The big crashes of 10 years ago make it much more interesting to a historian today.” “What is interesting, though,” Dalrymple says, “is that, if you read Victorian histories of the Company, this bailout barely warrants a footnote. The Company’s responsible for half of all British trade by then.
It’s the largest loan ever given to a British company up to that point. “The most obviously relevant moment is when the company goes bust in 1772 and has to borrow massive sums of money. Sometimes it looks as though the Company is winning-bribing the state to alter the law, guarantee its monopolies, provide it with military assistance-and at other times it seems as though the state is winning, which it ultimately does in 1858, when the Company is nationalized.” “Behind the story of the Company’s conquest of India is this tussle between the two. “The story of the East India Company is the story of this odd dance between the power of the corporation and the power of the state,” Dalrymple says. He points to some of the more obvious ways in which this is the case: the East India Company’s invention of corporate lobbying and its role in the world’s first-ever lobbying scandal, its dubious status as the recipient of one of history’s first government bail-outs.
0 kommentar(er)
