The East India Company: Everything You Wanted To Know | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra
"‘It is a company at a time when most trade is not organized by companies. And that's the really, really important thing. When we see that word company, we need to kind of forget most of the things we know about companies when we're talking about the East India Company, because what company really means is organization and in some ways, it means something a bit like a state.
So the East India Company is more like a government than it is like a company today. And it's interested in making money, but the reason why the traders who wanted to trade with India or Indonesia or wherever created the company, is because they thought that to trade in India, or or Southeast Asia or whatever, you needed to have weapons, you needed to have an army, you needed to have a kind of legal system. You needed to have the kind of things that we now would consider, you know, sort of to be more the prerogative of a state than a company.
And so when the East India Company went to India, it went there, not simply a kind of bunch of private traders who arrived peacefully and want to trade, you know, kind of in an entirely sort of consensual way, as we would normally imagine companies would do, most cases, of course there are exceptions, but it went there as a violent force. And there's a lot of controversy around that at the time. And throughout the kind of 17th century where critics of the East India Company say, actually, we can trade with India, perfectly peacefully. If we go to India, as a merchant, as merchants, as some did, you know, arrive and talk to the kind of governors of provinces, talk to local merchants, we can do business and it works and we make money and it's mutually beneficial.
And so, so when traders arrived in India, as traders, they were received, often very positively. They were received, you know, kind of as people who were able to ship goods that were being produced in India to markets in Europe that otherwise Indian traders wouldn't have access to, they were treated as people who potentially have had supplies of capital. You know, they were, they were often involved in kind of sort of inter-Indian trade, or trade with other parts of Asia, for example, kind of the horse trade to Persia, to Iran. So as traders, the East India Company were received very positively’...
‘When do we see or do we see this, this shift and move from a more of a trading interest into this idea of, might not be the right term, but a civilizing mission, or at least on the surface, they put this, this seemingly, seeming interest out?’
‘There never is a civilizing mission, this civilizing mission doesn't exist. The company is, company's purpose is to maintain its own power and to maintain British prestige and so forth. And the, the civilized, there are, there are moments when in, in front of Parliament, British company, you know, officials, or supporters of the East India Company say oh, no, what we're doing is actually, you know, good for India…
We can get really easily sidetracked by the idea of a civilizing mission when, you know, it basically doesn't exist, you know, kind of, when the company is building infrastructure, when the company are, even when they're opening schools, what they're doing is building machinery that allows them to survive in India, to govern in India. The schools that they open, are there to train administrators to administer British institutions in order to maintain British power...
There’s something very peculiar about the way in which people think about the East India Company and the British in India, to think the function of the state is to, is to civilize a country. I don't think people would normally look at, you know, the government of Britain or whatever. And, you know, when we looked at the Government of Britain, we think, oh, well, what is it interested in? It's interested in, it's a machine, it's interested in, in a structure that has a whole series of purposes, it's not, you know, where, you know, kind of, including, of course, the welfare of the population. But that's not the way in which we normally tend to think about states in 18th and 19th century…
We have this weird moralistic, you know, kind of whenever anyone uses the word Empire, it becomes a moral debate, you know, kind of nobody thinks about the Prussian state in the 18th century and says, was, did it have a civilizing mission? You know, the Prussian state in the 18th century is a state that's interesting in maintaining its power in, in a kind of glo- in a geopolitical global kind of context.
You know, similarly for the British state in Britain, but there's a kind of weird way in which I think probably towards the end of Empire, there's a, as Britain was leaving Empire in the 1950s, and 19, you know, 1940s, and 1950s. You know, kind of, and then subsequently, we, there's been a kind of an attempt to, you know, to sort of legitimize kind of, you know, something that everyone thought at the time was, was, was operating according to principles, which are very different from those that kind of were floating around in government and so forth at the time. And, you know, so there's kind of narrative that kind of moralises things…
Oh, no, these people were forces for good. And it's like, well, that's not how we view any other kind of government… In the 19th century, the Empire, conquest was celebrated, it was seen as just a good thing in itself, you know, just being a conquering power...
I just want to not answer that question about positive or negative? Because it's not the kind of question that we ask about any other kind of government, is just a very peculiar thing that we ask of the British Empire, because Empire’s become this kind of political, weird political football, that has no relationship, actually, to the real history of Empire. You know, nobody in the 19th century was going around. Well, then this kind of debate about whether Empire was a force for good didn't exist in the 19th century’"
This ignores Kipling's rhetoric about the white man's burden, though, which at least some people believed
History evaluates regimes and institutions all the time, e.g. whether King John of England was good or bad