The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire

is always a mistake to read history backwards. We know that the East India Company (EIC) eventually grew to control almost half the world’s trade and become the most powerful corporation in history, as Edmund Burke famously put it, ‘a state in the guise of a merchant’. In retrospect, the rise of the Company seems almost inevitable. But that was not

But though the ‘sea states’ coped most successfully with the economic conditions of the period, their strength and importance should not be exaggerated by hindsight. Much of their overseas commercial activity was risky and unprofitable,27 as the misfortunes of the Royal Africa Company, the South Seas Company and the Dutch West India and East India

At the turn of the nineteenth century, the British East India Company controlled huge swaths of the Indian subcontinent. It ruled more land and people than existed in all of Europe, collecting taxes and setting laws. It commanded a well-drilled standing army of 200,000 men, twice as large as Britain’s own army at home, and operated the world’s larg

The idea of a joint stock company was one of Tudor England’s most brilliant and revolutionary innovations.