The Corporation that Changed the World
By | May 10, 2007
The Corporation that Changed the World: How the East India Company Shaped the Modern Multinational.
By Nick Robins
ISBN 81 250 3022 0, Orient Longman
“This book offers a fascinating account of the forerunner of the modern multinational: the British East India” Company (1600-1874). Nick Robins shows how the East India Company pioneered the model of the corporation that we see today. Its innovations included the shareholder model of ownership, and the administrative framework of the modern firm. Global in reach, it achieved market dominance in Asia, trailblazing the British Empire in the East. In the process, the company shocked its age with the scale of its executive malpractice, stock market excess and human rights abuse.
Offering a popular history of one of the world’s most famous companies, Nick Robins shows what it teaches us about corporations today. Ultimately, the East India Company succumbed to popular protest and outright rebellion, first in the Boston Tea Party and then in the Indian Mutiny. For Robins, the Company’s legacy shows how essential it is to break-up today’s over-mighty corporations, introduce new legal duties on corporate executives and establish effective mechanisms to hold companies to account wherever they operate.”
New Internationalist describe it:
Globalization began in 1600 with a tiny trading company dealing in Asian spices. This book tells the compelling and appalling story of what has been called ‘the mother and father of all companies’ - the East India Company.
…no history lesson ever presented the extent of the economic devastation wrought by the East India Company on my country.
With precision and passion Robins shows how in 1600 the Indian economy was robust - healthier than the British economy, in fact - despite the efforts of corrupt, decadent nawabs. Then came the East India Company, a small-time trading outfit. Through a combination of greed, violence and corruption it acquired mafia-like power, enabling it to run the British Empire in India. The company crushed all obstacles in its way…
Robins grips the reader with tales of intrigue and infighting. He strips bare the romanticized notion of the Raj having its share of virtues and exposes the systematic destruction of the Indian economy which led to the impoverishment of a subcontinent. The book is a brilliant, important contribution to an understanding of development and poverty.
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