The sun, it was said, never set on the British Empire during the heydays of its glory as an imperialist power. The jewel in the British Crown was, of course, the East India Company, which initially began as The Governor and Company of Merchants of London Trading into the East Indies, following a royal charter issued by Elizabeth I in 1600. This later became shortened to simply the East India Company and also, colloquially, the Honourable John Company – despite the fact that, as its own board of directors frequently recognised in its 250 years of operations, its activities were often anything but honourable.
Nevertheless, the Company, a powerful engine manned by powerful men, brought out the best of adventurism, not just on the high seas but on land as well. The buccaneering style of its merchants and servants catapulted England from an also-ran European entity in the early 18th century to a first-class world power till the time of World War II. This group had subsequently scraped together the relatively small start-up capital of approximately 69,000 pounds sterling, by far the lowest of their continental competitors. This risky enterprise inadvertently gave birth to the first multinational company – one that went far beyond its trading activities, to administer Company Rule with powers of life and death over those it considered its subjects. Eventually, it controlled a significant chunk of the globe.
It was in 1757, after the decisive Battle of Plassey, that the nature of the Company changed irrevocably from isolated trading outposts in Surat, on the Coromandel Coast and Bengal's Hooghly River. This took place by virtue of a series of dastaks or firmaans issued by successive Mughal emperors after lobbying in the Mughal Court, allowing the Company to trade (inland as well as export, often, free of tax), and thus becoming essentially a vast colonial empire.
The party begins
Like most novel ideas, controlling the world through trade simply happened. It is unlikely that the British, who had fancied themselves as no more than merchants with a specific agenda, had any larger ambition in mind at the turn of the 17th century. The coincidence of the 'discovery' of a source of vast, largely untapped raw material – primarily cotton, salt petre and indigo – and the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution back home, changed demand and consumption patterns forever. And the English, through the circumstances of their presence in Southasia, took full advantage. Their military prowess, especially on the seas, helped them to aggressively take on other European powers that were already trading in the region and beyond. The hard-fought battles eventually gave the Company a virtual monopoly all the way to Hong Kong, accruing massive profits for years to come.