Question
Was the East India Company an elaborate ruse to further the colonising ambitions of the British Empire?
Answer
See Nick Robins' The Corporation that Changed the World.
The EIC was more a band of adventurers with broad goals and considerable autonomy to deliver returns to a beast nobody really understood back then: the corporation. So you cannot really judge the company.
The individuals showed a wide range of behavior. Robert Clive was basically a criminal thug. William Jardine was a drug dealer. Think Saddam Hussein and Pablo Escobar.
But others used the open-ended opportunity to do exceptional scholarly work, governance, state-building and social reform.
The thugs are naturally better known since they drove the biggest expansions in power and reach. The good guys were of course complicit in the looting indirectly, since it paid their wages, but then, most of us are complicit in various crimes by that standard.
So was it an elaborate ruse overall? Only to the extent that the company owners knew that providing sufficient autonomy and looking the other way would inevitably lead to abuse. Did they? We don't need to discuss that here on Quora. The parliamentary debates of the 1770s and 1780s went into it exhaustively. The debate provided the basis for Adam Smith's work. So we can safely say the question has been studied.
The general consensus is that there were a few truly powerful people who knew exactly what was going on and condoned it for profits. The rest were mostly happy to partake of the rewards and made sure to not ask too many questions.
The EIC was more a band of adventurers with broad goals and considerable autonomy to deliver returns to a beast nobody really understood back then: the corporation. So you cannot really judge the company.
The individuals showed a wide range of behavior. Robert Clive was basically a criminal thug. William Jardine was a drug dealer. Think Saddam Hussein and Pablo Escobar.
But others used the open-ended opportunity to do exceptional scholarly work, governance, state-building and social reform.
The thugs are naturally better known since they drove the biggest expansions in power and reach. The good guys were of course complicit in the looting indirectly, since it paid their wages, but then, most of us are complicit in various crimes by that standard.
So was it an elaborate ruse overall? Only to the extent that the company owners knew that providing sufficient autonomy and looking the other way would inevitably lead to abuse. Did they? We don't need to discuss that here on Quora. The parliamentary debates of the 1770s and 1780s went into it exhaustively. The debate provided the basis for Adam Smith's work. So we can safely say the question has been studied.
The general consensus is that there were a few truly powerful people who knew exactly what was going on and condoned it for profits. The rest were mostly happy to partake of the rewards and made sure to not ask too many questions.