British East India Company

The British East India Company was founded on the last day of 1600 through a royal charter signed by Queen Elizabeth I. In many ways it failed to achieve its initial aim of trade in spices and other items favored by the English people. British subsequent dominance over the Indian subcontinent came only following the Dutch withdrawal for the more lucrative isles of modern Indonesia.

From the beginning there was always tension between the company directors in London and the company officers in the field. The communication technology of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was slow; it often took a message two years to travel from London to India and back.

The company made unremarkable small gains until the eighteenth century. The eighteenth century, like the twenty-first, saw an expansion of multinational corporations with the means of enforcing their will. During the early period, factories or trading posts were established through grants from the native rulers in several parts of the subcontinent. To protect these areas, the company employed European and sepoy (sipahi, native troops) guards. Slowly, the company gained territory through the employment of military force. In 1757, Sir Robert Clive (1725–1774) won a remarkable victory at Plassey, which solidified British control over the vast territory of Bengal.

Throughout this phase, many of the British who went to India to serve the company were highly corrupt, seeing self-aggrandizement as their main goal. The London company set out to gain greater control over its Asian possessions. Warren Hastings (1732–1818) was commissioned to straighten out the corrupt administration. He is now recognized as the greatest of the governors-general, but he ran afoul of London for political decisions he made. Hastings was sent home to undergo one of the longest and most famous trials of the eighteenth century. After a long legal fight, Hastings was acquitted of the charges. Another famous figure in company history is Arthur Wellesley (1769–1852), later the duke of Wellington of Waterloo fame, who served under his brother, Governor-General Richard Wellesley (1761–1842). Sir Arthur defeated the famous Tipu sultan, acquiring large tracts of territory to the south in 1799.

But the company's history was not all wars and local battles. The permanent settlement of land revenues in 1793, enacted by Lord Cornwallis (1738–1805), brought much hardship to the Bengal peasantry. The last governor-general, Lord Bentinck (1774–1839), was both a social reformer and a builder of infrastructure that would much later set India ahead of other Third World countries after its independence in 1947. Unfortunately, many of his social reforms put the more conservative elements of the subcontinent at odds with the company's rule, leading to the Great Mutiny of 1857–1858.

During the mutiny, the British were barely able to hold on to their great prize. After miraculously winning, the British Crown took over the governance of India under Queen Victoria's Proclamation of 1 November, 1858, to the Princes and Peoples of India. This executive order was the end of a series of laws that had been limiting the prerogatives of the British East India Company. Although there is an organization today called the East India Company, since 1858 the company has not been a political player on the world's stage. It now sells tea.

Geoffrey Cook

Archer, Mildred, and Graham Parlett. (1992) Company Paintings of the British Period. London: Victoria and Albert Museum.

Keay, John, ed. (1994) The Honourable Company: A History of the East India Company. New York: Macmillan.

Tuck, Patrick, ed. (1998) The East India Company, 1600–1858. New York: Routledge.

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