East India Company: the original corporate raiders

How the British trading behemoth took control of 200 million people and one of the richest empires on Earth.

1547012 Shah 'Alam conveying the grant of the Diwani to Lord Clive, August 1765 (oil on canvas) by West, Benjamin (1738-1820); British Library, London, UK; (add.info.: Major-General Robert Clive, 1st Baron Clive, KB MP FRS (25 September 1725 – 22 November 1774), also known as Clive of India, was a British officer and soldier of fortune who established the military and political supremacy of the East India Company in Bengal. He is credited with securing India, and the wealth that followed, for the British crown. Together with Warren Hastings he was one of the key early figures in the creation of British India. He also sat in a rotten borough as a Tory Member of Parliament in Great Britain.); © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved; American, out of copyright. PLEASE NOTE: Bridgeman Images works with the owner of this image to clear permission. If you wish to reproduce this image, please inform us so we can clear permission for you.

In 1930, a book emerged by the young American historian and philosopher Will Durant that occasioned apoplectic outrage in British colonial India. The Case for India was a brief but savage indictment of the British Raj, written in indignant passion with the forensic precision of the historian and the moral empathy of the philosopher. Durant had interrupted a research visit to India, part of a worldwide journey that would result in the 11-volume The Story of Civilisation (1935-75), to record what he saw and read of Britain’s “conscious and deliberate bleeding of India”. So shocked was he by “the invasion and destruction of a high civilization by a trading Company [the British East India Company] utterly without scruple or principle”, that he set aside his research into the ancient past to produce a philippic about the present, depicting in wounding terms this “greatest crime in all history”.

Durant’s portrait of a corporation running amok, “overrunning with fire and sword a country temporarily disordered and helpless, bribing and murdering, annexing and stealing”, profoundly shocked its readers in 1930. The plunder of India marked the beginning of the destruction of a thriving and prosperous civilisation, and its supplanting, eventually, by the rise to global dominance of imperial Britain.