The East India Company

choi

Latest First.

(1) Letter to the editor. Economist, Jan 14, 2012
http://www.economist.com/node/21542713
(item 4 titled "Long before e-mail…")

(2) The East India Company | The Company That Ruled the Waves; As state-backed firms once again become forces in global business, we ask what they can learn from the greatest of them all. Economist, Dec 17, 2011.
http://www.economist.com/node/21541753

Quote:

"The East India Company foreshadowed the modern world in all sorts of striking ways. It was one of the first companies to offer limited liability to its shareholders. It laid the foundations of the British empire. It spawned Company Man. And--particularly relevant at the moment--it was the first state-backed company to make its mark on the world.

"The parallels between the East India Company and today’s state-owned firms are not exact, to be sure. The East India Company controlled a standing army of some 200,000 men, more than most European states [but not state-owned enterprises nowadays]. * * * The British government did not own shares in the Company (though prominent courtiers and politicians certainly did). Today’s state-capitalist governments hold huge blocks of shares in their favourite companies. Otherwise the similarities are striking. Both the Company and its modern descendants serve two masters, keeping one eye on their share price and the other on their political patrons.

"But for the most part it [East India Company] dealt with these political problems brilliantly. Indeed its most valuable skill—its 'core competence' in the phrase beloved of management theorists—was less its ability to arrange long-distance voyages to India and beyond than its ability to manage the politicians back home.

"It [the Company] created Britain’s largest cadre of civil servants, a term it invented.


Note:
(a) parlor game (n): "a game suitable for playing indoors"

All definitions are from www.m-w.com, unless otherwise specified.
(b) The article answered the question "when the modern world began," by saying "the modern world began on a freezing New Year's Eve, in 1600, when Elizabeth I granted a company of 218 merchants a monopoly of trade to the east of the Cape of Good Hope."

Elizabeth I of England
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_I_of_England
(1533-1603; reign 1558-1603)

(c) East India Company
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company
(1600-1874; first as English East India Company, then as British (from 1707); a joint-stock company [owned by shareholders]; Headquarters  London)

* joint-stock company
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_stock_company
(Finding the earliest joint-stock company is a matter of definition)

(d) The article stated East India Company "was one of the first companies to offer limited liability to its shareholders. * * * One of the benefits the company derived from its relations with the state was limited liability. Before the rise of state-backed companies, businesses had imposed unlimited liability on their investors."

* limited liability
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_liability
("By the 15th century, English law had awarded limited liability to monastic communities and trade guilds with commonly held property. In the 17th century, joint stock charters were awarded by the crown to monopolies such as the East India Company.[3] It became more straightforward to incorporate a joint stock company following the Joint Stock Companies Act 1844, although investors in such companies carried unlimited liability until the Limited Liability Act 1855")

(e) The report remarked, "The third benefit was military might. The Company's Dutch and Portugese competitors could all call on the power of their respective navies. The English needed to fo likewise in order to unlock investors' purses."

Cousins of (British) East India Company:
* Dutch East India Company
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_East_India_Company
(1602-1798; Headquarters  East India House, Amsterdam)
* Portuguese East India Company
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_East_India_Company
(1628-1633; Headquarters  Portuguese India)

(f) The article mentioned "[t]he Whig revolutionaries who deposed James II in 1688."
* "The Whigs played a central role in the Glorious Revolution of 1688," in which William (a Dutch) and Mary deposed Mary's father, James II.
* Whig and Tory. Encyclopaedia Britannica, undated.
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/641802/Whig-and-Tory

(e) Edmund Burke
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Burke
(1729-1797; Irish; served for many years in the House of Commons of Great Britain as a member of the Whig party; mainly remembered for his support of the cause of the American Revolutionaries, and for his later opposition to the French Revolution; section 6  India and the impeachment of Warren Hastings)

(f) The article commented, "It [Company] also made regular gifts to the Court: 'All who could help or hurt at Court,' wrote Lord Macaulay, 'ministers, mistresses, priests, were kept in good humour by presents of shawls and silks, birds' nests and attar of roses, bulses of diamonds and bags of guineas."

* For Lord Macaulay, see Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Babington_Macaulay,_1st_Baron_Macaulay
(1800-1859)
* pronunciation of "Macaulay":
http://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/Macaulay
* For "kept in good humour," see
humor (n):
"an often temporary state of mind imposed especially by circumstances <was in no humor to listen>"
* attar (n; Persian ʽaṭir perfumed, from Arabic, from ʽiṭr perfume; First Known Use 1798):
"a fragrant essential oil (as from rose petals)"
* bulse (n): "a purse or bag in which to carry or measure diamonds, etc"
Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, published 1913 by C & G Merriam Co
http://machaut.uchicago.edu/?resource=Webster's&word=bulse&use1913=on
* guinea (British coin)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guinea_(British_coin)
(1663-1813; the first English machine-struck gold coin; The name came from the Guinea region in West Africa, where much of the gold used to make the coins originated)

(g) The article allowed "the merchants [of the Company] offered to provide an English virgin for the Sultan of Achin's harem, for example, before James I intervened."

* Regarding "Sultan of Achin."
(A) Achin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achin
(Achin can refer to: * * * A previous name of Aceh, Indonesia)
(B) List of Indonesian monarchies
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indonesian_monarchies
("Aceh: In the northern region of Sumatra, the Sultanate of Achin or Atjeh was founded at the end of the 15th century. A powerful Islamic state in the 16th and 17th centuries, Achin ... ")
* James I of England and Scotland (1566-1625; reign 1603-1625)

(h) The article continued: "And where it could not bribe it bullied, using soldiers paid for by Indian taxes to duff up recalcitrant rulers."

* duff (vt; of uncertain origin; early 19th century): "informal  (duff someone up) British beat someone up"
Oxford Dictionaries
http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/duff--3

(i) "In an era when government lacked the resources of the modern tax-and-spend state, the state-backed company was a backstop against bankruptcy."

* backstop (baseball)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backstop_(baseball)

(j) The article talked about the Company: "Its manners reiterated the importance of frugality, economy and simplicity with a metronomic frequency."

* metronomic (adj): "mechanically regular (as in action or tempo)"
* metronome (n; Greek metron + -nomos controlling, from nomos law; First Known Use 1816):
"an instrument designed to mark exact time by a regularly repeated tick
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/metronome

(k) "The Company improvised a version of what Tom Peters, a management guru, has dubbed 'tight-loose management.' It forced its employees to post a large bond in case they went off the rails, and bombarded them with detailed instructions about things like the precise stiffness of packaging. But it also leavened control with freedom."

* Tom Peters
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Peters
(1942- ; American)
* go off the rails: "INFORMAL  to start behaving in a way that is not generally acceptable, especially dishonestly or illegally"
Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary & Thesaurus
http://dictionary.cambridge.org/ ... sh/go-off-the-rails
* leaven (vt):
"1: to raise (as bread) with a leaven
2: to mingle or permeate with some modifying, alleviating, or vivifying element; especially : LIGHTEN <a sermon leavened with humor>"

(l) "Many company men did extremely well out of this 'tight-loose' arrangement, turning themselves into nabobs, as the new rich of the era were called."

* nabob (n; Hindi navāb & Urdu nawāb, from Arabic nuwwāb, plural of nā'ib governor; First Known Use 1612):
"1: a provincial governor of the Mogul empire in India
2: a person of great wealth or prominence"

(m) The article said, "The Company pioneered the art of government by writing and government by record, to paraphrase Burke."

"Your Lordship will observe, in the course of the proceeding, the propriety of opening fully to you this circumstance in the government of India, --that is, that the Company's government is a government of writing, a government of record."
The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol 09 (of 12), page 136 of 188.
http://www.wattpad.com/16801-the ... und-burke-vol?p=136

(n) "It [Company] created Britain's largest cadre of civil servant, a term it invented."

"civil service[:] c1785, originally in reference to non-military staff of the East India Company. Civil servant is from 1800."
Online Etymology Dictionary
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=civil+servant

(0) "It recruited some of the country’s leading intellectuals, such as Edward Strachey, Thomas Love Peacock and both James and John Stuart Mill—the latter starting, at the age of 17, in the department that corresponded with the central administration in India, and rising, as his father had, to head it, on the eve of the Company’s extinction."

* John Stuart Mill
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stuart_Mill
(1806-1873; eldest son of the Scottish philosopher, historian and economist James Mill)

(p) "The Company also established a feeder college—Haileybury—so that it could recruit bright schoolboys and train them to flourish in, and run, India."

* Haileybury and Imperial Service College
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hai ... ial_Service_College
(is a British independent school; Originally a boys' public school, it is now co-educational; founded as East India Company College in 1805; located at Hertford Heath, near London)

It is a school, not a college for higher education.

(q) "In 1757 Sir Robert Clive won the battle of Plassey and delivered the government of Bengal to the Company. This produced a guaranteed income from Bengal’s taxpayers, but it also dragged the Company ever deeper into the business of government. * * * Tax rolls replaced business ledgers."

* Robert Clive, 1st Baron Clive
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Clive,_1st_Baron_Clive
(1725-1774; credited with securing India, and the wealth that followed, for the British crown)
* Battle of Plassey
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Plassey
(June 23, 1757; a decisive British East India Company victory over the Nawab of Bengal and his French allies; "took place at Palashi, Bengal (Plassey is the anglicised version of Palashi), about 150 km north of Calcutta, near Murshidabad, then capital of undivided Bengal"; battle was waged during the Seven Years' War (1756–63))

* nawab (n): "NABOB"
www.m-w.com

(A) Return to (l)--as in "L" instaed of "I"--above, review etymology of "nabob," and you will see "nawab" is Urdu.
(B) Urdu (n): "an Indo-Aryan language that has the same colloquial basis as standard Hindi, is an official language of Pakistan, and is widely used by Muslims in urban areas of India"
(C) A namab is a provincial governor. At the time, Mughal Empire (1526–1857), headed by an emperor, had its capital at Delhi (1649–1857; not New Delhi) during most of its rule.

* For pronunciation of Plassey, see
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/plassey
* For "tax roll," see
roll (n):
"1a (1) : a written document that may be rolled up : SCROLL; specifically : a document containing an official or formal record <the rolls of parliament> (2) : a manuscript book
b : a list of names or related items : CATALOG
c : an official list <the voter rolls>"