The world’s first multinational

Nick Robins, whose Imperial Corporation: reckoning with the East India Company will be published next year, writes:

Cover In The Discovery of India, the final and perhaps most profound part of his “prison trilogy”, written in 1944 from Ahmednagar Fort, Jawaharlal Nehru described the effect of the East India Company on the country he would shortly rule. “The corruption, venality, nepotism, violence and greed of money of these early generations of British rule in India,” he wrote, “is something which passes comprehension.” It was, he added, “significant that one of the Hindustani words which has become part of the English language is ‘loot'”.

For most of the succeeding 60 years, the East India Company sank from view. No plaque marked the site where its headquarters had stood in the City of London for more than two centuries. It was regarded as something that could be consigned to the history books, its deeds to be squabbled over by academics and imperial romantics. But the onset of globalisation has revived interest in a company that could be seen as a pioneering force for world trade. Exhibitions at the British Library and the V&A, plus a string of popular histories, have sought to revive the reputation of the “Honourable East India Company”. Its founders are now hailed as swashbuckling adventurers, its operations praised for pioneering the birth of modern consumerism and its glamorous executives profiled as multicultural “white moguls”.

More here from the New Statesman (via Arts & Letters Daily).