East India Company: #1 - Origin Story


How could a single private company, the East India Company (EIC), have conquered all of India? If you’re looking for a simple answer, then avoid William Dalrymple’s The Anarchy. But if you like superbly researched, insanely detailed narratives (even if they are super-long), then the book is just for you.

Right in the introduction, Dalrymple sets the expectations straight:
“It is always a mistake to read history backwards… (It’s only) in retrospect, the rise of the company seems almost inevitable.”
So he starts at the beginning. Formed in 1599, it was a time when England was a “relatively impoverished” country. Those who invested in the company were “mariners and adventurers”, men better at piracy and looting than the “far more demanding skills of long-distance trade”. The success of the Dutch with their private company model made the British feel, “Huh, maybe we can do it too”.

The British Crown had few expectations of success when the dominant players were Spain, Portugal and Holland, but were attracted by the possibility of tax revenue. So they issued a royal charter to make the proposition attractive: no custom duties (first 6 voyages), a monopoly on trade to the vaguely defined East Indies (15 years). Since nobody expected much, the charter was quite vague and its interpretation would be changed by the EIC over the next 150 years…

When they landed in India, they established Fort St George near what is now called Madras. They declared the area a no-customs zone for 30 years, thus making it into magnet for artisans and traders, soon becoming a city of 40,000. As long as trade happened, the EIC’s profits grew exponentially. But when recurring tiffs over trade happened, it hit profits leading to the first attempt by the EIC to take on the Mughals… and suffer a crushing defeat. The Mughal emperor eventually forgave them in 1690 and restored their trading privileges.

Given that Aurungzeb was a religious bigot, he alienated the Hindus. And so they would rise in revolt, which he would then put down viciously setting off another round of resentment. Thus, by the time Aurungzeb died in 1707, the backbone of his army (Rajputs) was barely on the Mughals’ side anymore, the military campaigns were bleeding the empire, and the insurgent Marathas had gotten better with “practice” at resistance and guerilla warfare:
“(The Mughal empire) shattered and fragmented like a mirror… leaving in its place glinting shards of mosaic of smaller and more vulnerable successor states.”
And:
“As authority disintegrated, everyone took measures for their own protection and India became decentralized and disjointed.”
A succession struggle after Aurungzeb didn’t help matters. Anarchy is never good for trade. As the risks to their profits rose, the EIC wondered if it had to now play a very active (read military) role in establishing stable rule for Bengal, the area they operated in…

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more