The Beginnings of the Imperial Dream
February 25, 2008 by gbrown · Leave a Comment
The trouble with history is history teachers. School left only and indelible impression of tedious history classes on a Wednesday afternoon with our socially inadequate teacher rambling on about the Bolsheviks, the Maginot Line and just about any historical subject that couldn’t be more irrelevant to the mind of a teenage boy.
Strange then that I was drawn to the book I am currently reading - The East India Company by Anthony Wild. Once I had overcome the knee jerk association of boring wednesdays and Clive of India I was drawn into a world of tea, piracy, treachery, humduggery and spices noted by one commentator as the “grandest society of merchants in the Universe”.
Indeed The Company did for global trade in the 17th century what Microsoft did to software in the 90s and Google respectively for the internet. It created the ecosystem.
India has always had a draw for me. I have visited a number of times, set up 2 offices in probably 2 of the most remote states and travelled from the very far rugged North on the Tibetan border in Sikkim down to the coconut backwaters of the Southern states of Kerala and Chennai.
Interesting that the Company had set up its original trading posts in the same locales our company had decided upon - Calcutta and Madras (now Chennai). But that’s where the similarities end. Wild claims that The Company was the largest, in real terms, in history turning over 10s of millions in the 16th and 17th centuries.
Beyond the obvious hiccups in its history such as the Black Hole of Calcutta and the ongoing subjegation of the locals, much of today’s corporate structures derive from The Company’s machinations - boards of directors, AGMs and dividend declarations all came from its initial blueprint.
But its legacy goes beyond corporate governance. Words familiar in our folklore derive from the company’s own history - The South Sea Bubble, pukka, Lloyds of London, mocha coffee, Boston Tea Party, stars and stripes, earl grey tea, The Stock Exchange, Pale Ale, tonic water, golf, the fur trade, slavery, tomato ketchup, Nutmeg, Opium, coffee houses, P+O and the Suez Canal are to name but a few whose history is inextricably intertwined with its own.
What it did unquestionably do was open up the world to trade - from coffee and textiles in its early stages to tea, opium, silks and tobacco in the 18 and 19th centuries.
When you read Wild’s account you find many parralels between the economic gunboat diplomacy of The Company and the modern antics of today’s multinationals. Ironically, its only the tools of their endeavours that have changed - India, Africa, China, Indonesia, Afghanistan and the Middle East all comprised the earlier playing and plundering grounds of the age’s zealous entrepreneurs.
As one Lord Palmerston commented “It is the business of government to open and secure roads for the merchant”.
How little has changed.
