The East India Company: The World's Most Powerful Corporation (The Story of Indian Business) by Tirthankar Roy Read Free Book Online

advances often by engaging in outside sales, and buyers renege on price commitments often by manipulating quality criteria.’
    Distrust on the economic plane was aggravated by a lack of social affiliation. The Indians never admitted the Europeans into their inner circles. Personal friendship between business associates on two sides of the race divide was conspicuously rare. This might seem surprising, when we consider how badly the Europeans needed to form personal ties with the Indians in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The average employee of the Company—a young male, who would spend the best part of his youth in India confined to the factory premises—had no other means of obtaining female companionship than by getting friendly with theIndians. Many of them did take this road, but the women involved in such partnerships came from the less wealthy classes than the Banias and the Brahmins, and even then, many had to cut off ties with their parental homes due to rigid societal norms. The Europeans’ closest business associates in India were, socially speaking, a forbidden territory.
    Between the Europeans and the Indians, there was partnership no doubt. But it was a partnership that was backed up neither by contract law nor by social bonding. Being based on nothing more than crude self-interest, it was a recipe for distrust. The relationship between Indian merchants and European merchants, in this way, developed an anarchic fringe. But if the Anglo-Bania order was discordant because of frequent breach of contract and social obstacles to fellow feeling, breach of contract could still fuel the Company’s desire to control political power by making it more interested in securing the political means to enforce contracts. The writ that was in force in Bombay, Madras and Calcutta needed to run in all of India to ensure a future for Indo-European business. In other words, a theory of discord supplies an alternative view of colonization just as plausible as the theory of partnership.
    Historians are unlikely to reach an agreement on what kind of motivation led to the empire. Amidstdiscords, many fruitful partnerships did develop. Many Indians did earn the confidence of the Company’s representatives. Moreover, the Company itself was an ambiguous entity being pulled in different directions in the mid-eighteenth century. In making the point, I cannot do better than cite the historian Holden Furber. ‘The real antithesis,’ Furber wrote in 1940, ‘is between those who stood to profit from the extension of empire in India and those who had been accustomed to profiting solely through trade, the former group being drawn from every class of English society and the latter consisting of the London merchants, ship-owners and sea captains dominant in the company’s courts of proprietors and director.’ Between 1690 and 1740, the cleavage was widening, just as the collapse of the Mughal empire supplied the means and the motivations to those who believed that an empire was more profitable than trade.
The scope of the book
    In this short history of the Company, the well-known story is retold, but by using an angle of vision somewhat unusual in the historical scholarship on the subject. Many histories have been written about the Company, describing the organization in the context of Britishpolitics and expansion. In this book by contrast, the Company is in the main a window into the distinctive globalization that occurred in the Indian subcontinent in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The story suggests that any attempt to deal with Indian business history during this time needs to refer to Europe’s own expansion overseas, show how the concept of a firm changed, connect traditional modes of doing business with the modern, Britain with India, India with China, politics with economics, and one empire with another. It indicates the great new profitable opportunities that opened up with European trade in the Indian Ocean,