Much of human history has consisted of unequal conflicts between the haves and have nots: between people with the farmer, military and economic powers and those without it or between those who acquired it by theft, murdering, plunder and loot. But in the 18th century, no one had an idea that The Mughal Empire (1526-1857) In India, a regional superpower that has seized and much of the north of India two centuries earlier, was overtaken by East India Company a small London based Corporation.
In 1600 AD, British Royal Charter forms the East India Company, subsequently, in 1608 the Company sent Captain William Hawkins to the court of Mughal emperor Jahangir to secure royal patronage. He succeeded in getting a royal permit for the Company to establish factories at various places on the western coast of India. Then in 1615 AD, First ambassador Thomas Roe was sent by Emperor James I of England to Jahangir’s court. India then had a population of around 150 million a fifth of the World’s largest.
As the British economic historian Angus Madison shows that around 1700 AD, Mughal India briefly surpassed China as the largest economy in the world. This was due to many factors Mughals had encouraged trade by developing roads, river transport, sea routes, ports and many inland tolls and taxes, their aesthetic obsession also helped bring Indian textile manufacturing to a new height of beauty and brilliance. Madisons exact figures show in 1600 AD, Britain was creating 1.8 percent of world GDP while Mughal India was creating 22.5 percent. The figures for 1700 AD 2.88 percent vs 22.44 percent.
Shashi Tharoor in his book ‘An Era of Darkness’ narrates, Less than a century and a half later, this Mughal empire was in a state of collapse after the spectacular sacking of Delhi by Persian Nadir Shah Afshar (1736-1744) in 1739 and loot of all of its treasures. The Mughal capital burned over eight long weeks; gold silver jewels and finery, worth over 500 million rupees were seized, along with the emperor’s fabled Peacock Throne: elephants and horses were commandeered: and 50,000 corpses littered the streets. It is said that when Nadir Shah and his forces returned home they had stolen so much from Mughal India that all taxes were eliminated in Persia for the next three years.
Over the years, the Company shifted its attention from pepper and other spices to calico and silk fabric and eventually tea and expanded into the Persian Gulf, China and elsewhere in Asia. The East India Company’s royal charter gave it to the ability to “wage war” and initially it used military force to protect itself and fight rival traders. Taking the advantage of the collapse of the Mughal Empire in 1757 AD, under the command of Robert Clive the Company won a famous victory in Plassey over a ruling Nawab Siraj-ud-Daula, however, it gained control of the entire Mughal state of Bengal. Clive who led the Company’s 3000 person army, became Bengals governor and began to collect taxes and customs, The Company then built on its victory and drove the French and Dutch out of the Indian subcontinent.
A good proportion of the loot of Bengal went directly into Clive’s pocket. He returned to Britain with a personal fortune, which made him the richest self-made man in Europe. He transferred to the East India Company treasury no less than £2.5 million (£262.5 million today) seized from defeated rulers of Bengal unprecedented sums at the time. The entire contents of the Bengal treasury were simply loaded into one hundred boats and floated down the Ganges to Fort William the Company’s Calcutta headquarters.
In the years that followed, the East India Company forcibly annexed other regions of the subcontinent and forged alliances with rulers of the territory they could not conquer. At its height, it had an army of 260,000. The subcontinent was now under the rule of East India Company’s shareholders who elected “merchant-statesmen” each to dictate policy within its territory.
But financial woes and widespread awareness of the company’s abuses of power eventually led Britain to seek direct control of the East India Company. In 1858 after a long wind down, the British government finally ended company rule in Subcontinent. By 1874, the company was a shell of its former shelf and was dissolved.
In 1930, Will Durant an American writer, historian and philosopher after visiting India. He had made an in-depth study of the Indian Civilization and published a book on it “The Case for India”. The British conquest of India was an invasion and destruction of great civilization by a trading company (East India Company) utterly without scruple principle, careless of art and greedy of gain, overrunning with fire and sword a country temporarily disordered and helpless bribing and murdering annexing and stealing and beginning that careen of illegal and ‘legal’ plunder which has now (1930) gone on ruthless for one hundred and seventy three years.
Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard Professor who won a US Senate seat in Massachusetts, is an expert in bankruptcy. Responding to Governor Romney’s statement that ‘corporations are people’, she replied, No corporations are not people. People have hearts. They have kids. They get jobs. They get sick. They thrive. They dance. They live. They love. And they die. And that matters…because we don’t run this country for corporations, we run it for people.
The writer is a directorate of Archaeology Sindh, Hyderabad