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Some things to learn from the British East India Company's growth and demise
- zeristor 4y agoTwo things: What happened when telegraph cables reached India? I’m assuming that’s when the British government ousted it aside, which would be an interesting point. Minor point there were two colleges, civil and military. The civil is close by to where I live in Hailey, Herts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company_College https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company_College There was also a military one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addiscombe_Military_Seminary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addiscombe_Military_Seminary Im aghast at the amount of praying going on, considering how the company operated it might as well be spelt preying.
- zeristor 4y agoLooking through the alumini of the military college I see that Augustus Abbot went to India at 15, starting as a second Lieutenant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustus_Abbott https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustus_Abbott
- rsynnott 4y agoThat’s a weird assumption, because the causes of the demise of the company are very well documented. It was nationalised as a consequence of being responsible for a rebellion which killed over 800,000 people, in 1857. First telegram between England and India was 13 years later: https://m.economictimes.com/documents-reveal-contents-of-the-first-telegraph-message-between-india-england/articleshow/11976488.cms https://m.economictimes.com/documents-reveal-contents-of-the...
- zeristor 4y agoYes I checked on following up, and 1870 was when the cable reached to India, it was in that era, but of course any effect would have taken a decade or so to be felt.
- throwaway-jim 4y agoIs that.. an AI generated image at the beginning?
- zeristor 4y agoIt could well be, at least it isn’t Rick Astley.
- pbhjpbhj 4y agoMust be, it's pretty crazy. No masts and what appears to be a gangplank full of people. What's interesting is that on a small screen it gives just enough of the right type of image to give the feeling needed.
- marquisdepolis 4y agoYup, midjourney
- pinkwinds 4y agoThe Empire podcast by William Dalrymple and Anita Anand has been fascinating and the first few episodes are exactly about the British East India Company.
- bennysomething 4y agoThis looks great. Thanks
- ZeroGravitas 4y agoI was going to recommend his book "The Anarchy" on this topic. I think he has more, but only read that one so far. https://openlibrary.org/books/OL27999959M/The_Anarchy https://openlibrary.org/books/OL27999959M/The_Anarchy
- ehecatl42 4y agoI second this recommendation. A real eye-opener for me was learning that France and England were at it on India's east coast (the Carnatic wars) at pretty much the same time they were messing about the Hudson drainage basin in North America. And that India was fabulously, spectacularly wealthy… like all of the gold and silver (taken and squandered in China by the Spanish) from the Americas plus some to spare. "The Anarchy" and Kennedy's "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers" make for great reading for the armchair historian.
- sgt101 4y agoI also loved the link between the behaviour of the British in India and the turn of sentiment in the Americas. What got me was the link between the tea in the tea-party and the famine inflicted in Bengal. What goes around comes around.
- selimthegrim 4y agoWait until you compare the EIC and USA flags.
- thematrixturtle 4y agoOther key success factors for the East India Company included warfare, slavery, and legally enforced monopolies. The EIC was only wound down after their misrule incited a full-fledged rebellion that killed 6,000 British people (which caused outrage back home) and on the order of 800,000 Indians. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Rebellion_of_1857 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Rebellion_of_1857
- hnbad 4y agoThanks for pointing this out. Even the most exaggerated claims about the "death toll of communism" tend to fall short of estimates of the total death toll of British rule of its colonies (the Holodomor pales in comparison to the preventable famines in India alone) and the British East India Company played no small part in this. We really should have a more critical lense of colonialism nowadays and abandon the badly aging romanticization of it.
- rayiner 4y agoFamines were common and cyclical in India prior to British colonization as well. There are certain ones you can pin on the British, like in 1943, but it would be a feat to get close to the deaths from communism. And even then you’re comparing an empire that was quite openly exploiting who they viewed as lesser people, versus governments who devastated their own populations through good intentions. (I also find it funny to see the top response criticizing the obviously Indian author for failing to talk about something other than war and famine. Folks love their poverty porn, huh?)
- exBarrelSpoiler 4y agoThey just find it distasteful. It’s like reading a productivity article about the best tips to be a more effective organizer by learning from the mistakes of Operation Searchlight in failing to put down the East Pakistani insurgency.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- tragomaskhalos 4y agoIt is often now forgotten that much of what is referred to as 'The British Empire' was just private enterprise (veering into freebooting) flying a flag of convenience. My (admittedly narrow) understanding is that other European colonial enterprises were far more closely tied to and administered by the governments in question. On another point: "Eventually they created the East India College to help educate the clerks, teaching all the essentials - “On the curriculum: history, the classics, law – and Hindustani, Sanskrit, Persian and Telugu.”": that is a pretty intense curriculum, even accounting for the leg-up afforded by the far broader state of classical education back then - I can't imagine too many modern students not being intimidated by it.
- noisy_boy 4y ago> Hindustani, Sanskrit, Persian and Telugu I would be surprised if all the four languages were taught to everyone - one would expect Hindustani/Persian to be more useful in the North and Telegu would have been more useful in the South. Sanskrit being a mother language is generally useful.
- baybal2 4y ago
- elankart 4y agoYou lost me there in calling Sankrit the mother language. Telugu has a different lineage and Sankrit is alien to Indian Sub-continent. Please stop using HN to subtly push your agenda.
- unmole 4y ago> Telugu has a different lineage True. But of all South Indian languages, Telugu shows the most Sanskrit influence. > Sankrit is alien to Indian Sub-continent This is a bizzare assertion. Classical Sanskrit was developed in India. That is likely true of even archaic forms of Sanskrit and the Prakrit substrate.
- 4y ago
- outsomnia 4y ago> latency being so low ... the author means that the latency between the UK and the remote offices was HIGH.
- marquisdepolis 4y agoYou're right! Fixed :)
- m33k44 4y agoAnyone interested in a very thorough writing on the British occupation of India should read "The Inglorious Empire" by Shashi Tharoor. It is a very well researched work!
- barry-cotter 4y ago> Eminent Scottish historian William Dalrymple criticised the book, saying it "was written in 12 days, involved no personal archive research and contains some serious factual errors" however he maintained that the book was, nevertheless, "persuasive".[8] > In a review published in the Cambridge Review of International Affairs, economic historian, Tirthankar Roy, a faculty at the London School of Economics criticized the book. He noted that "Tharoor makes his case with passion and plain good writing. The facts cited in the book are beyond dispute. The story is meant to be blood-curdling and the colourful language — including liberal use of “depredation,” “loot,” “rapaciousness,” “vicious,” “brutality,” “plunder” and “extraction” — produces that effect. Like a religious text, it tells a straight and narrow story with the zeal of a holy warrior. Yet none of these qualities makes the interpretation wrong, however. Few professional historians think that the British Empire ruled India with India’s best interests in mind. > Another review of Inglorious Empire, published in the Literary Review, by historian John Keay, whose many writings on India include India: A History, applauds Tharoor for "tackling an impossibly contentious subject". However, he deplores the fact that "his moral venom sometimes clouds his own judgement" and notes that many of Tharoor's statistics are very seriously out of date, many coming from the polemics contained in the American Will Durant's Story of Civilisation written in the 1930s, which itself drew on the even earlier work of the crusading American missionary Jabej T. Sutherland, author of India in Bondage.[9] > A more detailed criticism of Tharoor's book and his use of statistics was set out by the writer of South Asian history Charles Allen in a lecture entitled Quis custodiet ipsos custodes: who owns Indian history? delivered to the Royal Society for Asian Affairs in London on 25 April 2018. A revised version was published in Asian Affairs under the revised title Who Owns India's History? A Critique of Shashi Tharoor's Inglorious Empire. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inglorious_Empire https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inglorious_Empire
- ozim 4y ago
- sslayer 4y agoUltimately they understood it was the people, not the product that made money
- vivegi 4y agoWhat a glib article! It was about as horrifying as reading about a hypothetical article on Industrial Engineering takeaways from the Third Reich. The East India Company was an exploitative, ruthless and dishonorable organization that put millions of people in the Indian subcontinent to untold suffering. Perhaps, the takeaway is to learn NOT to do that?!
- verisimi 4y agoFor you perhaps, but the takeaway for billionaires is to learn how to do this and have everyone accept their suffering. So, how do you get people to work more, pay more, receive less, everywhere? The answer to that question is public relations, or exploiting human psychology to get the turkeys to vote for Christmas. Modern news events are illuminating from that perspective.
- pbhjpbhj 4y agoKnow your enemy.
- pessimizer 4y agoThat's not modern. These days you take being ignorant of your enemy as a point of pride, and treat everyone who seems too familiar with your enemy as suspicious.
- keepquestioning 4y agoWe will likely be dealing with extraterrestrial megacorps like EIC in the next 100 years, good to know how they function.
- pottertheotter 4y agoI don’t know, it sounds like you’re not being very inclusive towards others, especially when they are exploitative, ruthless, dishonorable people.
- ReptileMan 4y ago>The East India Company was an exploitative, ruthless and dishonorable organization that put millions of people in the Indian subcontinent to untold suffering. The history is full of exploitative, ruthless and dishonorable organizations that barely had shards of success of the British East India company. So they obviously did something right. "Rommel, you magnificent bastard, I read your book"
- AlbertCory 4y agoGood article. I didn't expect to read the whole thing, but I did. > There’s an increase in focus on assessments (and punishment) after the fact rather than permission to perform an action A modern variant (also quoted by Grace Hopper, btw) is "better to beg forgiveness than ask permission." Was EIC really independent of the government? There's our answer right there: EIC didn't have to ask permission for most of what they did, but they knew they'd be begging forgiveness if it turned out badly. So they didn't need to ask what the ruling class would think, because they went to the same schools.
- photochemsyn 4y agoA comparison between the British East India Co. and any major international drug cartel might be more illustrative (note the common factor of having a private army, and the difference of not having any obvious state support).
- _8j50 4y agoThe article keeps saying low latency when meaning high latency.
- amriksohata 4y ago"The first interesting thing is that while the structure, the charter and all that sounds about normal for any corporation, they had less than 200 people until the 1800s in the London office, part time clerks and all. That is efficiency!" The article reads as if the company was run very efficiently, yet it made India one of the richest countries in the world, with a population of 300 million very poor and in return transferred wealth to London, making a much smaller population richer but only for a shorter period. This is very inefficient, as they looted the trades and spices which helped Indians live within their means and instead created industries that were propped up on instable economics.
- exBarrelSpoiler 4y ago> instead created industries that were propped up on instable economics Ah, perhaps then it is appropriate to praise them in tech startup related spaces.
- amriksohata 4y agothe point is they didnt need tech startups, they were happy, rich, well fed, simple lives