East India Company

In order to create a British foothold in the lucrative Indian spice trade, which had been monopolized by Spain and Portugal up until that point, a private organization known as the British East India Company was established in December 1600. The business eventually rose to become the de facto colonial master of a vast portion of India and an incredibly potent tool of British empire in South Asia. The firm gradually lost its commercial monopoly and political authority due in part to widespread corruption, and the British crown nationalized its Indian holdings in 1858. By virtue of the East India Stock Dividend Redemption Act, it was formally liquidated in 1874. (1873).
# The East India Company used slave labor and smuggled slaves from West and East Africa, particularly Mozambique and Madagascar, to its possessions in India and Indonesia as well as to the island of St. Helena in the Atlantic Ocean throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. Although the East India Company's slave traffic was modest in compared to transatlantic slave-trading organizations like the Royal African Company, it was important to its ability to administer its remote areas that it transferred captives with specific knowledge and expertise.
# By 1800, the East India Company had its own force under control, with some 200,000 soldiers—more than twice as many as the British Army had at the time. The corporation utilized its armed force to impose terrible taxes, carry out officially approved looting, subjugate Indian governments and principalities with which it had previously entered into trading deals, and defend its economic exploitation of both skilled and unskilled Indian workers. The army of the company was notorious for its involvement in the unsuccessful Indian Uprising (also known as the Indian Mutiny) of 1857–1858. During this time, Indian soldiers working for the company led an armed uprising against their British superiors, which quickly gained support from the general public as a war for Indian independence. Both sides carried out atrocities over the more than a year of combat, including the slaughter of people, but ultimately the company's retaliations significantly outnumbered the rebels' bloodshed. The East India Company was effectively abolished in 1858 as a result of the uprising.
# The East India Company began selling opium to China in violation of the law to pay for its purchases of Indian tea and other items at the beginning of the 19th century. The First and Second Opium Wars (1839–42; 1856–60), which were both won by British soldiers, were sparked by Chinese opposition to that trade.
# The management of the organization was incredibly effective and cost-effective. The East India Company's first 20 years were spent operating out of the residence of its governor, Sir Thomas Smythe, with just six permanent employees. It had 35 permanent staff working in its modest London headquarters in 1700. With 159 regular employees in London, it ruled a wide dominion of millions of people in 1785.
# The firm's land revenues sharply decreased after several years of misrule and a severe famine (1770) in Bengal, where the company had placed a puppet state in 1757, leading it to apply (1772) for an emergency loan of £1 million to escape bankruptcy. Despite the British government's bailout of the East India Company, parliamentary committees' harsh criticism and investigations resulted in government regulation of the company's management (the Regulating Act of 1773) and eventually government control of Indian political policy (the India Act of 1784).
English joint-stock business The East India Company (EIC) was established in 1600 and shut down in 1874. The EIC was the biggest company in the world at one point[vague]. The business colonized sections of Southeast Asia and Hong Kong in addition to seizing control of a sizable portion of the Indian subcontinent. In 1601, James Lancaster served as the captain of the first East India Company voyage. The Bonaventure was the first English trip to the Arabian Sea that was successful.
The seizure of a Portuguese carrack by Sir Walter Raleigh in the late 1590s sparked a boom in English trade. With a massive cargo that included gems and pearls, it was the biggest ship ever seen in England. A gathering of eminent traders and explorers took place in 1599 to plan a future expedition to the East Indies under a royal charter. They boosted their initial investment to £68,373 and purchased ships for the project. The petition signed by "George, Earl of Cumberland and 218 others" received a favorable response from the Queen.
Prior to relocation to India House on Leadenhall Street, business was conducted at India House in Bishopsgate, London. In the Indian Ocean, English traders frequently engaged in combat with their Dutch and Portuguese rivals. At Suvali in Surat, the East India Company decisively defeated the Portuguese in 1612. The business opened its first factory in India in Surat in 1615, and its second in Masulipatnam in 1616. The business quickly grew its commercial trading activities.
It overshadowed the Portuguese Estado da Andia, which had bases in Bombay, Goa, and Chittagong. The English businessmen were welcomed in Bengali territory by the Mughal ruler Shah Jahan in 1634. The company's major industries included saltpetre, cotton, silk, indigo dye, and tea. In the Straits of Malacca, the Dutch had increased their monopoly over the spice trade. During the 17th and early 18th centuries, the East India Company (EIC) was the principal exporter of textiles to Europe.
In 1686, the company engaged in naval operations against Shaista Khan, the ruler of Mughal Bengal, beginning the first of the Anglo-Indian Wars. Between £325,000 and £600,000 worth of plunder was taken from the Ganj-i-Sawai, including 500,000 pieces of gold and silver. The English East India Company suffered significant repercussions as a result of the theft from Aurangzeb's treasure ship. Every was immune from all Acts of Grace (pardons) and amnesties that Parliament would later grant to other pirates. The firm officers' success enabled them to return to Britain and build expansive estates and companies.
The Merchant's Company and the East India Company combined to establish the United Company of Merchants of England Trading to the East Indies in 1708. By 1720, the firm handled practically all of the 15% of British goods that came from India. Another act from 1730 extended the license until 1766. The East India Company rose to become the dominant force in the British market on a global scale. The need to support the troops and the economy throughout the war increased demand for Indian goods.
The demand from the military was so great that the authorities occasionally ignored untaxed sales. The French soldiers were defeated during the Seven Years' War (1756–1763), which also restrained French imperial aspirations and stymied the Industrial Revolution's impact on French-controlled regions. The Great Bengal Famine of 1770 caused the East India Company to experience significant shortages in predicted land prices. In British warehouses in 1773, the East India Company owned 18 million pounds of tea. The company's directors requested a government loan and entry to the American colonies' tea market.
As a result, demonstrators stormed British ships and dumped tea overboard during the Boston Tea Party. On January 1st, 1874, the East India Company was formally liquidated. Although the corporation had been transferred to the UK government in 1833, it had continued to exist in some capacity up until that point. Craven House, an Elizabethan palace on Leadenhall Street, served as the organization's main office in London. The East India Company was founded in 1803 by Parliament in order to build a new set of docks for use by ships dealing with India.
The Port of London Authority took control of the docks in 1909, and they were shut down in 1967. To prepare aspiring officers for service in the company's troops in India, Addiscombe Seminary was established in 1809.
From 1600 to 1800, the East India Company's flag was flown. The St. George's Cross, which stood in for the Kingdom of England, was displayed across a field of 9–13 alternately red and white stripes. It closely resembled the Grand Union Flag at the period of the American Revolution. In 1698, the East India Company was granted its coat of arms. The crest featured a lion guardantly rampant in or clutching a royal crown upright in its forepaws.
Auspicio regis et senatus angliae was the motto (Latin: Under the auspices of the king and parliament). At the Battle of Pulo Aura in 1797, the East India Company's flagship, the Warley, repelled a French squadron of French frigates. Seven Dutch East Indiamen were taken prisoner in 1795 off the coast of St. Helena, thanks in great part to General Goddard.
The firm encountered hostility from both the Portuguese and the Dutch in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). Following the Amboina Massacre in 1623, in which English, Japanese, and Portuguese traders were executed by Dutch authorities, company members were essentially barred from the East Indies. However, the company was granted trading privileges by the Mughal Empire as a result of its victory over the Portuguese in India (1612). The business focused on trading in cotton and silk apparel, indigo, saltpetre, and South Indian spices. It expanded its operations to Southeast Asia, East Asia, and the Persian Gulf.
The East India Company started exploiting slave labor in the early 1620s and transported enslaved individuals to its locations in Southeast Asia, India, and the island of St. Helena in the Atlantic Ocean, west of Angola. The bulk of persons sold into slavery by the firm came from East Africa, notably Mozambique or Madagascar, and were transported primarily to the company's holdings in India and Indonesia, while some came from Indonesia and West Africa. Slave transportation on a large scale by the enterprise peaked in the 1730s, continued until the early 1750s, and came to a stop in the 1770s.
Tea from China became a significant import after the middle of the 18th century, while the trade in cotton items fell. The business began funding the tea trade with illegal opium exports to China in the early 19th century. Chinese opposition to that trade led to the first Opium War (1839–1842), which led to a Chinese loss and an increase in British trading privileges; a second war, known as the Arrow War (1856–1860), resulted in more trading rights for Europeans.
Due to opposition to its monopoly, the original company created a competing business, which it later combined as the United Company of Merchants of England shipping to the East Indies (1708). 24 directors made up the court of The United Company, which operated through committees. The Court of Proprietors, or shareholders, chose them yearly. Up until 1773, Indian policy was influenced via shareholders' meetings, where votes could be purchased with the purchase of shares, when the company took control of Bengal in 1757. The government stepped in as a result of that deal. Through a regulatory body answerable to Parliament, the Regulating Act of 1773 and William Pitt the Younger's India Act of 1784 established government control of political policy. After that, both commercial and governmental authority over the corporation progressively slipped away. Since 1813, when its trade monopoly was ended, it has only served as a management agency for the British government of India. After the Indian Mutiny (1857), it lost that position, and in 1873, it ceased to be a legal body.
== Corporate Raiding ==
Room after room of imperial loot is found at Powis Castle, all of it stolen from India. Among the riches are hookahs made of burnished gold and embossed ebony. There are talwars decorated with ivory and jade as well as yellow topaz. A incident from 1765 is depicted in a picture, during which the Mughal monarch Shah Alam was coerced into performing an unintentional privatization. The East India Company was given a subcontract to handle his revenue collection activities.
A multinational business was becoming a belligerent colonial power. The military conquest, subjugation, and pillage of broad swaths of southern Asia was carried out by the East India Company (EIC), which pulled off a business coup unlike any other in history. It vigorously and effectively claimed that the Diwani, a document signed by Shah Alam, belonged to the corporation and not the Crown. Bengal's wealthy weavers and artisans were compelled "like so many slaves" by their new owners as Bengal's wealth quickly flowed into Britain. What would be considered human rights breaches now were committed by company tax collectors.
Clive received a fraction of the plunder taken from Bengal in cash. The 1767 pact between the East India Company and the Mughal Shah Alam was finished faster than the majority of trades involving a jackass or a head of cattle. Although no modern organization could match its harshness, several have tried to imitate its success. Clive's treaty was signed in the Mughal fort, which is currently a restricted military area. The residents of Allahabad have made the decision to ignore this historical incident.
At the height of the Victorian era, there was a deep sense of shame about the dubious mercantile manner in which the British had established the Raj. The artwork was a part of a mural collection called the Building of Britain. It depicts Sir Thomas Roe, a James I diplomat to the Mughal court in 1614. India was then responsible for around a quarter of all global manufacturing at the time. Akbar, the father of Jahangir, briefly considered a mission to civilize the European immigrants to India, whom he referred to as "an assemblage of savages," but later abandoned the idea as impractical.
With the same enthusiasm he had displayed at the arrival of the first turkey in India, Jahangir greeted Sir Thomas Roe. The Mughal empire's quick fall opened the door for the rise of the East India Company. Clive was just 14 years old in 1739, yet the EIC already covered the entire planet. The EIC transported opium to China and participated in the opium wars in order to take control of a base offshore in Hong Kong. The East India Company's directors requested a £400,000 loan from the Bank of England in 1772.
They returned a week later and requested an extra £300,000 from the government. By August, they were teasing the government that they would require a record-breaking £1 million. The first mega-bailout in history was used in 1773 to salvage the first aggressive multinational firm in the globe. It was the first instance of a nation state demanding the power to tightly control and regulate a failing firm as payment for salvaging the company. Despite having a gross domestic product of only 2.1% of the global GDP, India is home to 6.9% of the approximately 1000 billionaires in the world.
The combined wealth of India's billionaires is roughly 10% of the country's GDP. Many of these fortunes were built through the use of governmental authority. The second-most expensive ballot in democratic history was the one for the general election in India. On the back of a tsunami of corporate donations, it propelled Narendra Modi to power. They might not be able to get everything they wanted despite Modi's new government's overwhelming power.
But there will undoubtedly be compensation for the money given. The returned corporate "nabobs" (or "nobs," both transliterations of the Urdu term "Nawab") were purchasing political influence, according to Burke. He rightly highlighted what continues to be one of the fundamental concerns of contemporary liberal democracies: the potential for a ruthless company to buy a legislature through corruption. The company's Indian holdings were officially declared to be nationalized and handed over to the British Crown in 1859 by Lord Canning, the governor general of India. For a further 15 years, the East India Company dragged along in its crippled state before finally folding in 1874.
Long after European imperialism ended, the firm has kept growing. Its impact much transcends that of Protestant Christianity and communism. Unseen corporations still control a major chunk of the population's lives. Corporations have the power to both influence a nation's future and weaken its economy. In fragile states where companies are poorly or ineffectively governed, corporate influence is especially potent and deadly.
The most horrifying example of corporate power abuse in history is still The East India Company. Its history has never been more relevant, even 315 years after its inception.
== Corruption ==
=== Public perception and the East India Company ===
Many people in England were outraged by the East India Company's actions, especially the way its servants behaved.
=== Nabobs ===
There were numerous reasons for both parliamentary and public fury. Nabobs were the Company employees who had amassed incredible money through shady business dealings and other schemes.
It was thought that by creating an unstoppable East Indian interest in Parliament, these people—along with their agents and those who accepted their bribes—would poison the institution.
=== brutality and corruption ===
In Britain and India, particularly in 1772 when the Company's finances collapsed, there was also dejection about the poor management of the Company's affairs. This worry led to Lord North's Regulating Act of 1773.
In addition, there was resentment toward the frequently violent and dishonest actions of some Company executives.
=== Congressional assaults ===
In May 1773, Robert Clive, the Plassey victor and MP for Shrewsbury since 1761, had to strongly defend himself in the Commons for three days in a row against the criticisms of General John Burgoyne, MP for Preston, who was the chairman of a committee looking into his administration in India.
Edmund Burke, a Malton-based MP, rose to prominence as one of Parliament's most vocal opponents of Company misuse and immorality in India. He also spearheaded an effort to have the former Governor-General Warren Hastings (1773–85) removed from office on charges of mismanagement and corruption.
=== Impeachment ===
Hastings was accused of serious offenses and misdemeanors, and in 1787, he was impeached. In Westminster Hall, his trial—the lengthiest impeachment procedures in Parliament history—began in 1788.
Burke was furious in his accusations of Hastings, calling him a "ravenous vulture eating the carcasses of the dead," a "spider of Hell," and the "captain-general of evil."
Nevertheless, after a seven-year trial, Hastings was found not guilty of all charges in April 1795, despite the fervor and power of Burke's moral anger.
=== public concern and interest ===
Both the Clive enquiry and the Hastings impeachment sparked a great deal of public interest and excitement and demonstrated that, thanks to the Evangelical movement, there was a growing public sentiment that British control in the expanding Indian empire should have a moral base.
== Evilness ==
How are we to deal with the power and dangers of multinational corporations, and how can a nation-state protect itself and its citizens from corporate excess? These age-old questions have taken on a new urgency with the continued rise of large oil and technology companies, with their campaign donations, commercial lobbying, predictive data harvesting, and surveillance capitalism.
A nation's economy can be negatively impacted by businesses just as it can be positively impacted by them, as the global subprime bubble and bank failures of 2007–09 showed. The estimated cost of the Federal Reserve's bank bailout is $7.77 trillion. Iceland was on the verge of going bankrupt when all three of its main privately held commercial banks failed.
Corporate influence is especially effective and deadly in fragile regimes when companies are not appropriately regulated and where a major company's purchasing power can outbid or overwhelm a weak government due to its fatal combination of power, money, and unaccountability.
The Anglo-Persia Oil Company was able to engineer a coup that overthrew the government in Iran in 1953; United Fruit Company, which owned 42 percent of Guatemala's land, lobbied to bring about a C.I.A.-backed coup a year later in 1954. These examples show how powerful lobbying can even make or break governments. In the 1970s, the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation pushed for Salvador Allende's overthrow in Chile, and more recently, Exxon Mobil pressured the US government to further its interests in Indonesia and Iraq.
The East India Company's founding and subsequent global ascent provide the foundation for this predatory corporate culture, which dates back 400 years. Many contemporary businesses have made an effort to duplicate its success in using governmental authority for their own objectives, but the Company continues to stand alone in terms of aggression and military strength.
The East India Company, which was founded in London in 1599 and had a charter allowing it to wage war, began using corporate violence on its first voyage in 1602 to advance its trade. The Company started taking over the most prosperous provinces of the Mughal Empire, which at the time included most of today's India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and half of Afghanistan, in the middle of the 18th century by using brute military force.
The defeated Mughal monarch Shah Alam was coerced into what we would now refer to as an act of involuntary privatization in 1765 in the Mughal fort of Allahabad in northern India. He had to hire a group of English traders to take the position of his own revenue officials in Eastern India.
From that point forth, the collection of Mughal taxes was delegated to a strong multinational corporation, whose operations were guarded by its own private army. Within a few months, 250 company clerks who were supported by 20,000 Indian soldiers who had been locally recruited had taken control of the richest Mughal provinces. For the first time, a multinational corporation was becoming a belligerent colonial power.
The Company began transporting opium from Mughal Bengal to China using the looted wealth of the empire. It subsequently engaged in the Opium Wars to take control of an offshore base in Hong Kong and protect its lucrative monopoly in narcotics. It sent Chinese tea to Massachusetts in the west.
The East India Company had such a bad reputation that during the chilly winter of 1772–1773 there was widespread fear among the 13 Colonies that the Company would be allowed to invade America. The "Penman of the Revolution," John Dickinson, feared that the troops of the Company were "casting their eyes on America as a fresh arena whereon to exercise their gifts of rapine, oppression, and cruelty" after plundering India.
An estimated 90,000 pounds of Company tea, valued £9,659 (more than $1.2 million today), was thrown in Boston Harbor as a result of this panic and the imposition of British taxes on tea. Soon after, the Revolutionary War started.
The Company had the ability to start wars or make peace anyplace in the East, as one of its directors put it, becoming "an empire within an empire." By this time, it had also built much of the London docklands, had a sizable and sophisticated administration and Civil Service, and was on track to produce close to a quarter of Britain's trade. Its annual spending in Britain alone amounted to roughly 25% of all annual government spending in Britain. Its dominance now extended throughout the whole planet, and its troops were larger than those of practically all nation-states.
The Company's attorneys, lobbyists, and several of its stockholders who were British Parliamentarians quietly lobbied for favorable legislation on the company's behalf. In fact, corporate lobbying may have been pioneered by the Company. Less than a century after its founding, in 1693, it was discovered that the Company was purchasing lawmakers with its own shares. The Company was found guilty of bribery as a result of the inquiry into this, the first corporate lobbying scandal in history, and the governor of the Company was imprisoned.
The Company nevertheless demonstrated to be both incredibly strong and strangely subject to economic uncertainties, similar to more current mega firms. When a famine set out in Bengal in 1770, the East India bubble deflated. The Company's pillage of what was once the richest region in India made conditions there worse and consequently resulted in enormous deficits in anticipated income.
A charge for £1 million in unpaid tax to the Crown and debts totaling £1.5 million were left behind for the Company. 30 banks in Europe fell as a result of the news of this. The directors of the Company submitted an application to the Bank of England on July 15, 1772, requesting a loan of £400,000. By August, the directors were quietly informing the government that they would actually require a record-breaking £1 million more.
The government's financial woes could potentially plunge the nation "down into an unfathomable abyss," according to the official report from the following year, which also expressed concern that "this cursed Company would, at last, like a viper, be the destruction of the country which fostered it at its bosom."
However, the company was simply too large to fail. The next year, it was saved by the first massive bailout in history, for which the British government demanded the ability to control and manage the Company.
The Company was the final model for many of the organizations of today, while not having any identical counterparts. Today's most powerful individuals do not require their own armies since they can rely on governments to uphold their interests and rescue them.
The history of the East India Company demonstrates how corporate capitalism and Western imperialism were the dragon's teeth that gave rise to the contemporary world. Corporations don't have bodies to punish or souls to condemn, as Baron Thurlow put it in the late 1700s when the Company was being chastised for its wrongdoings and its governor-general, Warren Hastings, was on trial. As a result, they act as they like.
== Exploiting India ==
The English company known as the East India Company, also known as the English East India Company, was established on December 31, 1600, by royal charter as the Governor and Company of Merchants of London Trading into the East Indies, or (1708–1873) as the United Company of Merchants of England Trading into the East Indies. From the early 18th century through the middle of the 19th century, the firm, which began as a dominant trade organization, was involved in politics and served as an agent of British imperialism in India. Furthermore, the company's efforts in China during the 19th century acted as a catalyst for the growth of British power there.
The company was established to participate in the trade of East Indian spices. Before England's victory over the Spanish Armada in 1588, Spain and Portugal held a monopoly on that trade. This allowed the English the opportunity to break the monopoly. The business ran independent, separately subscribed cruises up until 1612. Before a permanent joint stock was created in 1657, there were interim joint stocks.
The firm encountered hostility from both the Portuguese and the Dutch in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). Following the Amboina Massacre in 1623, in which English, Japanese, and Portuguese traders were executed by Dutch authorities, company members were essentially barred from the East Indies. However, the company was granted trading privileges by the Mughal Empire as a result of its victory over the Portuguese in India (1612). The business focused on trading in cotton and silk apparel, indigo, saltpetre, and South Indian spices. It expanded its operations to Southeast Asia, East Asia, and the Persian Gulf.
The East India Company started exploiting slave labor in the early 1620s and transported enslaved individuals to its locations in Southeast Asia, India, and the island of St. Helena in the Atlantic Ocean, west of Angola. The bulk of persons sold into slavery by the firm came from East Africa, notably Mozambique or Madagascar, and were transported primarily to the company's holdings in India and Indonesia, while some came from Indonesia and West Africa. Slave transportation on a large scale by the enterprise peaked in the 1730s, continued until the early 1750s, and came to a stop in the 1770s.
Tea from China became a significant import after the middle of the 18th century, while the trade in cotton items fell. The business began funding the tea trade with illegal opium exports to China in the early 19th century. Chinese opposition to that trade led to the first Opium War (1839–1842), which led to a Chinese loss and an increase in British trading privileges; a second war, known as the Arrow War (1856–1860), resulted in more trading rights for Europeans.
Due to opposition to its monopoly, the original company created a competing business, which it later combined as the United Company of Merchants of England shipping to the East Indies (1708). 24 directors made up the court of The United Company, which operated through committees. The Court of Proprietors, or shareholders, chose them yearly. Up until 1773, Indian policy was influenced via shareholders' meetings, where votes could be purchased with the purchase of shares, when the company took control of Bengal in 1757. The government stepped in as a result of that deal. Through a regulatory body answerable to Parliament, the Regulating Act of 1773 and William Pitt the Younger's India Act of 1784 established government control of political policy. After that, both commercial and governmental authority over the corporation progressively slipped away. Since 1813, when its trade monopoly was ended, it has only served as a management agency for the British government of India. After the Indian Mutiny (1857), it lost that position, and in 1873, it ceased to be a legal body.
== Bankrupting an Empire ==
To form a new corporation that would travel to India to conduct business, Sir Thomas Smythe, the founder of the East India Company, collected approximately 100 of the wealthier English merchants in September 1599 and persuaded them to pay individual subscriptions of between 100 and 3,000 pounds. He sought to petition the first and oldest of the tudors, Elizabeth, to grant them a royal charter. Smythe was successful in raising more than 3 million pounds in total. At the beginning of the 16th century, England was a relatively poor agricultural nation that had squandered almost fifty years in religious wars. They started to look for new markets with a rebellious aim and pro-radical passion.
Sir Francis Drake, a notorious privateer and slave trader, pillaged numerous Spanish ships in the 1560s and made a sizable profit. He sailed off in 1577 with the money he earned from his global travels in search of gold and spices, but he soon came home after robbing a Portuguese ship of more than 10 million pounds in loot. Elizabeth the first granted a royal licence to the rival legal pirate and creator of Roanoke Island, Sir Walter Rowley Drake, in 1584 to explore and establish whatever place he could find. These plundering voyages were crown permitted and stayed sanctioned. The English were amateurs at sea travel compared to many of their European counterparts; they returned with little more than fantastic tales of their efforts to steal ships and with neither personnel nor contents intact.
In order to purchase spices for Smythe, Ralph Fitch was sent to the East. However, he was quickly detained by Portuguese authorities. He was then sent to the Indian state of Goa in chains, where he would be dropped from a height attached to a rope. He was helped to escape, and his return to London three years later made him somewhat famous. He was mentioned in both Macbeth and Shakespeare, but he didn't have any pepper when he got there.
The following attempt to enter the spice trade was made by Sir James Lancaster in 1591. He was the first Englishman to attempt to travel from the west to the east via the cape in Africa. On the way, he was struck by a cyclone, lost three of his four ships, was ravaged by scurvy, and appeared to have had nearly all of his crew killed by spears from local islanders. Spain was the richest nation in Europe at the time, and Portugal ruled the oceans and the spice of the east, so the more prosperous Portuguese had been profitable for well over a century. The Dutch also returned from Indonesia successfully with 800 tons of pepper, 200 tons of cloves, as well as large quantities of cinnamon and nutmeg.
They gained over 400 profit. However, England was making no progress, and the Dutch delegation's attempt to purchase English shipping for additional eastward excursions was the final straw. The contributors to the journey feared legitimately that the Dutch had destroyed their current investment in the spice trade since this was too much for Elizabethan pride. This was the impetus behind Smythe and his associate's decision to establish a business and make it open to any new investor who would contribute; the East India Company was from the start intended to be a joint stock company open to all investors due to the prohibitively high costs of the commodities they wanted to purchase and the enormously expensive ships they had to use to transport them, which required large crews to operate and professional musketeers and artillery masters to protect them. Even if everything went as planned, it would take years before there was a return on investment.
Elizabeth's like I regard your promises and offers as unrealistic and vain and worthy of rejection go prick thy face and overread thy dread thou lily livid boy no i'm kidding go have your fun on the sea man you should see thy faces obtained their royal charter on December 31st, 1600. The charter granted them great powers such as immunity from all customs taxes for the first six voyages, a monopoly in trade and traffic for 15 years on nearly two-thirds of the trading world, and semi-sovereign privileges to rule territories and raise armies. It also permitted officials of the East India Company to assert control over all English subjects in Asia, mint money, build fortifications, wage wars, conduct policies, hold courts, punish, and imprison subjects. The necessary components for a ship, including masts, anchors, and riggings, had been constructed. Weapons, including muskets, pikes, and barrels of powder, had also been obtained.
Once they had rounded the cape in Africa in September, they continued on to Mauritius, where they discovered a series of carvings on a rock where five Dutch ships had recorded their visit just five months earlier. The voyage almost had a bad start in February of 1601 when the ship nearly stood in the English Channel for two months due to wind. Lancaster's fleet ultimately arrived in the Indonesian province of Ake in 1602, where they started bargaining with the ruler for spice. When Lancaster received permission to engage in piracy against Spanish or Portuguese ships, he acted without hesitation. A year later, in 1603, when Lancaster arrived in England, he had brought back all four of his ships intact and fully loaded with at least 900 tons of pepper, cinnamon, and cloves.
The voyage had generated an impressive 300 profit. Over the course of the following 15 years, 15 more east india company expeditions were launched, but they were still insignificant in comparison to what the Dutch were already bringing in because the several Dutch east india companies had already merged to form the VOC. VOC was able to generate nearly ten times as much cash as the English East India Company and was able to pay investors a 3 600 dividend right away. The directors of the East India Company came to the conclusion that there was no choice except to focus on less competitive but perhaps more profitable areas of the Asian trade and abandon the wealthy spice islands and their aromatic spice trade to the Dutch. The sources of all three of these luxuries—fine cotton fabrics, indigo, and Chinese—were of course India and China.
The 28th of August, 1608, saw the arrival of Captain William Hawkings, the first commander of an East India Company ship to set foot on Indian soil. In contrast, England had only 5% of India's population and produced only 3% of the world's manufactured goods at the time. At the time, India had a population of 150 million, making it a fifth of the world's population. The mughal emperor was by far the richest king in history, earning an estimated 10 billion pounds annually. The mughal capitals were the largest cities in either Asia or Europe at the time.
Early Europeans in the 17th century were accustomed to sweeping wins over foreign nations, but captain Hawkins quickly realized that no European nation could possibly attempt to fight the vast mughals since they maintained an incredible 4 million soldiers in armed service. With this in mind, the company concluded that in order to successfully conduct business with the Mughals, it would require both partners and permission from the emperor himself. Any form of unauthorized fortifications were quickly put down. Emperor Jahangir was a tremendously sensitive, intelligent, curious, and perceptive man who was observant of the world around him and a king collector of its curiosities. The emperor could hardly conceal his boredom at row as he paid respect to the emperor.
Captain Hawkins took a year to reach Agra, but the emperor quickly lost interest and sent him off. This time, a more impressive mission was called for sending a royal envoy Sir Thomas Row When Roe returned to England after three years in court and getting permission from Jahangir to develop a factory at Suret, he was miffed to learn that the mughals gave relations with the English a very low priority. Early East India Company officials were proud of negotiating commercial privileges rather than using attacking strategies. Jahangir, however, made a deliberate point of not conceding any major trading privileges after making it clear to the company directors that force of arms was not an option when dealing with the mughal empire, and yes, they followed his advice.
Over the next 200 years, the East India Company would gradually be drawn into the mughal nexus and learn to operate skillfully within the mughal system. Roe's mission marked the beginning of a relationship between the mughal company and the east india company that would eventually develop into something resembling the partnership. Captain Hippon was sent to the Coromandel coast while Roe was seducing Jahangir, and he created a second factory in Masulipatnam, the port of the famous dekhani competitors of the Mugals, where the best jewels, gems, and chintz could be purchased in India. Soon, this commerce in precious stones, pepper, textiles, and salt from Petra brought in even greater profits than the Dutch trade in fragrant spices. 30 years later, the East India Company imported a quarter million pieces of cloth from India, up from 1 million pounds of pepper in the 1630s.
Between 1601 and 1640, the corporation dispatched out 168 ships, but only 104 of them returned due to continuing high losses. The company's balance sheets became more successful as time went on, and in 1613 the first joint stock subscription raised close to 44 million pounds. Four years later, the second joint stock subscription brought in a staggering 170 million pounds, signaling its enormous success. The east india company did not establish its first fortified indian base in India until 1626 at armagun on the central Coromandel coast. After it was abandoned after two years, they attempted to establish a new fort at madras putnam.
This time, the settlement prospered and became the first English colonial town in India. When Sir Abraham Shipman first arrived with 450 men to claim Bombay for the English in September 1662, his mission was blocked at gunpoint. By the 1670s, the town was minting gold coins. The second major English settlement in India came into the hands of the company via the crown, which had received it as a wedding gift from the Portuguese monarchy. With only around 100 soldiers left when the British were ultimately able to seize control after three years, it became the best natural port, but the raucous English were losing favor there.
The British were soon referred to as "behnchhod," which means "sister-fucker," in the streets of Charette. In 1693, less than a century after its founding, the company was found to be using its own shares to buy the favors of parliamentarians as it paid out 1 200 pounds a year to prominent mps and ministers. The parliamentary investigation into this case, the world's first corporate lobbying scandal, found the East India Company guilty of bribery and insider trading. At the time, company directors in London were beginning to realize for the first time how powerful they were. The corporation only attempted to use his strength against the Mughals once during the 17th century, and that attempt ended in disaster.
A sizable fleet with 19 warships, 200 cannons, and 600 soldiers sailed from London to Bengal in 1686 in an attempt to teach the mughals a lesson despite the newly appointed director josiah child's ignorance of the scope of mughal power. However, child could not have picked a worse time to pick a fight with the emperor of the richest kingdom on Earth. The great two Deccan sultanates of Bijapur and Golganda had just fallen to the mughals, who appeared to have pushed the Moratas back to the hills from whence they had come. When Aurangzeb learned that the East India Company had apologized for their erroneous actions and submitted to mughal authority, the emperor left them to lick their wounds for a while before declaring them to be an unbeatable force. Almost all of the East India Company's factories were seized and pillaged, and the English had been completely driven out of Bengal.
and after this disaster, Job Charnock decided to establish a new British stronghold in Bengal in 1690, graciously agreeing to pardon them. The company was founded with the intention of making money, and they quickly realized that Bengal was the best place to do so. Bengal was the finest and most fruitful country in the world, as well as one of the richest, most populous, and best-cultivated countries. It was also the wealthiest region of the Mugal Empire. Everything for the corporation changed in 1707 with Arangzeb's death.
Aurangzeb: His father, Shahad Jaha, didn't love him as much as he thought he should have. He was a cunningly competent general and a brilliant tactician, but he evolved to be a bitter and bigoted Islamic puritan whose rule was harsh, tyrannical, and unpopular. As he got older, he broke with the liberals, imposed stricter sharia laws, and developed a strong dislike for the hindu subjects. Wine was outlawed, hindu customs that his forefathers had adopted were stopped, temples were demolished, and the jizya attacks that his great-grandfather Akbar had banned were reinstated. Worst of all, he executed Tagbahadur, the ninth guru of the Sikhs, causing religious wounds in India that have never entirely healed since Aurangzeb's reign in the 17th century.
His reckless expansion into the Deccan did the most to deplete the empire's resources by releasing powerful enemies like the Morathus under their leader Shivaji into disastrous conflicts. Unable to trust anyone, he marched across the empire putting down rebellions and severing several alliances that were made over centuries of tolerance. Shivaji's last two raids earned him the title of Lord of Umbrella: Chachapati and was titled legitimate hindu emperor. They caused such destruction to the mughal empire that on his deathbed, the backbone of the mughal army was lost to the emperor. The maratha wisely avoided pitched battles with the mughal armies but instead chose to ravage the mughal economy with raids yielding exorbitant effects that finally brought down the empire
Sambaji, the eldest son of Shivaji, was seized by Aurangzeb's soldiers on March 11, 1689, the same year the emperor defeated the company. He was cruelly tortured for weeks, having his tongue cut out and eyes punctured with nails, before being brutally killed. His head was hung on the Delhi gate, and his body was flung around. When he turned his back, the mughal empire had reached its greatest extent yet, extending from Kabul and afghanistan to the peninsular south Indian region, yet there had suddenly been so many disturbances. He had personally marched to conquer fort after fort only to see each lose immediately.
Aurangzeb passed away on February 20, 1707, at the age of 88. There were rebellions, banditry, opposition to taxation, and for the first time, the Mugal Treasury struggled to cover the administrative costs. Three emperors were assassinated in the years after his death, and worst of all, in 1719, four different emperors quickly assumed control of the famed peacock throne. During the disastrous Morothas attacks, local Mugal governors acted as independent rulers, which had a growing negative impact on their devotion to the emperor. Bengal Murshid Qulikhan, a former Hindu slave who converted to Islam and was known for his severe tax collection methods, was an exception to this rule.
He was extremely loyal to the emperor and continued to send half a million pounds sterling of the proceeds each year. By the 1720s, Bengal was still one of the last provinces to provide income to the Mugal government. As the country descended into anarchy, Murshad Khan sent tribute to Delhi using the credit networks of a family of Marwawi Aswal Jain financiers; these financiers were known as the "Bankers of the World" and were in charge of minting, collecting, and transferring bengal's revenue. The Jaguar Sets possessed tremendous power. In this nasty political scenario, the east india company authorities sided with the jiget sets and borrowed more than 5 million pounds from them between 1718 and 1730, similar to the rothschilds of 19th-century Europe.
If a mughal governor had been harsh and overtaxed an east india company settlement, the east india company would simply move its operations elsewhere, which would have been impossible a generation earlier. Local weavers and merchants were the losers in this transaction, and in the first case of violence by englishmen against the ordinary indians in 1710, the east india company ro Delhi received a letter from Murshid Khan about the East India Company officials' escalating assertiveness, but at this point, Delhi was preoccupied with a much more grave concern. Delhi had a population of two million in 1737. As the empire slid into disorder, it hung like a lush, ripe mango ready to fall at any moment.
It was bigger than both London and Paris put together, and it was still the most opulent city between Istanbul and Tokyo. The fabulous effeminate emperor Muhammad Shah, who ruled this wealthy and vulnerable empire, would spend his afternoons in entertainment in his pleasure dome. When the moratas reached the gates of Delhi in their raids, the hysterical emperor called for the old general Nissam ul Monk to save Delhi, but it was difficult even for the experienced Nissam to bring the morathis back to their heels because they had become too powerful. The notorious Persian invader Nadir Shah had dethroned the persian throne in a military coup, invaded Afghanistan in 1739, and had been looking further towards delhi for a treasure raid to pluck some golden feathers from the mughal peacock. The nizam, a veteran mughal general, suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of the maratha's bajirao.
However, this excruciatingly humiliating defeat was It took less than four months for Nadir Saha's small army to defeat three combined mughal armies of around a million men about a hundred miles north of Delhi. Nadir Saha's task was made easier by the acrimonious disagreements between Muhammad Sahab's two generals, Saharat Khan and izam ulmu. On May 21, 1738, Nadir Saha crossed into the mughal empire with a force of 80,000 men heading for the summer capital of Kab In February 1739, when the mughal army were routed in less than three hours, Nadir Shah was able to seize the emperor by asking him to dinner and forbidding him from leaving.
"all the emperor's resources at the Persians' disposal" The massacre continued until the nisam went bareheaded and begging the deer on his knees to spare the people and take revenge on him. He did accept his offer on the condition that the nizam would give him a hundred crore 13 billion pounds, a tremendous amount of money, before he would agree to leave Delhi. At least 100,000 people were killed after Nadir Shah's entry into the mughal capital. Women were enslaved.
The streets were strewn with corpses The nizam was forced to plunder his own city in the days that followed in order to pay the promised compensation. The 350-year-old wealth quickly changed hands. The legendary peacock throne, valued 260 million pounds, was one among the prizes, and the enormous timurubi and the Kohinoor diamond were embedded on it. The Persians could not believe what they were receiving because they had never seen anything like this before.
Nadir never planned to rule India, so after 57 days he returned to Persia with the treasures the Mugals had gathered throughout their 200-year reign. Nadir transported 700 elephants, 4,000 camels, and 12,000 horses, pulling wagons filled with gold and silver for a combined total of about 9 billion pounds. Muhammad Sahab stayed on the mughal throne withered and empty Delhi was abruptly impoverished sucked off of life by the plunder seized from India with such great nadir that it halted taxing in Iran for three years after his return. The days of massive imperial armies had come to an end, and the two most powerful governors stopped sending money. However, regional identities under regional government came back to life.
The Jats, Rohilla Afghans, Punjabi Sikhs, and Jats all started to form autonomous republics. A few Persians taking Dali with such ease inspired the Europeans' dream of conquest and empire in India. He had shown the way, and the Europeans were about to become obtrusively persistent. In the west, Jaipur, Jadhpur, and Udaipur reached their ages of empowerment. In the south, Tanjore would start to receive patronage.
Joseph Francois Du Place, the director general of the French settlement of Pondicherry, petitioned the emperor to create him a nawab, a regional ruler, which was immediately granted when he recently realized the opportunities involved in dealing with India. He moved swiftly to convince the English to hand over Madras to the French in September 1746 after making preparations right away to strengthen the French company's military capabilities. When the local nawab troops tried to obstruct the French in October, they found that nothing in the mughal arsenal could compete with their superior knowledge of 17th century European warfare. When word reached England that the War of the Austrian Succession was over and Madras would be returned to the East India Company, they made the decision to never let their guard down again. However, Dupleix had been selling troops and weapons elsewhere, and the British observed his successes too eagerly.
As a result, they committed all of their military resources to defending the already lucrative trading business. At the time, the trade of the Mugal Empire was split between the French and the English. The French were fooled by the occasional achievements of the degenerating Dutch, who were sitting on their piles of wealth and spices. They now bragged stupidly that they could control all of India's trade by that time. The corporation was dishonest, the leaders were stupid, and they campaigned extravagantly.
The English, however, were only interested in expanding their trade from the bases in India and all security. The British seized on the promise of a large profit in the long term while the French were doing things ruinously expensively and everything became impossible to realize. In the newly developed farmland of British Ohio, a group of French Indians led a war party of 240 warriors down Lake Huron. The British were brutally slaughtered, with the one survivor being scalped and the other being ceremonially boiled and eaten. On November 1st, the governor of Virginia despatched a 21-year-old volunteer north to investigate the violent attacks that had caused unrest and dread among the British traders.
He was named George Washington, and the first act of the French and Indian War, also known as the Seven Years War, took place in Ohio. The war would also be fought in the Philippines, Cuba, the coast of nigeria, Québec, and the Gangetic Plains, but India would be the region of the world most significantly affected.
== See Also ==
* Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, the VOC)