The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire

by William Dalrymple

One of the very first Indian words to enter the English language was the Hindustani slang for plunder: loot.

The collecting of Mughal taxes was henceforth subcontracted to a powerful multinational corporation – whose revenue-collecting operations were protected by its own private army.

In many ways the East India Company was a model of commercial efficiency: one hundred years into its history, it had only thirty-five permanent employees in its head office. Nevertheless, that skeleton staff executed a corporate coup unparalleled in history: the military conquest, subjugation and plunder of vast

On 19 June 1773, Lord North’s bill passed its final reading by 47 votes to 15. The world’s first aggressive multinational corporation was saved by one of history’s first mega-bailouts, an early example of a nation state extracting, as its price for saving a failing corporation, the right to regulate and rein it in.

In America, the Patriots had turned on the King, partly as a result of government’s attempts to sell the stockpiles of East India Company tea, onto which was slapped British taxes: the Boston Tea Party, which opened the American War of Independence by dumping 90,000 pounds of EIC tea, worth £9,659 (over £1 million today), in Boston harbour, was in part provoked by fears that the Company might now be let loose on the thirteen colonies, much as it had been in Bengal.