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>The East India Company was an exploitative, ruthless and dishonorable organization that put millions of people in the Indian subcontinent to untold suffering.

The history is full of exploitative, ruthless and dishonorable organizations that barely had shards of success of the British East India company. So they obviously did something right.

"Rommel, you magnificent bastard, I read your book"

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What they did in India was mostly the result of its field team (middle management) taking things into its own hands and operating almost completely free from oversight. The EIC was only supposed to establish trade between the two continents, instead it became a rogue mercenary power-broker between the subcontinent's fragmented pseudo-kingdoms and ended up taking control of all South Asia.

From whatever reports the upper management and regulators could scrape up at that time, there were many voices raised against the mayhem this enterprise was causing, but all complaints were quickly shot down after they saw the kind of riches the company was sending back home.

The BEIC was only sporadically profitable and required frequent British government intervention to keep it afloat. Corruption was widespread and its armies were forced to put down almost constant insurgences.

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