JOHN COMPANY:
The British East India Company (chartered 1600)
The British East India Company may not ring a bell nowadays, but for about a hundred years, between the mid-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, it was a major league player in world commerce and politics. Considered by many to be the world’s first multinational corporation, by the time of its dissolution in 1858, it controlled most of India, Burma, Singapore, and Hong Kong, an estimated 20 percent of the world’s people. Popularly known as “John Company,” it was chartered on the last day of 1599 by Queen Elizabeth I, who gave the fledgling company a monopoly on the potentially lucrative spice trade with the East Indies. For years it struggled against other European powers for a foothold in India, but gradually by the mid-seventeenth century the Company had constructed walled forts in the port cities of Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras (now called Chennai), protected by its own private army, stocked mostly with Indian mercenaries.
As the Company expanded its commercial interests, often through underhanded means, it began meddling in local politics, which infuriated Indian rulers. Finally in 1756, the Nawab of Bengal decided to put his foot down and teach the Company a lesson: he attacked and captured Calcutta’s Fort William and, according to one eyewitness account, packed nearly 150 English prisoners into an eighteen-by-fourteen-foot holding cell without food or water. After spending a sweltering night in what came to be known as the Black Hole of Calcutta, all but 23 prisoners had died. Just to keep the record straight here, some historians maintain that both the number of prisoners and deaths were greatly exaggerated; there’s even a suggestion that the whole incident was concocted to inflame English passions.
Whether true or not, the report of the cruel treatment of English prisoners did indeed rile the English. In response, they re-captured Fort William and further decided that a “regime change” in Bengal would be a good idea. After a lot of Machiavellian behind-the-scenes maneuvering, everything came to a head in 1757 on a large field near the village of Plassey. An EIC force of maybe three thousand soldiers, most of them hired hands, went toe-to-toe with an Indian army estimated at 50,000. Surprisingly, even though outnumbered seven-to-one, the English carried the day, mostly because, it seems, that at least half the Indian combatants had been bribed to play dead. The “Battle” of Plassey wound down in a civilized 10 hours with a minimum loss of life. Nearly two hundred years later, Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, bitterly but accurately ascribed the English victory to “treason and forgery.” However the Company pulled it off, Plassey marked the beginning of its century-long political domination of India.
But this was all still a hundred years down the road when Yale arrived. You might ask though (especially if you’ve had occasion to travel there yourself): Why would anyone go to India for so little money? Apparently even a “little money” went a long way in seventeenth-century India. And as Elihu Yale demonstrates, even low-level clerks, if they had the right stuff and were in the right place at the right time, could make LOTS of money. We have, as another example, lawyer and socialite William Hickey, born a century after Yale. At the age of 20, he was essentially banished to India by his family, to work for the EIC, in the hope that the experience would straighten out his wild and crazy ways. It didn’t, but by the time he said good-bye to Bengal he was keeping a household of sixty-three servants, had five horses to dispose of, besides “furniture, plate, jewelry, paintings and engravings, books, a billiards table, chamber organ, a stock of the best liqueurs,” a buggy “finished in the first style” and a “very elegant chair palankeen,” and had accumulated a personal fortune that amounted to one hundred and forty-nine thousand ... rupees.
Believe it or not, the EIC lives on in this country today in one strange but ubiquitous incarnation. The story goes that by the early 1770s the Company was nearly bankrupt. The English government, in an effort to boost the its sales, passed the Tea Act which allowed the Company to sell its enormous stockpiles of tea in the American colonies without worrying about paying the usual taxes. Remember the rallying cry from your high school American history class, “No taxation without representation”? With this legislation, the Company could undersell its colonial competitors, who now faced their own financial ruin.
American colonists, already up in arms over other instances of English high-handedness, did what all good Americans have always done when aroused by injustice–they protested. Most of the tea-carrying English ships were turned away from American ports except one, Boston. Toward the end of 1773, a large shipment was waiting to be unloaded from three ships anchored in the harbor. Calling themselves the “Sons of Liberty,” a band of about 150 men–disguised, ironically, as “Indians”–boarded the ships and dumped 45 tons of tea into the drink, an act of civil disobedience celebrated as the Boston Tea Party.
One of the protesters liberated an EIC flag from the ship Dartmouth. It consisted of alternating red-and-white horizontal stripes and a St. George’s Cross on a blue rectangle in the upper left-hand corner. Sound familiar? According to one legend, this flag served as a model for the first American flag, sewed in 1776 by Betsy Ross, a widowed upholsterer (though nowadays most historians no longer believe that Ross actually was the flag’s creator).
The British East India Company may not ring a bell nowadays, but for about a hundred years, between the mid-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, it was a major league player in world commerce and politics. Considered by many to be the world’s first multinational corporation, by the time of its dissolution in 1858, it controlled most of India, Burma, Singapore, and Hong Kong, an estimated 20 percent of the world’s people. Popularly known as “John Company,” it was chartered on the last day of 1599 by Queen Elizabeth I, who gave the fledgling company a monopoly on the potentially lucrative spice trade with the East Indies. For years it struggled against other European powers for a foothold in India, but gradually by the mid-seventeenth century the Company had constructed walled forts in the port cities of Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras (now called Chennai), protected by its own private army, stocked mostly with Indian mercenaries.
As the Company expanded its commercial interests, often through underhanded means, it began meddling in local politics, which infuriated Indian rulers. Finally in 1756, the Nawab of Bengal decided to put his foot down and teach the Company a lesson: he attacked and captured Calcutta’s Fort William and, according to one eyewitness account, packed nearly 150 English prisoners into an eighteen-by-fourteen-foot holding cell without food or water. After spending a sweltering night in what came to be known as the Black Hole of Calcutta, all but 23 prisoners had died. Just to keep the record straight here, some historians maintain that both the number of prisoners and deaths were greatly exaggerated; there’s even a suggestion that the whole incident was concocted to inflame English passions.
Whether true or not, the report of the cruel treatment of English prisoners did indeed rile the English. In response, they re-captured Fort William and further decided that a “regime change” in Bengal would be a good idea. After a lot of Machiavellian behind-the-scenes maneuvering, everything came to a head in 1757 on a large field near the village of Plassey. An EIC force of maybe three thousand soldiers, most of them hired hands, went toe-to-toe with an Indian army estimated at 50,000. Surprisingly, even though outnumbered seven-to-one, the English carried the day, mostly because, it seems, that at least half the Indian combatants had been bribed to play dead. The “Battle” of Plassey wound down in a civilized 10 hours with a minimum loss of life. Nearly two hundred years later, Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, bitterly but accurately ascribed the English victory to “treason and forgery.” However the Company pulled it off, Plassey marked the beginning of its century-long political domination of India.
But this was all still a hundred years down the road when Yale arrived. You might ask though (especially if you’ve had occasion to travel there yourself): Why would anyone go to India for so little money? Apparently even a “little money” went a long way in seventeenth-century India. And as Elihu Yale demonstrates, even low-level clerks, if they had the right stuff and were in the right place at the right time, could make LOTS of money. We have, as another example, lawyer and socialite William Hickey, born a century after Yale. At the age of 20, he was essentially banished to India by his family, to work for the EIC, in the hope that the experience would straighten out his wild and crazy ways. It didn’t, but by the time he said good-bye to Bengal he was keeping a household of sixty-three servants, had five horses to dispose of, besides “furniture, plate, jewelry, paintings and engravings, books, a billiards table, chamber organ, a stock of the best liqueurs,” a buggy “finished in the first style” and a “very elegant chair palankeen,” and had accumulated a personal fortune that amounted to one hundred and forty-nine thousand ... rupees.
Believe it or not, the EIC lives on in this country today in one strange but ubiquitous incarnation. The story goes that by the early 1770s the Company was nearly bankrupt. The English government, in an effort to boost the its sales, passed the Tea Act which allowed the Company to sell its enormous stockpiles of tea in the American colonies without worrying about paying the usual taxes. Remember the rallying cry from your high school American history class, “No taxation without representation”? With this legislation, the Company could undersell its colonial competitors, who now faced their own financial ruin.
American colonists, already up in arms over other instances of English high-handedness, did what all good Americans have always done when aroused by injustice–they protested. Most of the tea-carrying English ships were turned away from American ports except one, Boston. Toward the end of 1773, a large shipment was waiting to be unloaded from three ships anchored in the harbor. Calling themselves the “Sons of Liberty,” a band of about 150 men–disguised, ironically, as “Indians”–boarded the ships and dumped 45 tons of tea into the drink, an act of civil disobedience celebrated as the Boston Tea Party.
One of the protesters liberated an EIC flag from the ship Dartmouth. It consisted of alternating red-and-white horizontal stripes and a St. George’s Cross on a blue rectangle in the upper left-hand corner. Sound familiar? According to one legend, this flag served as a model for the first American flag, sewed in 1776 by Betsy Ross, a widowed upholsterer (though nowadays most historians no longer believe that Ross actually was the flag’s creator).
