذية الخزينة البريطانية في (حرب السنوات السبع) كتاب مرعب يوضح جانب من التاريخ لم يتطرق اليه الا القليل ولكن الكاتب أوضح ما نريد ان نعرفه وما يمكن ان يعطينا كقرا صورة بانورامية عن الأوضاع هناك خلال فترة مظلمة من تاريخ الهند كما لا يمكن ان يتم اغفال انه في عام 1695م تم اجراء تحقيق من قبل البرلمان الإنجليزي في فساد الشركة).
قراءة ممتعة ومؤلمة في الوقت نفسه تبدأ من ميناء كروسبي ( لا تبحث في جوجل عنه احترق في حريق لندن 1666م) والاهتمام السياسي والاجتماعي والتجاري ��ما يمكن ان يتم في الهند من استغلال لابعد مدى.
December 1, 2022
A good book, providing a business-centric history of the East India Company. The author, British Maritime Historian Nick Robins, explains the rise, fall, and legacy of the world’s first major corporation. Robins presents the East India Company’s history in a series of stages, from it’s beginning as one of many chartered joint stock company, to its 18th century dominance in the mercantilist economies, and finally its steady demise as it became the British government’s agent of expansion in India. Rather than a history of British colonization of India, the book maintains its business outlook, analyzing the Company’s governance, investments, and functions as a multinational trading firm. The Company’s advancement of commercial practices and maritime technology are discussed. But most of the work talks to the increasingly nefarious practices the Company undertook to maintain the profits necessary for its monopoly status. Robins does a good job explaining the voices of dissent against the Company’s opium trade and territorial acquisitions. His presentation of Adam Smith as an anti-corporate economist was especially interesting. A great book for anyone looking to better understand the dynamics of multinational corporations. Highly recommended for those interested in historic commercial enterprise.
June 6, 2020
This was a very thorough history of the British East India Company (EIC) and its influences around the world. It did feel a little bit disorganized in some parts of the book because things are not always presented in a chronological order, or in some easy to follow narrative, but I think part of the reason is due to the complexities of EIC’s history and the vastness of the research that the author has done on this topic. The book does a phenomenal job in giving you a sense of the injustices and the atrocities that were done at the hands of the company in India and China.
I also enjoyed the tidbits of narrative that the author throws in every now and then about how things in the present day resembles something that was done during EIC’s time. However, these are few and far between. So you may be disappointed if you read the title and expected more of how the EIC shaped the modern corporations.
While the book is definitely not the one I would recommend for a leisurely summer reading list, it is definitely a must read for anyone who is interested in general history or who is interested in learning about how the fate of modern western and eastern societies were shaped through commerce in the 17th and 18th century.
June 4, 2023
"إن الشركات لا تصحح أخطاءها بنفسها، وهو الأمر الذي لاحظه "إدموند بيرك" بصفة مباشرة. فلا يوجد في هيكلها ما يدعو إلى وقف الزيادة في توسع الأسواق، أو يبتعد عن التدخلات السياسية التي تتلاعب بالأسواق لمصلحة تلك الشركات. ولذلك فإن هناك حاجة ملحة لوجود آليات خارجية لمحاسبة الشركات على سوء تصرفها... ولكن عندما كُشف اللثام عن نظام الرشاوي واسع النطاق الذي كانت تديره الشركة، وحاول البرلمان توجيه الاتهام بالتقصير والخيانة لرئيس مجلس الملك، لم يكن من الملك سوى أن حل البرلمان.."
هكذا هي الحياة السياسية والاقتصادية منذ عصر شركة الهند الشرقية حتى اليوم، إن كان رأس المال والاستثمار سعيدا، فليذهب باقي العالم إلى الجحيم.
كتاب مؤسف، يشرح بالتفصيل قصة صعود شركة الهند الشرقية ومقاومتها لجارتها الشركة الهولندية ثم سيطرتها على الأسواق، مرورا بحروب الشاي والمنسوجات والأفيون والمحاولات البائسة لمقاومة فساد الشركة في الهند وخارجها. وأخيرا، انهيار الشركة واقتصار دورها لتكون ممثلة للإمبراطورية البريطانية في الهند، قبل بداية الاستعمار الصريح للهند.
الكتاب كثير التفاصيل ويقفز بين التواريخ أحيانا لشرح الأحداث المترابطة في حياة الشركة، مما يثير بعض الارتباك أثناء القراءة.
ترجمة جيدة يبدو فيها المجهود المبذول، رغم بعض الأخطاء، إلى جانب التعليقات الهامشية الغاضبة أحيانا من سلوكيات مسؤولي الشركة والقيم الاستعمارية السائدة.
هكذا هي الحياة السياسية والاقتصادية منذ عصر شركة الهند الشرقية حتى اليوم، إن كان رأس المال والاستثمار سعيدا، فليذهب باقي العالم إلى الجحيم.
كتاب مؤسف، يشرح بالتفصيل قصة صعود شركة الهند الشرقية ومقاومتها لجارتها الشركة الهولندية ثم سيطرتها على الأسواق، مرورا بحروب الشاي والمنسوجات والأفيون والمحاولات البائسة لمقاومة فساد الشركة في الهند وخارجها. وأخيرا، انهيار الشركة واقتصار دورها لتكون ممثلة للإمبراطورية البريطانية في الهند، قبل بداية الاستعمار الصريح للهند.
الكتاب كثير التفاصيل ويقفز بين التواريخ أحيانا لشرح الأحداث المترابطة في حياة الشركة، مما يثير بعض الارتباك أثناء القراءة.
ترجمة جيدة يبدو فيها المجهود المبذول، رغم بعض الأخطاء، إلى جانب التعليقات الهامشية الغاضبة أحيانا من سلوكيات مسؤولي الشركة والقيم الاستعمارية السائدة.
January 24, 2018
Historical non-fiction worth every moment spent reading it. A huge list of speeches and books have been added to my list as a by-product of reading this book. This book itself serves as a good summary of the whole thing.
The writing might have been a bit more coherent and the author should have chosen to move chronologically forward from 1600, tracing the company's history. Instead, Robins skips around here and there, often talking about signs of Indian nationalism in 1806 while talking about the EIC in 1850s but never having mentioned anything about it before. Owing to all this, the book is disorienting, but nothing a little more time spent can't remedy.
I have seen the Victoria Memorial in Kolkata before, but I look forward to returning there: informed of what really transpired, with a list of the atrocities that Clive committed, that Curzon chose to memorialize and Queen Victoria chose to stand silently by.
The writing might have been a bit more coherent and the author should have chosen to move chronologically forward from 1600, tracing the company's history. Instead, Robins skips around here and there, often talking about signs of Indian nationalism in 1806 while talking about the EIC in 1850s but never having mentioned anything about it before. Owing to all this, the book is disorienting, but nothing a little more time spent can't remedy.
I have seen the Victoria Memorial in Kolkata before, but I look forward to returning there: informed of what really transpired, with a list of the atrocities that Clive committed, that Curzon chose to memorialize and Queen Victoria chose to stand silently by.
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