That summer, the attacks on the Company took many forms. Some accused the Company of near-genocide in India; others of corrupting Parliament; others again focused on the social mountaineering of the returned Nabobs, with their dripping Indian diamonds, their newly bought estates and their rotten boroughs. Many raised the valid point that a private corporation enjoying a government trading monopoly ought not to be running an overseas empire: ‘Trade and the Sword ought not to be managed by the same people,’ wrote Arthur Young in a widely circulated pamphlet. ‘Barter and exchange is the business
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