Before the East India Company | Hacker News Reader

Before the East India Company

laphamsquarterly.org

128 pointsbenbreen60 comments

Timely, I'll add it to my reading list. I've just (yesterday) finished "The Corporation that Changed the World"[1], that combines history of EIC and current (well, 2006) corporations and globalisation. It jumps about a fair bit (intentionally), as he draws lessons from the now mostly repealed regulations to stop EIC happening again, but well worth a read overall. Not afraid to dig into history of an utterly out of control corporation. A darker rendering than others I have seen with some surprises. Might have been even more interesting had he published a year after the 08 banking crisis.

We've failed to remember Adam Smith's take on the corporation into modernity, just the Wealth of Nations. One for me to dig into further, as his actual views on companies don't seem to match up with what we think he thought. :)

There were calls to wind EIC in, or wind it up going all the way back to the 1610s, and to give India back almost from the moment they arrived. Which continued constantly until it was finally forcibly wound up. All those dodgy stock splits, Theranos and Enron type frauds, countries wondering how to tame the out of control tech titan? EIC got there first. Just as willing to defraud Britain as anywhere else. As the first English joint stock company. As a near independent sovereign corporate with powers of justice, war and currency.

Ain't nothing new then.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/844131.The_Corporation_T...

Imagine a company like Google had an army that invaded countries that would not deregulate privacy. That would be a modern equivalent to the HEIC. It would suck.

The Murdochs’ News Corp is arguably in that position already, albeit with the one extra step of needing to lobby politicians whose constituents are already in its thrall.

https://www.google.com/search?q=murdoch+iraq

United Fruit Company (present day Chiquita) has done messed up things.

Was literally thinking about buying a book about EIC. Not interested in the political perspective would rather have a historians. Would it still be a good book or are there other suggestions?

Overall recommended. I enjoyed it, and it left a few trails to follow - like the surprise views of Adam Smith as I mentioned in OP. If you don't know the general history of empire and the age, or want more of a "The EIC and how India was colonised" and the impact on lives, the focus might be frustrating. Dry in places. Could be longer - it's about 1 page per year of EIC!

Mini review:

Author is a prof at LSE who's written other histories. It's light on some of the surrounding events, as it's focused on the company and the money. He threads forward periodically, to how some of those company things relate to a modern multinational, or a corporate survivor of that age or some regulation. Mostly that works, occasionally it's a bit jarring. Overall it's a feature to see what we think as modern capitalism getting out of control now, were just as out of control way back when.

Focusing on the company, you don't get a great deal of depth of some of the events, e.g. The Boston Tea Party, and the preceding tea boycott, just the company role in causing it and how they made it worse. You get to find out the EIC's part had English merchants writing to their colonial cousins urging them to restart the boycott - that had been petering out. You get to find out Adam Smith felt the invisible hand should be paired with an invisible fist of regulation, and really quite disliked the company. You won't get the depth of the events and consequences that those choices, share splits, or chasing dividends caused, or the impact on the Indians and company workers they were betraying.

It's opinionated. I think it's all the better for that. The couple of others I have read on EIC or Clive have perhaps been easier reads, but could fall into the trap of "they did terrible things, but it was another age, so...". Then give you the more of the events without the detail of the evil villain plotting the next way to line their pockets. Yet give you more a sense of the impact on regions.

There is a good deal on Clive, Plassey and Bengal. By the time you're done you get a visceral sense of why, in his later days, Robert Clive was one of the most hated figures in England (and no doubt India).

The bit about the bait and switch contract they gave Amirchand (or Omichand, as they know him in Bengal), is pretty jaw dropping.

> In the course of this, in what seemed to many of its wisest minds an act of willful self-harm, the English had unilaterally cut themselves off from the most powerful institution in Europe, so turning themselves in the eyes of many Europeans into something of a pariah nation. As a result, isolated from their baffled neighbors, the English were forced to scour the globe for new markets and commercial openings further afield. This they did with a piratical enthusiasm.

Cor, perhaps it was deliberate, but I was so sure this was leading up to a comment on the current political climate.

My wife and I used to debate which were the most important inventions in history but both of us agreed that the joint stock corporation was in the top 5 along with the wheel, gear, and control of fire.

A gear is equivalent to a wheel with a large coefficient of friction. Is there a particular reason you consider it to be a separate invention?

invention (n): the action of inventing something, typically a process or device.

device (n): a thing made or adapted for a particular purpose

The purpose is different.

Sure; I'm arguing that the leap necessary between wheels and gears isn't really all that huge. A gear is basically just a wheel–regardless of whether you think it's a separate invention or not it's not really that impressive as going from nothing to the wheel.

Gears provide mechanical advantage -- i.e. gear ratio.

So do two wheels of different sizes.

A gear is a lever which uses a wheel to apply continuous leverage - I would say using wheels as force multipliers is a considerable jump in cleverness than just using them to roll around

I'm sure it's more about infinite lever/ratio than the teeth.

Gear drives don't work with flat wheels, you have to have belts or elaborate movable axles to keep them pressured together.

Metal gears are also considerably difficult to make reliability. I'd be interested in a history of the gear.

I read a surprisingly enjoyable book you might like on the history of double entry accounting, developed in the markets of Venice in the 16th century as Arabic numerals began replacing Roman numerals for their easier arithmetic. More thorough month to month bookkeeping of profits and losses was a precursor to anyone investing their own money in someone else’s business. Before that it was just Royal families funding risky excursions.

The book is “Double Entry” by Jane Gleeson-White

Wow that sounds like it would be a great conversation to be a part of. Why do you put joint stock corporations as number one though ?

One of the nice things about marrying someone from a very different background yet with many shared interests is that life together can be really fun. That particular conversation (what are the most important inventions) probably spanned more than a decade. It was not the only such. Sometimes a topic would go into abeyance and then one of us would read something that would reignite the topic for a while.

I don't think either of us would have ranked the JSC #1, but in the top 5 or so, sure. It's not like one can definitively generate a proper ranking, but some things are clearly top 25 but not top 10, for example.

How can you include those but not insurance?

Insurance is essentially gambling, which has existed since ancient times, backed by a too-big-to-fail institution, which is made possible in modernity by the joint stock corporation.

Lloyds was historically structured as a partnership, specificity not a limited liability structure.

My vote is for moveable type: Suddenly Bibles became cheap and people could question the structure of the church. News papers came and people could debate the structure of the state. Scientific books and journals.

I recommend a podcast from the World Service called "50 Things that Made the modern Economy". They are short (8min) episodes, by Tim Harford (the Undercover Economist).

Some of them are the obvious, but there are also many less so items that have had surprising impacts. Obviously they are short, so not lots of details, but they always cite their sources at the end if you are inspired to read more.

We've been debating this recently, and I'm curious your take: is a corporation a form of artificial intelligence?

you might appreciate Charles Stross' take on the situation

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/12/invaders...

No, I consider a corporation simply to be a machine operated by people.

I do find it disturbing that if you run my over while driving a car you, not the car, is punished while if a corporation knowingly poisons people the people “driving” it are rarely punished at all.

What is the fifth one?

Writing, iirc.

For a more honest perspective, see;

"Empire in Asia: How We Came by It. A Book of Confessions" by W.M.Torrens

https://archive.org/details/empireinasiahow00torrgoog/page/n...

For more honest than what, exactly? Did you read the linked article? Your comment sounds like reactionary nationalism

Hmm... You seem to be triggered by my dismissal of Dalrymple. And yes, i have read the article (and a even better excerpt in The Guardian earlier).

The problem i have is that, he is too far removed from that time and too much inclined to keep things "nice" rather than calling a spade a spade. You cannot look at the actions of the EIC from a purely mercantile viewpoint. You have to acknowledge the inherent racism and rampant thievery with a complete absence of ethics/morals which were disguised under the garb of "Trade" and "Civilization". There is a reason for the existence of the phrase "Perfidious Albion" to describe British treachery over the ages.

William McCullagh Torrens was an enlightened Irish Politician of the 19th century when India was still suffering under Colonialism. He wrote in detail about how the Indian Kings/Nawabs were lied to, duped and fleeced of their wealth and power via promises made but never kept. There was absolutely no regard for the common man's life. He writes (page 7);

"Our duty is not to judge others, but ourselves; to beware of covetousness and of being betrayed into passive complicity by unpardonable laziness to seek, or still more despicable cowardice to own, the truth ... We are accountable, as a free-speaking and freely represented people, for all that may hereafter be done in our name; and if upon investigation, which with honour and in conscience we are not at liberty to elude, we are convinced ... that a great debt of reparation is due to India by this country, we are bound to use every just and fair occasion to press for restitution..."

In this age of expediency, no British Historian/Journalist would ever utter such a thing. I highly recommend going through the Torrens book.

For some general Edification; here is Shashi Tharoor's longer speech "Looking back at the British Raj in India" -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OB5ykS-_-CI

I recommend reading this book as a supplement. https://www.amazon.in/Inglorious-Empire-What-British-India/d...

India was one of the richest countries in the world, if not the richest before the East India company and Islamic, Dutch and British invasions. It used clay pots, not plastics and its population of 200 milloin plus had plenty of fertile land to develop agriculture and cotton - the oil of the time. It was the land that gave the world yoga, Ayurveda and the numerical system. Not to mention Indian food. Britain called it the jewel in the crown for this reason, no other country gave it more wealth than India. You could argue that the British are incredibly innefficient in one regard that they survived it's meagre population of 10 million people off the back of this and made them wealthy whilst making a larger country impoverished. India didn't need the industrial revolution, Britain did. India had natural leaf plates, Britain's and west gave it an industry that it now has to rely on which is driven by coal production and climate change driving industries. What a mess

No idea why this is getting downvoted, as it presents a historically correct fact. India's GDP % before the British invasion was huge:

https://www.quora.com/How-much-was-Indias-GDP-before-the-Bri...

Probably because it’s a bit misleading as your link shows. GDP per capita was low everywhere, barely above subsistence. Their % dropped when others started growing rapidly.

Nope, India/China's GDP dropped upon invasion and decimation of trade routes by the Western countries with the GDP gain.

People underestimate how key the US was to the opium trade in China. The US was a bigger trader than the UK/Germany/France combined at one point.

The data linked doesn’t indicate that was the primary reason, there is a small dip in GDP per capita (-10%?) for India/China but it was basically flat.

Looks like before industrialization the richest countries were only moderately better off. Once it began to take off that gap became enormous.

Yes the data linked is limited in scope.

While the parent comment is heated and not factually incorrect, the reason for the down-votes has to do with the willful ignorance of the west towards some of the worst atrocities committed by places from where it derives its value systems from.

The Nazis were the bad guys and they are gone. The Soviets and USSR were the baddies after, and they are gone.

The west and esp. US+UK pride themselves in never having been that evil. In the mean time, the EIC committed atrocities on a scale rivaling those exact boogeymen of the West.

Accepting the crimes of the EIC, would have them facing some of the worst Hypocrisy of their society, and that isn't the most fun thing.

> It used clay pots, not plastics and its population of 200 milloin plus had plenty of fertile land to develop agriculture and cotton - the oil of the time.

It's not like Europe was using it either: the development of what we'd call plastic happened largely during the late 19th century leading into the 20th century.

The point being made is that systems existed for the manufacture of consumer goods required by millions of people without the need for modern fossil fuel based technologies that are wrecking the planet. On a first glance, it seems like a valid point to me.

They exist now; kulhars were mandated by a previous railways minister but I'm not sure about their present uptake

He's right about India being the richest, it's estimated that all together the British stole $45 trillion in wealth from India. I imagine the amount stolen from China is of similar magnitude.

https://cup.columbia.edu/book/agrarian-and-other-histories/9...

Summary Articles on this rapacious thievery;

https://www.livemint.com/Companies/HNZA71LNVNNVXQ1eaIKu6M/Br...

https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/britain-stole-45-t...

I'll stick this here for anyone wanting to know the real history of EIC and not some fancy, all-so-rosy version presented by EIC apologists. As a constant reminder of the atrocities, plunder, destruction of culture and tradition carried by EIC in the garb of "Industrialization" and establishing "Democracy" for which Britain has never apologized:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7CW7S0zxv4

A great podcast on the same : https://www.behindthebastards.com/podcasts/part-one-the-most...