Quotes About East India Company

From this point of view, Zafar could certainly be tried as a defeated enemy king; but he had never been a subject, and so could not possibly be called a rebel guilty of treason. Instead, from a legal point of view, a good case could be made that it was the East India Company which was the real rebel, guilty of revolt against a feudal superior to whom it had sworn allegiance for nearly a century.

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 tracts of southern Asia.

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 tracts of southern Asia. It almost certainly remains the supreme act of corporate violence in world history.

On 18 December 1772, the directors of the East India Company were summoned to the Houses of Parliament. There they were fiercely examined by General John Burgoyne's Select Committee, which had been set up to investigate EIC abuses in India, and particularly accusations of embezzlement and bribe-taking. Charges of corruption were levelled against several EIC servants

EIC gradually drawn into the Mughal nexus. Over the next 200 years it would slowly learn to operate skilfully within the Mughal system and to do so in the Mughal idiom, with its officials learning good Persian, the correct court etiquette, the art of bribing the right officials and, in time, outmanoeuvring all their rivals – Portuguese, Dutch and French – for imperial

It was not the British government that began seizing great chunks of India in the mid-eighteenth century, but a dangerously unregulated private company headquartered in one small office, five windows wide, in London, and managed in India by a violent, utterly ruthless and intermittently mentally unstable corporate predator – Clive.

Indeed, one of the principal fears of the American Patriots in the run-up to the war was that Parliament would unleash the East India Company in the Americas to loot there as it had done in India.

The EIC was, as one of its directors admitted, 'an empire within an empire', with the power to make war or peace anywhere in the East.

The Company's conquest of India almost certainly remains the supreme act of corporate violence in world history. For all the power wielded today by the world's largest corporations – whether ExxonMobil, Walmart or Google – they are tame beasts compared with the ravaging territorial appetites of the militarised East India Company.

In this way the EIC prefigured by 300 years the response of many modern corporates when faced with the regulating and taxation demands of the nation state: treat us with indulgence, they whisper, or we take our business elsewhere.

Yet, like more recent mega-corporations, the EIC proved at once hugely powerful and oddly vulnerable to economic uncertainty. Only seven years after the granting of the Diwani, when the Company's share price had doubled overnight after it acquired the wealth of the treasury of Bengal, the East India bubble burst after plunder and famine in Bengal led to massive shortfalls in expected land revenues.

in total around £1,238,575 was given by Mir Jafar to the Company and its servants, which included at least £170,000 personally for Clive. In all, perhaps £2.5 million was given to the Company by the Murshidabad Nawabs in the eight years between 1757 and 1765 as 'political gifts'. Clive himself estimated the total payments as closer to 'three million sterling'.

We have outdone the Spaniards in Peru! They were at least butchers on a religious principle, however diabolical their zeal. We have murdered, deposed, plundered, usurped – say what think you of the famine in Bengal, in which three millions perished, being caused by a monopoly of the provisions by the servants of the East India Company?

The East India Company limped on in its amputated form for another fifteen years when its charter expired, finally quietly shutting down in 1874, 'with less fanfare,' noted one commentator, 'than a regional railway bankruptcy'. Its brand name is now owned by two brothers from Kerala who use it to sell 'condiments and fine foods' from a showroom in London's West End.

This great oracle of the East India Company himself admits that, if there is no power vested in the Court of Directors but that of the patronage, there is really no government vested in them at all.

Furthermore, the East India Company showed how government and commercial enterprises of the same nation can make common cause in expanding commerce and culture across borders. Indeed, it demonstrated that when it comes to globalization, the line between the state and its companies can be thin or invisible.

The East India Company's domination of the Indian economy was based on its private army.

The East India Company established a monopoly over the production of opium, shortly after taking over Bengal.

While England may have lost control over its colonies, the British East India Company simply changed its name—a simple d.b.a.—and kept on trading.

The India that the British East India Company conquered was no primitive or barren land, but the glittering jewel of the medieval world.

Taxation and the general conditions of life under the East India Company were so unpleasant and onerous that, as I have mentioned earlier, as many as could fled their traditional homes for refuge in domains beyond the Company's remit, whereas the migration of Indian peasants from the 'native states' to British India was unheard of through most of the nineteenth century.

Apparently Doctor Thomas went to Charles Grant in London," continued Andrew Fuller, uncharacteristically subdued. "Grant is now one of the Directors of the East India Company. Thomas was refused licenses. Apparently the government is no longer indifferent to missionaries but hostile...

At the decisive Boston town meeting of Nov. 29, 1773, while ships loaded with cargo from the East India Company idled in the harbor, Thomas Young was the first and only speaker to propose that the best way to protest the new Tea Act was to dump the tea into the water.

In 1770, the British East India Company – the world's first multinational corporation – increased the taxes it forcibly collected on crops, and ten million people, a third of Bengal, starved to death.