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New Statesman, UK
Dec 9 2004
The world's first multinational
Cover story
Nick Robins
Monday 13th December 2004
NS Essay 1- Corporate greed, the ruination of traditional ways of
life, share-price bubbles, western imperialism: all these modern
complaints were made against the British East India Company in the
18th century. Nick Robins draws the lessons
In The Discovery of India, the final and perhaps most profound part
of his "prison trilogy", written in 1944 from Ahmednagar Fort,
Jawaharlal Nehru described the effect of the East India Company on
the country he would shortly rule. "The corruption, venality,
nepotism, violence and greed of money of these early generations of
British rule in India," he wrote, "is something which passes
comprehension." It was, he added, "significant that one of the
Hindustani words which has become part of the English language is
'loot'".
For most of the succeeding 60 years, the East India Company sank from
view. No plaque marked the site where its headquarters had stood in
the City of London for more than two centuries. It was regarded as
something that could be consigned to the history books, its deeds to
be squabbled over by academics and imperial romantics. But the onset
of globalisation has revived interest in a company that could be seen
as a pioneering force for world trade. Exhibitions at the British
Library and the V&A, plus a string of popular histories, have sought
to revive the reputation of the "Honourable East India Company". Its
founders are now hailed as swashbuckling adventurers, its operations
praised for pioneering the birth of modern consumerism and its
glamorous executives profiled as multicultural "white moguls".
Yet the East India Company, romantic as it may seem, has more
profound and disturbing lessons to teach us. Abuse of market power;
corporate greed; judicial impunity; the "irrational exuberance" of
the financial markets; and the destruction of traditional economies
(in what could not, at one time, be called the poor or developing
world): none of these is new. The most common complaints against late
20th- and early 21st-century capitalism were all foreshadowed in the
story of the East India Company more than two centuries ago.
In The Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith used the East India
Company as a case study to show how monopoly capitalism undermines
both liberty and justice, and how the management of
shareholder-controlled corporations invariably ends in "negligence,
profusion and malversation". Yet nothing of Smith's scepticism of
corporations, his criticism of their pursuit of monopoly and of their
faulty system of governance, enters the speeches of today's
free-market advocates.
Smith's vision of free trade entailed firm controls on corporate
power. And, as did his own times, subsequent history shows how right
he was. If it is to contribute to economic progress, the
corporation's market power has to be limited to allow real choice,
and to prevent suppliers being squeezed and consumers gouged. Its
political power also needs to be constrained, if it is not to rig the
rules of regulation so that it enjoys unjustified public subsidy or
protection. Internal and external checks and balances must curb the
tendency of executives to become corporate emperors. And clear and
enforceable systems of justice are necessary to hold the corporation
to account for any damage to society and the environment. These are
tough conditions, and have rarely been met, either in the age of the
East India Company or in today's era of globalisation.
Today, we can see the East India Company as the first "imperial
corporation", the very design of which drove it to market domination,
speculative excess and the evasion of justice. Like the modern
multinational, it was eager to avoid the mere interplay of supply and
demand. It jealously guarded its chartered monopoly of imports from
Asia. But it also wanted to control the sources of supply by breaking
the power of local rulers in India and eliminating competition so
that it could force down its purchase prices.
By controlling both ends of the chain, the company could buy cheap
and sell dear. This meant organising coups against local rulers and
placing puppets on the throne. By the middle of the 18th century, the
company was deliberately breaching the terms of its commercial
concessions in Bengal by trading in prohibited domestic goods and
selling its duty-free passes to local merchants. Combining economic
muscle with extensive bribery and the deployment of its small but
effective private army, the company engineered a series of
"revolutions" that gave it territorial as well as economic control.
After Robert Clive's victory at the Battle of Palashi in 1757, the
company literally looted Bengal's treasury. It loaded the country's
gold and silver on to a fleet of more than a hundred boats and sent
it downriver to Calcutta. In one stroke, Clive netted a cool £2.5m
(more than £200m today) for the company, and £234,000 (£20m) for
himself. Historical convention views Palashi as the first step in the
creation of the British empire in India. It is perhaps better
understood as the company's most successful business deal.
It was the unrivalled quality and cheapness of textiles that had
lured the East India Company to Bengal, and it would be Bengal's
weavers who felt the full force of the company's new-found market
power. Never rich, the weavers nevertheless had a better standard of
living than their counterparts in 18th-century England. At a time
when the British state was intervening on the side of the employer -
for example, to set maximum levels for wages - India's weavers were
able to act collectively, aiding their ability to negotiate
favourable prices. But the East India Company eliminated the weavers'
freedom to sell to other merchants, and so crushed their limited but
important market autonomy. It imposed prices 40 per cent below the
market rate, and enforced them with violence and imprisonment. Many
weavers were driven to despair. One account reports that, among the
winders of raw silk, "instances have been known of their cutting off
their thumbs to prevent their being forced to wind silk".
As the company transformed itself from a modest trading venture into
a powerful corporate machine, so its systems of governance completely
failed to cope with the new responsibilities that it faced. As Philip
Francis, one of its leading critics, put it, in- stead of seeking
"moderate but permanent profit", the company had recklessly pursued
"immediate and excessive returns". Corruption assumed epidemic
proportions and speculation overtook its shares, stoked up by insider
trading led by Clive and other executives.
In the history of financial crises, the South Sea Bubble is often
regarded as the only premodern crash worthy of note. But the East
India Company also engineered its own stock-market boom, ending in a
share-price slump that rocked the world. The company's share price
doubled in the decade following Palashi, stoked by ever more
extraordinary acquisitions, such as the takeover of Bengal's entire
tax system in 1765. In London, the company's management and
shareholders fought for control of a money machine they believed
would yield unlimited returns. A swarm of "bulls" and "bears"
descended on the company's shares, with shareholders voting for a
doubling of the annual dividend from 6 to 12 per cent in order to
cash in on the new-found wealth. This upward spiral of "infectious
greed" - to use a phrase employed by Alan Greenspan, chairman of the
US Federal Reserve, more than two centuries later - came to an end in
May 1769 when news of renewed conflict in India reached the London
markets. The share price fell 16 per cent in a single month, and
would continue a downward course for the next 15 years, reaching the
depths in July 1784 after a fall of 55 per cent.
Yet the human tragedy was just beginning. In Bengal, the annual
monsoon rains had failed. But what turned a manageable natural
disaster into a catastrophe was the manipulation of local grain
markets by East India speculators, driving up the price of food
beyond the reach of the poor. "As soon as the dryness of the season
foretold the approaching dearness of rice," went one eyewitness
account, "our Gentlemen in the Company's service were as early as
possible in buying up all they could lay hold of." The situation was
compounded by the company's decision to increase the rate of tax to
ensure that revenue levels remained stable. Estimates vary, but up to
ten million people may have died of starvation. When the full story
became known in Britain, there was fury at the firm's negligence. As
Horace Walpole wrote at the time: "We have murdered, deposed,
plundered, usurped - nay, what think you of the famine in Bengal, in
which millions perished, being caused by a monopoly of provisions by
the servants of the East Indies."
The company's fortunes had now turned sharply downwards. By the end
of 1772 it was, in effect, bankrupt. A final slump in its shares
precipitated a Europe-wide financial crisis, and forced the company,
begging for a bailout, into the arms of the government. But not only
was the East India Company the mother of the modern multinational
corporation, it also stimulated one of the first movements for
corporate reform.
Well-versed in the history of the Roman Republic, Britain's elite
feared that, just as the proceeds of Rome's conquest of Asia (western
Anatolia) had been used to subvert its ancient freedoms, so the
company's takeover of Bengal would bring despotism back home. If left
unchecked, argued one editorial, the company could "repeat the same
cruelties in this island which have disgraced humanity and deluged
with native and innocent blood the plains of India". Prior to his
conservative turn during the French revolution, Edmund Burke pressed
repeatedly for the company to be made accountable to parliament and
for its system of exploitation to be ended. "Every rupee of profit
made by an Englishman is lost for ever to India," he concluded, a
judgement that would probably be echoed today by millions of people
working at the wrong end of the multinational bargain.
All the tools with which we are now familiar were deployed to tame
the firm: codes of conduct for company executives, rules on
shareholder abuse, government regulation, and ultimately, as with so
many failed firms, nationalisation.
Government intervention over a hundred years transformed the company
from a purely commercial institution to an agent of the British
state. It was only in the wake of the great rebellion against company
rule, which shook northern India in 1857-58, that its anachronistic
position as a profit-making ruler was put to an end. Direct control
of the company's territories passed to the crown, and the British Raj
was born.
Yet in spite of all the parliamentary inquiries and waves of
regulation, few of the company's executives were ever brought to
book. Clive narrowly escaped parliamentary censure in 1773, only to
die by his own hand. Parliament then turned its attention to Warren
Hastings, governor-general of Bengal, voting twice to recall him for
mismanagement. Both times this was rebuffed by the company's
shareholders and, as a last resort, and at Burke's instigation, the
medieval practice of impeachment was revived and used against him.
Among the charges was that Hastings had introduced a company monopoly
over the production of opium and, in an attempt to smuggle the crop
into China, had awarded the contract at a knock-down price to the son
of the East India Company chairman, who promptly sold it on for a
tidy profit. Hastings was also the first to seek deliberately to
break China's ban on the importation of opium. His attempt failed,
but would be pursued by his successors, with tragic consequences.
Burke won Commons majorities in support of his case, and in February
1788, the trial of Hastings began in the Lords with Burke delivering
a four-day opening speech against him.
What makes Burke's challenge to Hastings and the East India Company
so compelling are the principles on which it was based. "The laws of
morality," he declared, "are the same everywhere . . . there is no
action which would pass for an act of extortion, of peculation, of
bribery, and oppression in England, that is not an act of extortion,
of peculation, of bribery, and oppression in Europe, Asia, Africa and
the world over." Against the relativism that increasingly viewed
India as an inferior land in which different standards of justice
should apply, Burke unfurled the standard of absolute values,
protesting against "geographical morality". In the heat of his
reactions to the French revolution, Burke would oppose Tom Paine's
Rights of Man. But in the case against Hastings, Burke argued for
companies to be judged by their respect for what we would understand
as universal human rights. The trial was interrupted, first by George
III's madness and then by the French revolution. After eight long
years, Hastings was acquitted of all charges, a result that surprised
nobody, given the political complexion of the Lords.
Yet there is one instance where the company's impunity was broken. In
1774, a group of Armenian merchants launched a civil case for damages
against Hastings's predecessor, Harry Verelst. Led by Gregore
Cojamaul and Johannes Padre Rafael, the merchants alleged that
Verelst had arbitrarily locked them up in Bengal six years earlier,
confiscating their property and removing their freedom to trade. It
is a testimony to the British legal system that in December 1774, the
Lord Chief Justice decided in favour of the Armenians, judging that
Verelst had been guilty of "oppression, false imprisonment and
singular depredations". Verelst had to pay £9,000 in damages, as well
as full costs. Thousands of miles away from the scene of the crime,
the principle of extra-territorial liability for corporate
malpractice was established in 1770s London.
Many in business regard the current upsurge of global litigation
against corporations such as Talisman, Unocal and Shell as somehow
new and unjustified. Yet Verelst's case provides a powerful
precedent, demonstrating that more than 200 years ago, a senior
executive of the world's first multinational was tried and found
guilty of what we would now consider human rights abuses.
It is not, however, Cojamaul's statue that stands outside the Foreign
Office in Whitehall, but Robert Clive's. That such a rogue still has
pride of place at the heart of government suggests that Britain has
not yet confronted the connections between its corporate and imperial
pasts. This is not mere forgetfulness, but the mark of a continued
belief that the unrestrained pursuit of market power and personal
reward is to be praised at the highest levels. In India, the East
India Company's mismanagement remains part of the national
consciousness; here, knowledge of the company's corruption and abuse
is almost entirely lacking. We still do not recognise the "imperial
gene" that remains at the heart of modern corporate design.
Perhaps Nehru can help us. In The Discovery of India, he examined the
consequences of England's long domination of India in terms of karma,
the spiritual law of cause and effect. "Entangled in its meshes," he
wrote, "we have thus struggled in vain to rid ourselves of this past
inheritance and start afresh on a different basis." Independence was
a necessary starting point for India, wrote Nehru, but Britain, too,
needed to "start afresh". As we approach the 250th anniversary of
Palashi, we do not need further glorification of the East India
Company's contribution to consumerism or of the celebrity of its
executives. We need an honest reckoning with the human costs of its
quest for market domination.
Nick Robins's Imperial Corporation: reckoning with the East
India Company will be published next year. He also takes part in
The Great Debates: Hastings v Burke (Radio 4, 29 December, 8pm)
http://www.newstatesman.com/site.php3?newTemplate=NSArticle_Ideas&newDispl ayURN0412130016
Dec 9 2004
The world's first multinational
Cover story
Nick Robins
Monday 13th December 2004
NS Essay 1- Corporate greed, the ruination of traditional ways of
life, share-price bubbles, western imperialism: all these modern
complaints were made against the British East India Company in the
18th century. Nick Robins draws the lessons
In The Discovery of India, the final and perhaps most profound part
of his "prison trilogy", written in 1944 from Ahmednagar Fort,
Jawaharlal Nehru described the effect of the East India Company on
the country he would shortly rule. "The corruption, venality,
nepotism, violence and greed of money of these early generations of
British rule in India," he wrote, "is something which passes
comprehension." It was, he added, "significant that one of the
Hindustani words which has become part of the English language is
'loot'".
For most of the succeeding 60 years, the East India Company sank from
view. No plaque marked the site where its headquarters had stood in
the City of London for more than two centuries. It was regarded as
something that could be consigned to the history books, its deeds to
be squabbled over by academics and imperial romantics. But the onset
of globalisation has revived interest in a company that could be seen
as a pioneering force for world trade. Exhibitions at the British
Library and the V&A, plus a string of popular histories, have sought
to revive the reputation of the "Honourable East India Company". Its
founders are now hailed as swashbuckling adventurers, its operations
praised for pioneering the birth of modern consumerism and its
glamorous executives profiled as multicultural "white moguls".
Yet the East India Company, romantic as it may seem, has more
profound and disturbing lessons to teach us. Abuse of market power;
corporate greed; judicial impunity; the "irrational exuberance" of
the financial markets; and the destruction of traditional economies
(in what could not, at one time, be called the poor or developing
world): none of these is new. The most common complaints against late
20th- and early 21st-century capitalism were all foreshadowed in the
story of the East India Company more than two centuries ago.
In The Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith used the East India
Company as a case study to show how monopoly capitalism undermines
both liberty and justice, and how the management of
shareholder-controlled corporations invariably ends in "negligence,
profusion and malversation". Yet nothing of Smith's scepticism of
corporations, his criticism of their pursuit of monopoly and of their
faulty system of governance, enters the speeches of today's
free-market advocates.
Smith's vision of free trade entailed firm controls on corporate
power. And, as did his own times, subsequent history shows how right
he was. If it is to contribute to economic progress, the
corporation's market power has to be limited to allow real choice,
and to prevent suppliers being squeezed and consumers gouged. Its
political power also needs to be constrained, if it is not to rig the
rules of regulation so that it enjoys unjustified public subsidy or
protection. Internal and external checks and balances must curb the
tendency of executives to become corporate emperors. And clear and
enforceable systems of justice are necessary to hold the corporation
to account for any damage to society and the environment. These are
tough conditions, and have rarely been met, either in the age of the
East India Company or in today's era of globalisation.
Today, we can see the East India Company as the first "imperial
corporation", the very design of which drove it to market domination,
speculative excess and the evasion of justice. Like the modern
multinational, it was eager to avoid the mere interplay of supply and
demand. It jealously guarded its chartered monopoly of imports from
Asia. But it also wanted to control the sources of supply by breaking
the power of local rulers in India and eliminating competition so
that it could force down its purchase prices.
By controlling both ends of the chain, the company could buy cheap
and sell dear. This meant organising coups against local rulers and
placing puppets on the throne. By the middle of the 18th century, the
company was deliberately breaching the terms of its commercial
concessions in Bengal by trading in prohibited domestic goods and
selling its duty-free passes to local merchants. Combining economic
muscle with extensive bribery and the deployment of its small but
effective private army, the company engineered a series of
"revolutions" that gave it territorial as well as economic control.
After Robert Clive's victory at the Battle of Palashi in 1757, the
company literally looted Bengal's treasury. It loaded the country's
gold and silver on to a fleet of more than a hundred boats and sent
it downriver to Calcutta. In one stroke, Clive netted a cool £2.5m
(more than £200m today) for the company, and £234,000 (£20m) for
himself. Historical convention views Palashi as the first step in the
creation of the British empire in India. It is perhaps better
understood as the company's most successful business deal.
It was the unrivalled quality and cheapness of textiles that had
lured the East India Company to Bengal, and it would be Bengal's
weavers who felt the full force of the company's new-found market
power. Never rich, the weavers nevertheless had a better standard of
living than their counterparts in 18th-century England. At a time
when the British state was intervening on the side of the employer -
for example, to set maximum levels for wages - India's weavers were
able to act collectively, aiding their ability to negotiate
favourable prices. But the East India Company eliminated the weavers'
freedom to sell to other merchants, and so crushed their limited but
important market autonomy. It imposed prices 40 per cent below the
market rate, and enforced them with violence and imprisonment. Many
weavers were driven to despair. One account reports that, among the
winders of raw silk, "instances have been known of their cutting off
their thumbs to prevent their being forced to wind silk".
As the company transformed itself from a modest trading venture into
a powerful corporate machine, so its systems of governance completely
failed to cope with the new responsibilities that it faced. As Philip
Francis, one of its leading critics, put it, in- stead of seeking
"moderate but permanent profit", the company had recklessly pursued
"immediate and excessive returns". Corruption assumed epidemic
proportions and speculation overtook its shares, stoked up by insider
trading led by Clive and other executives.
In the history of financial crises, the South Sea Bubble is often
regarded as the only premodern crash worthy of note. But the East
India Company also engineered its own stock-market boom, ending in a
share-price slump that rocked the world. The company's share price
doubled in the decade following Palashi, stoked by ever more
extraordinary acquisitions, such as the takeover of Bengal's entire
tax system in 1765. In London, the company's management and
shareholders fought for control of a money machine they believed
would yield unlimited returns. A swarm of "bulls" and "bears"
descended on the company's shares, with shareholders voting for a
doubling of the annual dividend from 6 to 12 per cent in order to
cash in on the new-found wealth. This upward spiral of "infectious
greed" - to use a phrase employed by Alan Greenspan, chairman of the
US Federal Reserve, more than two centuries later - came to an end in
May 1769 when news of renewed conflict in India reached the London
markets. The share price fell 16 per cent in a single month, and
would continue a downward course for the next 15 years, reaching the
depths in July 1784 after a fall of 55 per cent.
Yet the human tragedy was just beginning. In Bengal, the annual
monsoon rains had failed. But what turned a manageable natural
disaster into a catastrophe was the manipulation of local grain
markets by East India speculators, driving up the price of food
beyond the reach of the poor. "As soon as the dryness of the season
foretold the approaching dearness of rice," went one eyewitness
account, "our Gentlemen in the Company's service were as early as
possible in buying up all they could lay hold of." The situation was
compounded by the company's decision to increase the rate of tax to
ensure that revenue levels remained stable. Estimates vary, but up to
ten million people may have died of starvation. When the full story
became known in Britain, there was fury at the firm's negligence. As
Horace Walpole wrote at the time: "We have murdered, deposed,
plundered, usurped - nay, what think you of the famine in Bengal, in
which millions perished, being caused by a monopoly of provisions by
the servants of the East Indies."
The company's fortunes had now turned sharply downwards. By the end
of 1772 it was, in effect, bankrupt. A final slump in its shares
precipitated a Europe-wide financial crisis, and forced the company,
begging for a bailout, into the arms of the government. But not only
was the East India Company the mother of the modern multinational
corporation, it also stimulated one of the first movements for
corporate reform.
Well-versed in the history of the Roman Republic, Britain's elite
feared that, just as the proceeds of Rome's conquest of Asia (western
Anatolia) had been used to subvert its ancient freedoms, so the
company's takeover of Bengal would bring despotism back home. If left
unchecked, argued one editorial, the company could "repeat the same
cruelties in this island which have disgraced humanity and deluged
with native and innocent blood the plains of India". Prior to his
conservative turn during the French revolution, Edmund Burke pressed
repeatedly for the company to be made accountable to parliament and
for its system of exploitation to be ended. "Every rupee of profit
made by an Englishman is lost for ever to India," he concluded, a
judgement that would probably be echoed today by millions of people
working at the wrong end of the multinational bargain.
All the tools with which we are now familiar were deployed to tame
the firm: codes of conduct for company executives, rules on
shareholder abuse, government regulation, and ultimately, as with so
many failed firms, nationalisation.
Government intervention over a hundred years transformed the company
from a purely commercial institution to an agent of the British
state. It was only in the wake of the great rebellion against company
rule, which shook northern India in 1857-58, that its anachronistic
position as a profit-making ruler was put to an end. Direct control
of the company's territories passed to the crown, and the British Raj
was born.
Yet in spite of all the parliamentary inquiries and waves of
regulation, few of the company's executives were ever brought to
book. Clive narrowly escaped parliamentary censure in 1773, only to
die by his own hand. Parliament then turned its attention to Warren
Hastings, governor-general of Bengal, voting twice to recall him for
mismanagement. Both times this was rebuffed by the company's
shareholders and, as a last resort, and at Burke's instigation, the
medieval practice of impeachment was revived and used against him.
Among the charges was that Hastings had introduced a company monopoly
over the production of opium and, in an attempt to smuggle the crop
into China, had awarded the contract at a knock-down price to the son
of the East India Company chairman, who promptly sold it on for a
tidy profit. Hastings was also the first to seek deliberately to
break China's ban on the importation of opium. His attempt failed,
but would be pursued by his successors, with tragic consequences.
Burke won Commons majorities in support of his case, and in February
1788, the trial of Hastings began in the Lords with Burke delivering
a four-day opening speech against him.
What makes Burke's challenge to Hastings and the East India Company
so compelling are the principles on which it was based. "The laws of
morality," he declared, "are the same everywhere . . . there is no
action which would pass for an act of extortion, of peculation, of
bribery, and oppression in England, that is not an act of extortion,
of peculation, of bribery, and oppression in Europe, Asia, Africa and
the world over." Against the relativism that increasingly viewed
India as an inferior land in which different standards of justice
should apply, Burke unfurled the standard of absolute values,
protesting against "geographical morality". In the heat of his
reactions to the French revolution, Burke would oppose Tom Paine's
Rights of Man. But in the case against Hastings, Burke argued for
companies to be judged by their respect for what we would understand
as universal human rights. The trial was interrupted, first by George
III's madness and then by the French revolution. After eight long
years, Hastings was acquitted of all charges, a result that surprised
nobody, given the political complexion of the Lords.
Yet there is one instance where the company's impunity was broken. In
1774, a group of Armenian merchants launched a civil case for damages
against Hastings's predecessor, Harry Verelst. Led by Gregore
Cojamaul and Johannes Padre Rafael, the merchants alleged that
Verelst had arbitrarily locked them up in Bengal six years earlier,
confiscating their property and removing their freedom to trade. It
is a testimony to the British legal system that in December 1774, the
Lord Chief Justice decided in favour of the Armenians, judging that
Verelst had been guilty of "oppression, false imprisonment and
singular depredations". Verelst had to pay £9,000 in damages, as well
as full costs. Thousands of miles away from the scene of the crime,
the principle of extra-territorial liability for corporate
malpractice was established in 1770s London.
Many in business regard the current upsurge of global litigation
against corporations such as Talisman, Unocal and Shell as somehow
new and unjustified. Yet Verelst's case provides a powerful
precedent, demonstrating that more than 200 years ago, a senior
executive of the world's first multinational was tried and found
guilty of what we would now consider human rights abuses.
It is not, however, Cojamaul's statue that stands outside the Foreign
Office in Whitehall, but Robert Clive's. That such a rogue still has
pride of place at the heart of government suggests that Britain has
not yet confronted the connections between its corporate and imperial
pasts. This is not mere forgetfulness, but the mark of a continued
belief that the unrestrained pursuit of market power and personal
reward is to be praised at the highest levels. In India, the East
India Company's mismanagement remains part of the national
consciousness; here, knowledge of the company's corruption and abuse
is almost entirely lacking. We still do not recognise the "imperial
gene" that remains at the heart of modern corporate design.
Perhaps Nehru can help us. In The Discovery of India, he examined the
consequences of England's long domination of India in terms of karma,
the spiritual law of cause and effect. "Entangled in its meshes," he
wrote, "we have thus struggled in vain to rid ourselves of this past
inheritance and start afresh on a different basis." Independence was
a necessary starting point for India, wrote Nehru, but Britain, too,
needed to "start afresh". As we approach the 250th anniversary of
Palashi, we do not need further glorification of the East India
Company's contribution to consumerism or of the celebrity of its
executives. We need an honest reckoning with the human costs of its
quest for market domination.
Nick Robins's Imperial Corporation: reckoning with the East
India Company will be published next year. He also takes part in
The Great Debates: Hastings v Burke (Radio 4, 29 December, 8pm)
http://www.newstatesman.com/site.php3?newTemplate=NSArticle_Ideas&newDispl ayURN0412130016