Early
days of globalisation
Nick
Robins: The Corporation that Changed the World: How
the East India Company Shaped the Modern Multinational. Pluto
Press, ú15.99
I
often gauge how much I have enjoyed a book by the amount of
highlighting and marginal notes I make in pencil. This book, like
many on my shelves, will horrify those who prize pristine, unmarked
first editions.
On
31 December 1600 a precursor of the modern transnational corporation
came into existence. Its pioneering techniques in the field of trade
and commerce, and downright murder and corruption, preceded by
centuries the noxious business practices that we associate with
today’s all-powerful corporations, many of whom have a higher turn
over than small countries.
This
book presents as a meticulous account of perhaps the most powerful
corporation that ever lived, tracing how it came into existence, how
it operated, its inner structure, the role of its own armies in its
rise to supremacy, its part in the Bengal Famine when 10 million died
as a result of the Company’s market manipulation, its militaristic
role in the Opium Wars, its part in the Indian Mutiny and the Boston
Tea Party and how, for the last twenty years of its existence, it
ruled India as an agent of the British Empire. When it comes to
downright exploitation, corruption, slaughter and sheer negligence
and indifference to the suffering of others, perhaps no company that
ever existed comes near the East India Company in its ruthless
pursuit of profit, whilst refashioning the world commercial order in
the interests of privilege and power for hundreds of years to come.
In
its time the company had many critics, most notably Edmund Burke,
“the real champion of India’s identity”, Adam Smith and Karl
Marx. Burke fought long and hard to impeach the Company’s Governor
General Warren Hastings for the devastation wrought on India in its
endless search for profit.
Commencing
his opening speech at Westminster Hall in February 1788, Burke said:
“I
impeach him in the name of the people of India, whose laws, rights
and liberties, he has subverted, whose properties he has destroyed,
whose country he has laid waste and desolate . . . I impeach him in
the name of human nature itself, which he has cruelly outraged,
injured and oppressed, in both sexes, in very age, rank, situation
and conditions of life.”
Despite
Burke’s opening four day tirade against Hastings - one of the
longest opening speeches in history - during which women were
carried out fainting, at which the Speaker was “rendered
speechless” and at which spectators were willing to pay ú50
for a seat, despite an ensuing trial that lasted from February 1787
to April 1795, Hastings was acquitted.
Considering
the Company’s operations for the New York Daily Tribune in
the summer of 1853, Marx noted five characteristics: “ . . . a
permanent financial deficit, a regular over-supply of wars, and no
supply at all of public works, an abominable system of taxation, and
a no less abominable system, of justice and law..”
Satirising
the Company’s administrative system, he commented how there existed
“no government by which so much is written and so little done.”
Marx furthermore viewed the company as a tool of British capitalism
plc in India, observing how “the aristocracy wanted to conquer it,
the moneyocracy wanted to plunder it and the millocracy to undersell
it”.
The
Second Opium War was, in Marx’s view, attributable to the Company’s
operations in the East and its insistence that it had the right to
swamp China with drugs in the name of profit, regardless of the
addiction-induced misery its trade created or how the Chinese
authorities felt. He wrote:
“While
openly preaching free trade in poison, it secretly defends the
monopoly of its manufacture. Whenever we look closely into the nature
of British free trade, monopoly is pretty generally found to, lie at
the bottom of its’freedom’”.
In
eight carefully researched chapters, Robins traces the Company’s
operations from its inception as a trader in spices to its role in
running the Indian sub-continent on behalf of the British crown,
withholding, one imagines, very little regardless how gruesome, and
there indeed are some stomach-churning passages.
In
the final chapter, his analysis masterly done, Robins, contemplating
the state of corporate play today, reflects how the Company’s
legacy reveals the importance of taking on the mega-corporations who
presently rampage across the planet unhindered, and this, for
socialists, is the book’s one failing.
Robins’
remedy for curbing corporate power is simple:
“First
of all, its market power and political influence must be limited . .
Next, stringent rules are needed to ensure that management and
investors do not use the corporation as a tool for their short-term
interests . . And, finally, clear and forcible systems of justice
have to be in place to hold the corporation to account for damage to
society and the environment.”
Thus,
a brilliant attack on unchecked power in the pursuit of profit is
marred by the simple request that the capitalist class behaves and
shows a little more respect when carrying out its obscene business,
and that the executive arm of capitalism – government – hurries
to the rescue of society and the natural environment. Smiley-faced
capitalism is, for Robins, the only remedy. Warren Hastings laughs in
his grave.
All
said, if you’re into the study of corporate power gone mad, read
this.
John
Bissett
The
Last Conflict The Corporation that Changed the World Crisis
of Socialism
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