It is often now forgotten that much of what is referred to as 'The British Empire' was just private enterprise (veering into freebooting) flying a flag of convenience. My (admittedly narrow) understanding is that other European colonial enterprises were far more closely tied to and administered by the governments in question.
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.
> My (admittedly narrow) understanding is that other European colonial enterprises were far more closely tied to and administered by the governments in question
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).
Right. Corporations and governments are 2 totally different things, not 2 wings of the same bird. We haven't always lived in a fascist governance structure, where corporations and governments work together to exploit individuals, via education, law, religion, media, etc. /s
> Corporations and governments are 2 totally different things
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.
I think you missed the /s at the end of my comment! We agree, they are similar - but disagree where you say things should remain that way. They should not.
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.
> there is no moral foundation for the existence of any governance system, except self-governance
"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.
The options are anarchy (or accepting personal responsibility for one's life) or immoral governance by force; aka slavery (to those who are able to take personal responsibility); aka pretending it is possible to abdicate one's personal rights to some ficticious entity called government. Self governance is really just the start of one's life as an adult.
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.
You lost me there in calling Sankrit the mother language. Telugu has a different lineage and Sankrit is alien to Indian Sub-continent. Please stop using HN to subtly push your agenda.
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.
Words from Sanskrit can be found not only in several Indian languages but even in some south east asian languages. I speak four languages out of which three have words from Sanskrit. Learn a bit before alleging things.
Yes on reflection, having spent 30 years on and off trying to teach myself just Sanskrit despite benefit of classical education, I reached the same conclusion!
> It is often now forgotten that much of what is referred to as 'The British Empire' was just private enterprise (veering into freebooting) flying a flag of convenience.
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.
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.
if you are going to "get real" about Imperialist administration, I think you have to give a bit of credit to concepts of Crown Law versus the bloodbath/disease fest of South America. Are both British world imperialism and South American conquest unacceptable in today's world without question? yes .. are today's capital markets an attempt at recreating the best of these trading empires without the negatives, probably yes. Was there a difference in how these trading empires were conducted, versus raw pillaging under Roman Catholic blessing? yes
Anyone interested in a very thorough writing on the British occupation of India should read "The Inglorious Empire" by Shashi Tharoor. It is a very well researched work!
> Eminent Scottish historian William Dalrymple criticised the book, saying it "was written in 12 days, involved no personal archive research and contains some serious factual errors" however he maintained that the book was, nevertheless, "persuasive".[8]
> 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.
Have you yourself read the book? The book provides massive list of references from all over the world used for researching the topic.
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.
Criticism by British people only adds credibility to that book. Even Tirthankar Roy - which seems to be of Indian descent is working for London School of Economics.
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.
Mr. Tharoor is a current Member of Parliament of India and previously India's Ambassador to the UN. He is a very eloquent speaker and writer.
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
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:
That’s a weird assumption, because the causes of the demise of the company are very well documented. It was nationalised as a consequence of being responsible for a rebellion which killed over 800,000 people, in 1857.
Yes I checked on following up, and 1870 was when the cable reached to India, it was in that era, but of course any effect would have taken a decade or so to be felt.
The Empire podcast by William Dalrymple and Anita Anand has been fascinating and the first few episodes are exactly about the British East India Company.
I second this recommendation. A real eye-opener for me was learning that France and England were at it on India's east coast (the Carnatic wars) at pretty much the same time they were messing about the Hudson drainage basin in North America.
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.
I also loved the link between the behaviour of the British in India and the turn of sentiment in the Americas. What got me was the link between the tea in the tea-party and the famine inflicted in Bengal.
"The first interesting thing is that while the structure, the charter and all that sounds about normal for any corporation, they had less than 200 people until the 1800s in the London office, part time clerks and all. That is efficiency!"
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.
Good article. I didn't expect to read the whole thing, but I did.
> 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.
Other key success factors for the East India Company included warfare, slavery, and legally enforced monopolies. The EIC was only wound down after their misrule incited a full-fledged rebellion that killed 6,000 British people (which caused outrage back home) and on the order of 800,000 Indians.
Thanks for pointing this out. Even the most exaggerated claims about the "death toll of communism" tend to fall short of estimates of the total death toll of British rule of its colonies (the Holodomor pales in comparison to the preventable famines in India alone) and the British East India Company played no small part in this.
We really should have a more critical lense of colonialism nowadays and abandon the badly aging romanticization of it.
Famines were common and cyclical in India prior to British colonization as well. There are certain ones you can pin on the British, like in 1943, but it would be a feat to get close to the deaths from communism.
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?)
> 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?
> 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.
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.
> 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.
The article does provide interesting, educational details, but it also engages in a lot of gratuitous cheerleading of the BEIC and makes comparisons to modern day startups. Wonks celebrating imperialism for business lessons. It’s ghoulish and absurdly tasteless. You can expect something like that from say the War Nerd, but the style and framing of this article is just wildly inappropriate.
> 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.
> The statute of limitations have passed on those crimes since they took place in Antiquity.
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.
Then perhaps it is different in that South Asian nations don’t seem themselves as successors to Britain, whereas many peoples the Romans conquered claimed their imperial mantle as legitimacy.
Fwiw I wrote right upfront that it's of course terrible. But the assumption was that now that we've acknowledged that we can also look at other aspects. I get the revulsion though, sorry!
It’s interesting history and good analysis but the whole framing just seems ill-conceived. “Business operational lessons from the great bloodthirsty marauders of history” works as a parody or when you’re intentionally edgy (as with War Nerd), here it’s reads as tone-deaf.
To satisfy Godwin's law: Nazi concentration camps had amenities like swimming pools for the guards. I'm sure plenty of thought went into how to make the job comfortable given its gruesome reality. That doesn't mean we should be writing salivating opeds about management lessons to take away from that.
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.
They just find it distasteful. It’s like reading a productivity article about the best tips to be a more effective organizer by learning from the mistakes of Operation Searchlight in failing to put down the East Pakistani insurgency.
There were also famines in the 1870s-1890s where the extent of the death toll was mostly determined by British administration and imposition of laissez-faire capitalism and Malthusian ideology.
To qualify this further, "actually famines are normal and okay for these people" was also the attitude used by the British during the 100% British caused Irish potato famine which reduced the population of Ireland to a point it still has only barely recovered from.
Droughts and other weather events can be cyclical, but famines rarely are because humans are actually fairly good at adapting to cycles like that and plan accordingly. However colonial governments tend to ignore any preexisting systems and primarily focus on extracting surplus of the barest minimum to keep the colonized alive, rather than building reserves for these catastrophes.
And that's when the colonial power doesn't intentionally slaughter, maim or execute people to cull the "excess population" (which arguably was part of the motivation behind the Irish famine as the Irish Catholics were seen as being at risk of outbreeding the British Protestants).
Frankly, I don't think it's good or desirable to model any modern company after an enterprise built on extracting as much surplus value as possible from people who were not permitted any rights to object. That seems like the exact opposite of the kind of company I would consider good or desirable. It's the kind of company I would like to see made illegal if at all possible.
I don’t know anything about the people writing the comments. I’m pointing out that the author of the article is Indian. He’s presumably aware of the EIC’s negative history, but chose to write an article about a different aspect of it. Not everything about India or the EIC needs to be about poverty.
Desi attitudes on the British are fragmented. My parents were technically born in the Dominion of Pakistan, and her older siblings remember the Empire. My mom and her sisters have quite a positive view—if you were a young woman hoping to get an education and a career British influence in the country probably held some appeal.
My dad has what I had thought was a fairly negative view, but less so than most Americans I have met.
If someone starts pinning the (continued) deaths due to the disturbance of social customs and divide-and-rule by the British (Also account for the partition). It may far surpass it
To anyone who thinks this is obvious hyperbole: please look into the causes of the Rwandan genocide. Specifically the ahistorical division of the local population into two competing tribes by the Belgian colonial government. Divide-and-rule is a long standing tradition because it prevents the colonized from unifying and rising up against the colonizers by giving one group preferential treatment over the others.
It's rather difficult to find a whole lot that's positive about colonialism, when you look into the details. For example, it's true that the British colonials brought railway technology to India, which has of course become a signature feature of modern Indian civilization. However, the rationale at the time was more about having the ability to rapidly move large numbers of troops and guns from one rebellious hotspot to another. However, this also had many economic benefits for other sectors, aided in moving food and preventing famines, etc.
> "After a slow start in 1853, the construction of the railway network envisaged by Lord Dalhousie was sped up rapidly after the 1857 Rebellion. The railways were an instrument of control. The stations became fortresses, the white and, later, the Eurasian, staff became an auxiliary army, and the tracks became lines of communication in the event of conflict. The 1857 Rebellion, coming as it did at a crucial stage in railway development, had an enormous impact on the railways’ eventual shape and the attitude of the British colonial rulers to their Indian subordinates. This was a nakedly military project, but not solely one. There were immeasurable economic benefits, too, and though the very design of the railways was as conduits to and from the ports to help British imports and exports, inevitably the Indian economy received a stimulus through their construction."
The argument that such colonialism was necessary to spread knowledge and technology (which is really the only pro-colonialism argument I can think of) is belied by the example of Japan, which strongly resisted colonial efforts for many centuries, but was still able to rapidly adopt and develop things like train technology.
It's interesting that you accuse me of "faux outrage" when you're the one using language suggesting moral indignation and making broad generalizations, whereas I try to be specific with my criticism. I didn't say "critical lense" in the sense that we should view it as bad, I said it in the sense that we should be less superficial and more nuanced than the article is.
Colonialism is a broad complex issue. It's impossible to separate the mass deaths from the operation of colonial power structures because they are closely tied to each other. For insights to be transferrable they need to be applicable.
The Company sustained itself with access to a practically infinite pool of cheap/free labor and natural resources guaranteed by an army more powerful than any resistance they could face.
The learnings aren't particularly groundbreaking either and mostly come in a form that heavily suggests an "ought" rather than merely describing an "is" (or "was"):
> People knew when they could ignore the rules so they could do things that helped the Company
Given the context (as "the rules" were mostly an artefact of English domestic law and ettiquette) this translates directly to Western companies skirting/bending/changing labor protection laws in the Global South to reduce production costs. Most people consider this a bad thing.
> They ran with a much smaller bureaucracy centrally than what we’d think necessary, even with multiple committees to devolve decision making into
Almost everything ran with a much smaller central bureaucracy at the time. Large bureaucracies are a fairly recent development and a result of easier access to vastly more data and its analysis. If you want to make a point against micromanagement, there are better and more applicable examples that don't involve an underclass of forced labor.
> In many cases the employees could trade for themselves on the side, i.e., helping the Company helped themselves - like a franchise model in miniature, or even a version of equity shares
This is embezzlement at worst and an MLM scheme at best. Again, how is this transferrable? Do you want SaaS sales people running a sidebusiness as a whitelabel reseller? Tesla managers selling spare parts off-brand? This would require rolling back centuries of consumer protection and liability laws.
> When you ask a lot from employees, its good to give them a lot - whether its salary, perks, nap rooms or better working conditions
This is just a vague appeal to provide perks, high pay and benefits. Hardly novel.
> You need at least a few people who are freelance gunslingers to go unlock opportunities you can’t know about, to explore more of the territory
This would be groundbreaking advice if large enough companies wouldn't already know to invest heavily in R&D and hire ICs. Arguably this has actually been disproven as the hype about Google "moonshots" has died down because it's more profitable to let startups do the hard work of testing the waters and just acquire or outcompete them if their new ideas become profitable.
> There’s an increase in focus on assessments (and punishment) after the fact rather than permission to perform an action
Again, this was novel when Facebook promoted this as "It's better to ask for forgiveness than permission" and "Move fast and break things". After a decade and a half of this it turns out that this is actually rarely good advice if you want to avoid causing irrepairable damage.
So pay your worker aristocracy well to retain them, maintain a pool of willing cheap labor, fight laws and regulations that impact your freedom to conduct business and everybody should be an enterpreneur. This is literally just right-wing libertarianism you could have equally arrived at by reading Atlas Shrugged.
Must be, it's pretty crazy. No masts and what appears to be a gangplank full of people. What's interesting is that on a small screen it gives just enough of the right type of image to give the feeling needed.
A comparison between the British East India Co. and any major international drug cartel might be more illustrative (note the common factor of having a private army, and the difference of not having any obvious state support).
What a glib article!
It was about as horrifying as reading about a hypothetical article on Industrial Engineering takeaways from the Third Reich.
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?!
There are plenty of books about the engineering takeaways from the Third Reich. The fact that it was evil does not mean one should ignore everything about it.
For you perhaps, but the takeaway for billionaires is to learn how to do this and have everyone accept their suffering. So, how do you get people to work more, pay more, receive less, everywhere?
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.
That's not modern. These days you take being ignorant of your enemy as a point of pride, and treat everyone who seems too familiar with your enemy as suspicious.
>The East India Company was an exploitative, ruthless and dishonorable organization that put millions of people in the Indian subcontinent to untold suffering.
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"
What they did in India was mostly the result of its field team (middle management) taking things into its own hands and operating almost completely free from oversight. The EIC was only supposed to establish trade between the two continents, instead it became a rogue mercenary power-broker between the subcontinent's fragmented pseudo-kingdoms and ended up taking control of all South Asia.
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.
The BEIC was only sporadically profitable and required frequent British government intervention to keep it afloat. Corruption was widespread and its armies were forced to put down almost constant insurgences.
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.