Some things to learn from the British East India Company's growth and demise
strangeloopcanon.com
strangeloopcanon.com
On another point: "Eventually they created the East India College to help educate the clerks, teaching all the essentials - “On the curriculum: history, the classics, law – and Hindustani, Sanskrit, Persian and Telugu.”": that is a pretty intense curriculum, even accounting for the leg-up afforded by the far broader state of classical education back then - I can't imagine too many modern students not being intimidated by it.
I would be surprised if all the four languages were taught to everyone - one would expect Hindustani/Persian to be more useful in the North and Telegu would have been more useful in the South. Sanskrit being a mother language is generally useful.
True. But of all South Indian languages, Telugu shows the most Sanskrit influence.
> Sankrit is alien to Indian Sub-continent
This is a bizzare assertion. Classical Sanskrit was developed in India. That is likely true of even archaic forms of Sanskrit and the Prakrit substrate.
At the beginning sure, but the monarchy took over and controlled it to milk its worth (1). The Regulating Act in 1773 was step 1, followed by Pitt’s India Act in 1784 (2):
> the act provided for the appointment of a Board of Control, and provided for a joint government of British India by the Company and the Crown with the government holding the ultimate authority
Either way, given how monarchy and democracy progressed, I find it ridiculous how often this false “separation” of the East India Company and the British Empire is bought up.
1 - https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/charter-granted-...
Not even at the beginning. It’s laughable to intimate that a Crown monopoly and something exclusively owned by members of Parliament is anything but state-owned enterprise. The Company even struggled for the first half of the 17th century until Parliament pursued more heavy-handed mercantilism after the English Civil War.
The author writes: “one of the exemplars of administration that found success was the British East India Company. They ruled over an empire, created an empire in point of fact, and seemed to only be dislodged through the Queen’s velvet glove smacking them on the head, dissolving it in 1874 by government decree.”
This take is painfully revisionist. The Company was already suffering rot by the late 1700s culminating in the impeachment of Warren Hastings and later the revocation of its monopoly in 1813 (when Britain turned to more “liberal” economic policy). People like Adam Smith, Thomas Paine, and Edmund Burke throughly condemned a corrupt political system that kept this zombie entity alive.
For a more realistic overview, especially on the intimate links between government and the Company, I recommend Nick Robins’ The Corporation that Ruled the World and Priya Satia’s Empire of Guns.
Depends which government - the Spanish and to a lesser degree the French yes, but for instance the Dutch used a structure pretty close to the British one, with the East India (VOC) company and West India company (WIC).
Are they, though? There are points well short of fascism where they exhibit significant similarity and cooperation. The idea of government as the remedy to every problem created by corporations is as overly simplistic as the idea of government ruining everything that corporations create. Either can be oppressive. Either can be beneficial. Some level of cooperation between the two can even be a good thing, as e.g. when corporations were first created to do things that were too expensive for one and too risky for the other. The similarities between organizations of similar size - also including churches, universities, and so on - overwhelm their differences. I would say corporations and governments are two wings of the same bird, and should remain that way, if the body in between is to be a healthy economy as part of a healthy society.
P.S. Yes, I'm well aware that the two exist for different purposes and answer to different kinds of authority. Don't even bother. The point is that their structure, behavior, and actual effect on society are not so dissimilar as you make them out to be.
From my perspective, there is no moral foundation for the existence of any governance system, except self-governance. Governance should NOT have a monopoly on force, they cannot legalise taxation, or the initiation of attacks on individuals, or license people/businesses, etc. These actions are possible on account of governmental force (in the form of police and military) it is not a moral right.
"Self governance" is just another word for anarchy, which leads inevitably (and often quickly) back into autocracy. No thanks. Not even worth engaging with further.
> In a review published in the Cambridge Review of International Affairs, economic historian, Tirthankar Roy, a faculty at the London School of Economics criticized the book. He noted that "Tharoor makes his case with passion and plain good writing. The facts cited in the book are beyond dispute. The story is meant to be blood-curdling and the colourful language — including liberal use of “depredation,” “loot,” “rapaciousness,” “vicious,” “brutality,” “plunder” and “extraction” — produces that effect. Like a religious text, it tells a straight and narrow story with the zeal of a holy warrior. Yet none of these qualities makes the interpretation wrong, however. Few professional historians think that the British Empire ruled India with India’s best interests in mind.
> Another review of Inglorious Empire, published in the Literary Review, by historian John Keay, whose many writings on India include India: A History, applauds Tharoor for "tackling an impossibly contentious subject". However, he deplores the fact that "his moral venom sometimes clouds his own judgement" and notes that many of Tharoor's statistics are very seriously out of date, many coming from the polemics contained in the American Will Durant's Story of Civilisation written in the 1930s, which itself drew on the even earlier work of the crusading American missionary Jabej T. Sutherland, author of India in Bondage.[9]
> A more detailed criticism of Tharoor's book and his use of statistics was set out by the writer of South Asian history Charles Allen in a lecture entitled Quis custodiet ipsos custodes: who owns Indian history? delivered to the Royal Society for Asian Affairs in London on 25 April 2018. A revised version was published in Asian Affairs under the revised title Who Owns India's History? A Critique of Shashi Tharoor's Inglorious Empire.
So these quotes don't convince me that this book was not "well researched".
I do take into account that Shashi Tharoor as I check on Wikipedia is a politician while born in UK he holds political positions in India - which convinces me that he has all the incentives to write book with "zeal of holy warrior".
Seems like adding link to Shashi wikipedia page and explaining who he is does much better job in showing that book might be more colorful than it should be.
Here's his famous short speech at the Oxford Union where he made a case for reparations from Britain for its excesses during its reign of the Indian subcontinent. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7CW7S0zxv4
Actually eloquent speakers and writers are known for pushing their political agenda and furthering their influence at all costs.
I might be cynical but being member of parliament or being ambassador - just like Shania Twain - That Don't Impress Me Much.
I will give you an example of how the UK manipulates the facts for consumption of its citizens. After Shashi Tharoor's Oxford Union speech went viral, the BBC published an article by a leading UK "historian". This guy claimed that he never "heard" of the UK damaging hands of Indian handloom weavers to destroy the Indian textile industry to promote it's own! This shows how the UK historians write history. I would urge citizens of UK to visit the former colonies of the UK and talk to the locals and get their facts. It is very well known both within the UK historian community and across the world that the UK history is whitewashed to hide lots of misdeeds of the past. Unfortunately that does not help the country to move forward as most of the country still thinks that they did good by occupying other countries.
What happened when telegraph cables reached India? I’m assuming that’s when the British government ousted it aside, which would be an interesting point.
Minor point there were two colleges, civil and military.
The civil is close by to where I live in Hailey, Herts:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company_College
There was also a military one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addiscombe_Military_Seminary
Im aghast at the amount of praying going on, considering how the company operated it might as well be spelt preying.
First telegram between England and India was 13 years later: https://m.economictimes.com/documents-reveal-contents-of-the...
And that India was fabulously, spectacularly wealthy… like all of the gold and silver (taken and squandered in China by the Spanish) from the Americas plus some to spare.
"The Anarchy" and Kennedy's "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers" make for great reading for the armchair historian.
What goes around comes around.
The article reads as if the company was run very efficiently, yet it made India one of the richest countries in the world, with a population of 300 million very poor and in return transferred wealth to London, making a much smaller population richer but only for a shorter period. This is very inefficient, as they looted the trades and spices which helped Indians live within their means and instead created industries that were propped up on instable economics.
Ah, perhaps then it is appropriate to praise them in tech startup related spaces.
> There’s an increase in focus on assessments (and punishment) after the fact rather than permission to perform an action
A modern variant (also quoted by Grace Hopper, btw) is "better to beg forgiveness than ask permission."
Was EIC really independent of the government? There's our answer right there: EIC didn't have to ask permission for most of what they did, but they knew they'd be begging forgiveness if it turned out badly. So they didn't need to ask what the ruling class would think, because they went to the same schools.
We really should have a more critical lense of colonialism nowadays and abandon the badly aging romanticization of it.
And even then you’re comparing an empire that was quite openly exploiting who they viewed as lesser people, versus governments who devastated their own populations through good intentions.
(I also find it funny to see the top response criticizing the obviously Indian author for failing to talk about something other than war and famine. Folks love their poverty porn, huh?)
Funny. That's exactly how most people who keep talking about the Holodomor say the Soviet Union viewed the Kulaks.
> I also find it funny to see the top response criticizing the obviously Indian author for failing to talk about something other than war and famine.
He's not talking about "something other than war and famine", he's romanticizing a company that literally killed and oppressed millions of people in the history of his own country. He can simply not do that, without having to only talk about victimhood. Black Americans can talk about other things than how cotton plantations were a great business model actually without talking about how slavery was bad. It's just very odd to focus so much on the supposed positives of an overall extremely bad thing. This is very much a "I just want the trains to run on time" kind of situation.
I for one want to know how the East India Company managed to colonize a vastly more populous and historically wealthier civilization. There’s certainly lessons in there. After all, you can’t undo those things, but you can make the trains run on time. And the lives of Indians in the present would be better if the trains ran on time.
First, the article does plenty of throat clearing about those issues.
Second, empires are impressive. Can the French or British find things to admire about the Romans?
The statute of limitations have passed on those crimes since they took place in Antiquity.
> First, the article does plenty of throat clearing about those issues.
Please, he's practically drooling:
> While not quite Google cafeteria, the lunches and dinners served were exquisite! Free breakfasts in London, and on-site cooks (English, Portuguese and Indian) in factories, with plenty of alcohol to go around.
> If that’s not enough, if you were a senior officer you got a pretty great stipend to spend on entertaining others.
> Also, they had an incredibly sexy headquarter to work in (marble bas-reliefs, pipe organ of a tiger devouring a European and jewel-encrusted gold throne of the Sultan of Mysore Tipu). Even the warehouses were elegant and stylish in the City.
Europeans got over it even way back in antiquity. The Franks adopted the Roman language, religion (by then Christianity), and civil law and institutions. They didn’t seek to distance themselves from Roman empirical history.
There's a difference between looking at the BEIC to figure out how it managed to exist this long and looking at it to find "some things to learn" from it and using it as a model for building a successful business.
The very same can be said about the Russian empire/the USSR.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droughts_and_famines_in_Russia...
> And even then you’re comparing an empire that was quite openly exploiting who they viewed as lesser people, versus governments who devastated their own populations through good intentions.
Sorry, which one is the UK and which one is the USSR here?
... the author means that the latency between the UK and the remote offices was HIGH.
The East India Company was an exploitative, ruthless and dishonorable organization that put millions of people in the Indian subcontinent to untold suffering.
Perhaps, the takeaway is to learn NOT to do that?!
The answer to that question is public relations, or exploiting human psychology to get the turkeys to vote for Christmas.
Modern news events are illuminating from that perspective.
The history is full of exploitative, ruthless and dishonorable organizations that barely had shards of success of the British East India company. So they obviously did something right.
"Rommel, you magnificent bastard, I read your book"
From whatever reports the upper management and regulators could scrape up at that time, there were many voices raised against the mayhem this enterprise was causing, but all complaints were quickly shot down after they saw the kind of riches the company was sending back home.