The official report the following year, written by Edmund Burke, foresaw that the EIC’s financial problems could, potentially, ‘like a mill-stone, drag [the government] down into an unfathomable abyss … This cursed Company would, at last, like a viper, be the destruction of the country which fostered it at its bosom.’ But the East India Company really was too big to fail. So it was that the following year, in 1773, the world’s first aggressive multinational corporation was saved by one of history’s first mega-bailouts – the first example of a nation state extracting, as its price for saving a
...more
