Unit 6 SAQ 6.5 - 1 AMSCO AP WORLD - Withrow

"It was at this moment that the East India Company (BIC) ceased to be a conventional corporation, trading and silks and spices, and became something much more unusual. Within a few years, 250 company clerks backed by the military force of 20.engal. An international corporatiens had become the ofective rulers of Bengal. An international corporation was transforming itself into an aggressive colonial power...

We stil talk about the British conquering India, but that phrase disguises a more sinister reality. It was not the British go verment that seized inca at the end of the 18th century, but a dangerously unregulated private company headquartered in one small office, five windows wide, in London, and managed in India by an unstable sociopath— [Robert] Clive.

In many ways the EIC was a model of corporate efficiency: 100 years into its history, it had only 35 permanent employees in its head office. Nevertheless, that skeleton staff executed a corporate coup unparalleled in history: the military conquest, subjugation and plunder of vast tracts of southern Asia.

It almost certainly remains the supreme act of corporate violence in world history. For all the power wielded today by the world's largest corporations whether ExxonMobil, Walmart or Google they are tame beasts comparedwith the ravaging territorial appetites of the [militarized] East India Company.

Yet if history shows anything, it is that in the intimate dance between the power of the state and that of the corporation, while the latter can be regulated, it will use all the resources in its power to resist."