Quotes About East India Company

Even as the Virginia Company presented its plans to the king—through his privy council—for royal approval, Smythe set out to promote the company's new venture. Sir Thomas (he was knighted by James I soon after the king took the throne) was one of England's wealthiest and most powerful merchants. He had long been involved in foreign trade with Russia, through the Muscovy Company, and he was the head of the East India Company. He was also a marketing genius.

The English were luckier in their drugs, too: long habituated to alcohol, they were roused from inebriation in the seventeenth century by American tobacco, Arabic coffee and Chinese tea. They got the stimulation of the coffee house, part café, part stock exchange, part chat-room;47 the Chinese ended up with the lethargy of the opium den, their pipes filled by none other than the British East India Company.

was true of the English East India Company, the VOC's biggest challenge was the principal-agent problem: the tendency of its men on the spot to trade on their own account, bungle transactions or simply defraud the company.

The Queen coined new money specifically for the Company {East India}. Minted at the Tower of London and bearing her arms on one side and a portcullis on the other, it soon became know as the portcullis money. She also granted the merchants a new flag which, with its blue field and background of thirteen red and white stripes, prefigured the one adopted by the Thirteen Colonies of America some 175 years later.

Dutch governor of Batavia, Jan Pieterszoon Coen, came up with an alternative plan. Coen founded Batavia, on the island of Java, as the Dutch East India Company's new capital in 1618. In 1621 he sailed to Banda with a fleet and proceeded to massacre almost the entire population of the islands, probably about fifteen thousand people.

As far back as 1602, Dutch people were buying shares in the United Dutch East India Company. This was the world's first popular stock, sold on the world's first popular stock exchange, which operated from a bridge over the Amstel River in Amsterdam. Crowds of eager investors gathered there, trying to get the attention of a stockbroker, and when their pushing and shoving got out of hand, police were called in to restore the peace.

The East India Company created the Dutch empire in Indonesia by means of brute force combined with economic pressure.

Rabindranath Tagore's family, connected to the British East India Company right from the settling of Calcutta in 1690, was a prominent beneficiary of the British economic and cultural reshaping of India. His grandfather was the first big local businessman of British India, and socialized with Queen Victoria and other notables on his trips to Europe; his elder brother was the first Indian to be admitted by the British into the Indian Civil Service (ICS).

Addiction among its southern population was a serious and growing social problem for the Qing dynasty. Although the Portuguese had been the main suppliers, the trafficking burgeoned when Britain's East India Company entered the business. The East India Company, a privately capitalised firm but operating with the full mandate and