A London trading company once ruled most of India
Chartered in 1600 and wound up in 1874, the English East India Company began as merchants of London seeking East Indies spices and cloth. By the mid-eighteenth century it handled about half of world trade in staples—and then governed vast Indian territories with its own armies.
Plunder showed the way. Francis Drake's voyage in the Golden Hind reached the Spice Islands, traded with Sultan Babullah for cloves and nutmeg, and paid investors roughly 5,000 percent on his return in 1580. During war with Spain and Portugal, Elizabeth I turned to privateering, and in 1592 Walter Raleigh and the Earl of Cumberland captured the Madre de Deus, the largest ship England had ever seen, loaded with jewels and spices and carrying a precious route book for the China, India and Japan trades.
In 1599 a group including London's Lord Mayor, the administrator Thomas Smythe, the writer Richard Hakluyt and the traveller Ralph Fitch, back from nine years overland in Asia, pledged £30,133 toward an eastern venture. On 31 December 1600 the Queen chartered them with a fifteen-year monopoly on English trade east of the Cape of Good Hope; interlopers risked losing ship and cargo. Directors first met at the Nags Head Inn in Bishopsgate. James Lancaster led the first voyage in 1601 aboard the Red Dragon, seized a Portuguese carrack and set up trading posts at Bantam and in the Moluccas.
Cotton, silk, indigo, saltpetre, tea and later opium made it the world's largest corporation by several measures. Its three presidency armies totalled about 260,000 men, at times double the British Army. After the Battle of Plassey in 1757 its territory swelled until, by 1858, most of modern India, Pakistan and Bangladesh plus Lower Burma lay under company rule or allied princes.
That rule was ruthless. The company used torture to collect taxes, impoverished much of the population and pursued policies that led to the Bengal famine of 1770, when some 10 million people starved. After the rebellion of 1857, the Crown took direct control, and the hollowed-out company was dissolved in 1874.
Source: East India Company
