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Title: BOOK REVIEW A law unto itself The Corporation that Changed the World
Source:
Asia Times
URL Source: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/IA27Dj01.html
Published: Jan 29, 2007
Author: Sreeram Chaulia /
Post Date: 2007-01-29 17:19:34 by swarthyguy
Keywords: None
Views: 304
Comments: 19
Jan 27, 2007 Page 1 of 2 BOOK REVIEW A law unto itself The Corporation That Changed the World by Nick Robins Reviewed by Sreeram Chaulia The British East India Company was a colossus responsible for the creation of the iniquitous modern world. Historian Nick Robins' trenchant new history of this giant re-examines the world's most powerful corporation during the Age of the Enlightenment in terms of its shadow over the global economy of today. It is an attempt to expose its destructive legacy so that future interactions between Western corporations and Asian countries are based on principles of fairness. From the 17th to the 19th century, the East India Company shocked its age with executive malpractice, stock-market excesses and human oppression, outdoing the felons of our times such as Enron. Its contemporaries across the political spectrum saw the "Company" as an overbearing and fundamentally problematic institution. Karl Marx called it the standard bearer of Britain's "moneyocracy". Adam Smith, the economist deeply suspicious of mighty corporations, was horrified at the way in which the Company "oppresses and domineers" in India. Edmund Burke, the father of modern conservatism, declared India to be "radically and irretrievably ruined through the Company's continual drain of wealth". Established in 1600 by royal charter, the Company's operations stretched from the Atlantic Ocean to India, Southeast Asia, China and Japan. Colonial rule in India was the eventual outcome of the Company's forays, but its ultimate purpose was profit-making with an eye to shareholders and the annual dividend in London. Personal and private profits were the abiding motives of this Company, which "reversed the centuries-old flow of wealth from West to East and engineered a great switch in global development" (p 7). Robins challenges romantic reinterpretations of the Company's past, now under way in Britain, for ignoring the abuse, misery, devastation and plunder that marked its presence in India. His point is that the Company should be assessed on the basis of its extortion, corruption and impunity rather than peripheral contributions to "discovering" Oriental culture Poster Comment: Nothing new under the sun......
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#2. To: swarthyguy (#0)
I don't think the East India Company was a corporation, was it? If memory serves, Blackstone's chapter on corporations focuses on things like municipalities and universities, not businesses. Back in the eighteenth century, I don't think businesses enjoyed limited liability.
It was a corporation, with stockholders. And, it is not an accident that it came into being at approximately the same time as the Bank of England. As to corporations in that day and age, do a little study on the Rochechilds, and one of the foundations of the their (British) wealth is the slight of hand that (do not remember his name at the moment) pulled off right after the Battle of Waterloo, when he spread a false rumor that Napoleon had won (he kjnew better, because he had agents waiting for news in France), and the British stock market crashed (that is correct, there was a very well developed stock market, and this was in the very early 1700s). He bought up tens of thousands of Pounds Sterling stock for pennies, and the rest, as they say, is history. And yes, of course, the corporations dealt in many more things besides these, but these were the BIG money makers, just as drugs are today as well. And sugar, in that day and age, was well recognized as an addictive drug. The sister to this corporation was the British West Indies Corporation, which dealt in slaves for the West Indies (Caribbian) and sugar, while the British East Indies Co. dealt in Opium, tea and silver stolen from the Chinese (this was the direct cause of the Boxer rebellion in China, where United States troops were used for the first time to protect the drug trade).
The British East India Company was indeed a joint stock company, with shareholders. But joint stock companies differ from corporations, most notably in not having limited liability. Edit: I didn't read that Wikipedia piece on joint stock companies carefully enough. Apparently I was wrong, and joint stock companies did indeed have limited liability.
It really is a fascinating story..... In one sense, India dropped into the Britisher's laps like a piece of overripe fruit. One could blame the Dutch; in Ambon, Indonesia in 1592 or thereabouts, the Dutch, challenged by upstart Britishers for the vaunted Spice Islands trade, proceeded to massacre and torture the crews of a couple of English ships for encroaching on what they felt was their turf. The British, spooked by Dutch savagery(!), moved on to greener pastures, Inja.
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#4. To: aristeides, swarthyguy, lodwick, all (#2)
I don't think the East India Company was a corporation,
#5. To: richard9151 (#4)
(Edited)
#15. To: aristeides (#5)
Replies to Comment # 15.