Behind the Bastards - Part One: The Most Evil Company In History

Episode Date: September 4, 2018

No matter who you are, or what personal stance you happen to have on capitalism, there is probably a corporation you regard as “evil”. In Episode 20 Robert is joined by the hilarious Michael Swaim to discuss one of the most terrible companies to ever exist.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Michael S. Wame Howdy y'all! Did I get that right? Swame here. That is correct. From the cool ranch.

Tell y'all about the great crunchy taste of Doritos. We are eating Doritos. That's not like a joke or anything. It started out as an attempt to get money out of the Doritos people, and now we just eat a lot of Doritos. You're pounding them down. Yeah, it's delightful. It's great to be here, Robert. Thank you so much. Yeah, thanks for showing up. Michael, you and I worked together for a while. I know you are one of the head beans of the Small Beans Network. T.R.U.

What? True. Oh. Dat. True dat tape. Fantastic. So today we're talking about the age of heroic commerce. Have you ever heard of this? No, and I asked for a clue as to what we'd be talking about, and you said it's the age of heroic commerce, and I resisted so strongly the urge to look it up, so I'm coming in fully cold.

I do not know what you're talking about. Well, yeah, that is, you've hit upon, as I should have explained a few seconds earlier, the premise of the show, which is that I read a story about someone terrible, or someone's who are terrible, to a comedian guest who's coming in cold. So we're going to start in on that right now. Nice. Actually, first off, I'm going to open a Diet Coke, and I'm going to do like a theatric open. So, no matter who you are, or what your personal stance on politics and capitalism is, you probably have a corporation at least one that you regard as evil. Maybe it's Monsanto, maybe it's AT&T's Warner Media, the parent of CNN, if you're the president. Perhaps you hate Blackwater, now XE, or perhaps you hate News Corp, or maybe you're not a fan of Twitter because they banned your favorite conspiracy theorist.

Everybody hates at least one corporation these days. Build a bear workshop. You've got a real problem with them. So angry. I feel like there's not just a story, but like a solid two seasons of stories and the explanation for that. Yeah, for another day. So, yeah, we've all got a corporation we hate. And hatred of a corporation or corporations feels like a pretty modern thing, right?

You have trouble imagining someone in like 1605 yelling about the corporation. Giving a shit at all, yeah. But the reality is that tens of millions of people have, all over the world, with very good reason, been hating on big business since the 1600s. In fact, even with all the nightmarish climactic fuckery of modern oil corporations, the scandals of the tobacco industry, and the vast sea of eating disorders caused by the fashion industry in Hollywood, corporate evil may have reached its peak so far, more than 200 years ago. So join me, won't you? On a magical tour of a period of time, the author Stephen R. Bown calls the age of heroic commerce. The book Merchant Kings has been one of the major sources for this episode.

So, the idea of working with several other people to run a business goes back a very long time, thousands of years, right? Probably to the beginning of currency and cities and stuff. I think Zildjian symbols started that. Whoa. Oldest incorporated business still in existence. That's cool. How old do they go back? I'd have to look it up, but I just know they tout that fact and I've verified it online.

Well, that's pretty cool. So, yeah, the idea of running a business with a bunch of people, that goes back a long time, but a corporation is a different matter. Because for most of human history, there was nothing that you would want to do that would require more than a couple of rich people working together in order to provide the funding. The funding. I was like, the rich people wouldn't be doing the work. No, never, never, never, never, never. At no point in history, obviously. But you mean you're like, we don't need to put ink to paper on this, we're three rich dudes with money, we'll do the things.

Yeah, you didn't need, like, if you wanted to run a factory at the very beginning. Like, it was just a couple of rich guys could fund it. Right. You didn't need, it didn't take resources of huge numbers of people and like, vast capital and stuff. That makes sense. You know, anything that did, that was generally the province of estate, you know, the national government or whatever. Rome built the roads as a government, not as a bunch of business enterprises, right? The great granddaddy of all modern corporations was the Dutch East India Company.

It was first formed in 1602. It was a chartered company, so basically a bunch of people who didn't know each other all paid in so they'd get a share of the profits from this business. And in the case of the Dutch East India Company, its business was achieving a monopoly on all of the spices that came from India and Southeast Asia. So we're talking, like, Mace, we're talking. Mace is a cooking spice? Yeah, sure is. Is it related to Mace, like the weapon Mace? I think it's probably why the spray has its name.

Okay. But there's also nutmeg and cloves. Oh yeah, you don't want to get nutmeg sprayed in your eyes. That's right. Does that happen to you a lot? All the time, yeah, yeah. Try to sneak a cookie. Mom just goes nuts with the nutmeg.

So yeah, now that kind of stuff you buy for, like, 89 cents from Trader Joe's in a big tube. But back in the day, it was worth enough that, like, if you had a backpack of nutmeg and you, like, landed in London in the 1600s, you were a rich man. It's crazy that, like, Disney or Facebook, any of the big companies you could name, back then the big company that had that much money and Cloud was just like, food is so fucking bland, this will fix that. Everything sucks in Europe. Oh, thank God, yeah, finally. Here's all the money. Well, and all of the spices that we've talked about so far come from or only located in a chunk of Indonesia called the Banda Islands.

These are known as the Spiceries. Why do they get all the spices? It's just animals. That was the only place nutmeg grew. Yeah, only place cloves grew. So yeah, the Dutch East India Company is formed to try and gain a monopoly on the trade of all the spices from those delightful islands. Now, it started out with a 21-year charter, so it was supposed to be dissolved in the money given back to its original formers after that point. But it wound up getting its charter extended over and over again and eventually lasted more than two centuries.

So this is a company that had a long history. The Dutch East India Company was the first publicly traded corporation in the world, and the first stock market in history was created to sell its stock. Because if they were the first publicly traded, they had to invent the idea that... Yeah, yeah, this is when people were like, stock markets, that's a thing we should have. This is doing so well, we should make paper that represents a portion of it and just sell that. We don't even need the spices. And let people gamble on whether it'll be worth more or less at the end of the day. Yeah, wow.

And then let that run our entire society. So these are, I mean, these are capitalist visionaries, for sure. Yeah, this is the beginning of capitalism. I will say the only... maybe mild spoiler alert, I don't know. The only thing I recall about the Dutch East India Company is that I read a small plaque about it in the Slavery Museum. So that makes... there's some thread there, possibly. Oh yeah, yeah, there's some thread there, although they're not like the number one group for that. I'll brace myself.

We'll get to that later. According to a book called The Honorable Company, which is about the British East India Company, so there's the Dutch and the British East India Company, two different companies, almost the same name. Yeah, are they competing with each other? Oh, and how, buddy? Okay. So the British East India Company received its royal charter on the 31st of December in 1600, so two years before the Dutch East India Company. Its original name was the Company of Merchants of London Trading into the East Indies.

Now that original name, which is not very clickable, may inform you that it was not the same thing as the Dutch East India Company to start. Rather than being a modern corporation, it was basically a bunch of independent ventures under the same name. So like a bunch of different individual boats going over to these islands, getting spices and bringing them back, all profiting independently, just sort of marketed under the same name. Why did they benefit? It's just like easier to all be under one name? Yeah, that's what they thought at the time. Yeah, the company itself had no, unlike the Dutch East India Company, had no ability to invest money in new projects or decide how its funds were used across its many ventures.

So the British East India Company, when it starts off, is not like a modern corporation. Now, a few decades later in 1670, the Huston Bay Company, which still exists today, is formed and winds up gaining control of like most of Canada. It's why we have Vancouver. Vancouver started as like a corporate outpost for this company. Imagine a meeting today for that company and you're like, well, how are we doing? Well, we used to own most of Canada. This quarter, we made $800,000. How's that? It's quite a legacy. Once the whole Northwest was all domain, but we're doing okay, up one and a half percent.

Exactly. So yeah, so that's just to give you an idea of sort of, this is when the idea of running corporations starts to take off and people are trying various different things. Not all of these companies are quite like modern companies. The Dutch East India Company is the one that from the start is really recognizable as a modern corporation in terms of its formulation and the way it functions. So for an idea of what made it so special, I'd like to turn to an article from the global trade magazine called The Violent Birth of Corporations. This is why corporations were so different from what it existed before. They were anonymous. The partners did not all have to know each other.

They separated ownership from control. Elected directors made decisions while most investors had only the choice of accepting those decisions or selling their shares. They were permanent. If one or more partners did want out, there was no need to renegotiate the whole arrangement. Finally, there were legal entities separate from any one owner, and they had unlimited life. The big trading partnerships of the 16th century and earlier were created with a planned date of dissolution. Sometimes at the end of one voyage, sometimes after a set number of years, at which point all the firm's holdings would be liquidated and divided among the partners. The new firms, like modern corporations, did not self-liquidate.

They built up their capital over the years rather than distributing it back to its separate owners. So they have now created an immortal being that has pretty wide-ranging powers as we'll start to get to. The corporation as an abstract. It sounds like the guild of calamitous intent from venture brothers. A little bit, right? It's because they're ahead of the curve as far as any regulation, obviously, so they all get to be anonymous from even each other. They're just like, Mr. X has charted this mission. Yeah, it's just the company has charted this mission.

Exactly. So yeah, there are some people we'll get into who are very critical in the operations of this. So for the first 200 years, from 1600 to 1800 of the corporate era, there were almost no corporations meant to service the needs of inter-European trade or based solely within a single nation. So for two centuries, the job of a corporation was not operating stores or designing new products. It was plunder and conquest of the known and unknown world. Like, that's why we made corporations. Right. The only business that existed was exploration and conquest.

Well, the only business that was big enough. That required incorporation, yeah. Yeah, exactly. You don't need a corporation to sell clothes to people on the other side of the fin from you in middle of gross England or wherever. You just have like handshake deals with people who own carts and shit. Or like small businesses where it's like a shop and the shop sells the hats and you get the hats from the shop or whatever. I just wonder who's the first person to be like, I'm a stockbroker. I'll manage the stock of this single company and track its ups and downs.

I mean, it's sort of like evolved naturally because you start out with these things that weren't really corporations, but they had stock and they were for a limited time. And once that becomes a thing, initially it's just a way for you to get your profits from the deal, but eventually people start selling and trading the stock. And once there's five stocks instead of just one stock, they're like, we need a building to talk about the stocks. We should have an exchange. Yeah, so it's snowballs at some point. Or my name's not John Nasdaq. So the main reason that corporations were necessary was essentially that violence was necessary in the business of international trade. Operating boats and trading stations cost a lot of money, but the real cost came because in order to force people to trade sometimes you needed to wage war

on the native peoples who had the resources you wanted. It was also necessary because these corporations all wanted monopolies on the areas they were trading in. So corporations would fight corporations. So you needed money not just to take products from one area to the other, not just to operate factories, but to operate navies and to operate land armies and to wage war against other corporations and against the local peoples who didn't want to give you their stuff. So that's why corporations are necessary. It's staggering to imagine how profitable this must have been for the home country government, for them not to give a shit. Like that private citizens, you know, are amassing a navy and be like, well, just let them do it.

They'll pay millions and millions of dollars. That's how it starts as we'll cover it, gets more complicated. But at the start, yeah, the Dutch and British, East India companies were not just licensed to trade, they had a literal license to kill. They had a power to declare war, and they did so regularly. Like without governmental approval? Yeah, none necessary whatsoever. Now, it didn't start out violent in late 1601. The British East India Company was the first corporation in the Spiceries, you know, these islands in Indonesia that are just filled the fucking bursting with delightful spices.

Spices like the delicious spices on this cool ranch Doritos chip that I'm going to fortify myself with before getting into the rest of this. Oh, yeah. That's the malic acid you're tasting. We should find the island they grow that acid on. I mean, monosodium cultures all day. That's a good Dorito. So in late 1601, when the British East India Company winds up there, it's actually pretty peaceful. You know, there's no other corporations around yet. The native islanders are pretty peaceful people.

The vast majority of gunpowder expended by the British East India Company is used saluting. Like they'll pass a port, they'll pass another ship, and they'll fire into the air. And so most of the people who die at this point die in saluting accidents. Just bullets randomly raining down on them. Here's a quote from the Honorable Company. The indiscriminate firing of a few pieces, often on the flimsiest of free texts, would account for a good many lives. So much so that in London, the directors would be moved to protest that it was quite unnecessary to salute every port, every passing vessel, every sailor, every imaginable anniversary. Yet if anything, the practice grew and there was probably more powder expended in ceremony than in bed.

Oh my God. Oh, it's National Peach Day, shoot at those guys. Shoot the cannons. I forgot. Which is a very male thing to do. We've got cannons, we're on a boat and it's boring. We're stopped with gunpowder, what the fuck are we supposed to do? Let's shoot some stuff.

So the Honorable Company tells the story of a captain brand of a boat named the Ascension, who quote, had the unusual misfortune of being shot by the guns of his own ship. In somber mood, he was rode ashore to attend the funeral of the red dragon on other boat's mate, when the Ascension's gunner let fly with the usual three gun salute for a deceased officer. Unfortunately, the gunner, being not so careful as he should have been, had forgotten that his guns were loaded and that the captain was within range. One ball scored a direct hit and slewed the captain and the boat's wanes mate stark dead, so that they went to see the funeral of another and were both buried themselves. Oh, I missed the ocean, dude. Well, they were supposed to just put powder in the cannons so it made no but they just left the ball in and shot the captain. Oh my god.

So it's a little bit of a slap-desh operation at the start. Yeah, it sounds like it's just a pack of mercenaries with no training. Yeah, often times these corporations started off with a name like the Adventurers Association or whatever, because it's just guys with guns going out to get rich. I don't think it's a coincidence that their initials are THC, that's all I'm saying. Oh, shit. Wait, are they? The Honorable Company, I believe so.

Yeah, that's a nickname for them, but yeah. Right. But that would be a nickname later. Well, that's what my dealer calls himself, that's all I'm saying. Okay. Weird dude. Yeah, it's weird that you have a dealer in Los Angeles. I know, it seems unnecessary, but I'm a traditionalist man.

Feels like you're complicating matters unnecessarily. I like awkwardly hanging out with a weird dude to get my weed. To give him $60 for a bag of, yeah. Speaking of giving people too much money for a tiny amount of spices. Sure, ooh, good thing. Yeah. So around 1608, 1609, the Dutch East India Company makes it to the Spiceries, right? Now they had a charter to establish a monopoly on spice trading in Asia and India.

Things had been peaceful up to this point, but now that the Dutch were here, they decided they didn't want any English assholes buying and selling spices from the same islands that they were. So in 1609, Admiral Peter Verhoeven, I'm assuming the ancestor of Paul Verhoeven, took 13 warships to the Banda Islands, the world's only source of nutmeg and mace. Here are the orders his corporate masters sent him with. We draw your special attention to the islands in which grow the cloves and nutmeg, and we instruct you to strive after winning them for the company either by treaty or by force. The precious.

The precious nutmeg. Thousands will bleed for the nutmeg. Yeah, like what are you willing to die for? Oh, nutmeg for sure. 100% I'll die for nutmeg. That's number one with a bullet, or a cannon shot, I guess. So Admiral Verhoeven took with him an army of 1,000 soldiers, including Japanese mercenaries with swords meant to be used as executioners to enforce corporate will through terror.

If this isn't in the 1600s, it sounds 100% like a cyberpunk story. I also had the natives in that area been rebellious or stood up for themselves, or are they going in like, we're going to need some executioners. It'll be nice to have them. They think it'll be nice to have them, and he's planning to fuck with the British. And you want some samurai if you're really going to murder British people. Sure. But then the anniversary of something comes along, they accidentally just execute each other.

So Verhoeven's big enemies are the British East India Company and the Portuguese, so he wants to expel basically everyone who's not the Dutch East India Company from the spice islands because he who controls the spice controls the dinner table. Maladib is going to come in here. On April 19th, 1609, the Admiral came ashore on the largest of the band of Isles with 250 men and outgifts to the assembled natives and told them that they had broken their promise to trade only with the Dutch. As a result, he said the company was building a fort and a permanent factory on the island to keep track of things. Then he went around to all the different tribal chiefs and had them sign agreements,

which none of them could read to give his company a monopoly on the nutmeg trade from their island. The islanders did not take well to this. For one thing, he just had all the chiefs on one island sign an agreement, and then he tried to enforce it on all the islands, and they were like, we're different countries basically dude, like we don't work that way. And for another thing, no one in the band of islands understood why they should agree to give any company a monopoly over their stuff. The goods he tried to buy them off with were basically wool and velvet, neither of which was useful for people on tropical islands, so they were like,

what are we getting out of this? But yeah, Verhoeven keeps taking islands, so in a little bit later, he lands with 750 of his troops on another island, Njera, and he starts building a big fort. The local people decide to take matters into their own hands, and we're going to get into how the local people fight back against sort of corporate encroachment. But first, we have another kind of corporate encroachment. That will not result in the destruction of island cultures. We'll see.

We'll see. Probably not. You can guarantee that. No, actually I will. I will guarantee none of the sponsors of this show are going to destroy islands in Indonesia. Robert doesn't speak from both of us. I think it's ads time. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations.

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But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price.

Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back and we are talking about Admiral Peter Verhoeven of the Dutch East India Company and his attempts to build a monopoly in the Spice Island. So he's landing on islands. He's signing agreements with the people on islands. He's building himself some forces and he's just landed on the island of Nero with 750 men and he starts building a giant fortress so that he can stop anyone else from trading with the island.

The local people invite the Admiral to Parley in the middle of nowhere to talk to him about sort of the limitations of this agreement. And he obliged them, bringing along two chained up English prisoners as a sign of his dominance over the British East India Company. To be like, check out what a boss I am. I've got these dudes and chains who aren't Dutch, but probably look the same to you because we're all Europeans. Like Bob Iger showing up to the Lucasfilm negotiations with like, look at this dude from Time Warner, I got chained over here. Yeah, maybe with his lips sewn together. I imagine Bob Iger sews a lot of people's lips together. I could see that. Yeah. So yeah, when the Admiral and his men arrived at the meetup point, they found it empty. So the Admiral sent out a scout who found some locals hiding and apparently terrified in the woods.

Here's a quote from the book Merchant Kings. They informed him that they had become frightened at the sight of so many armed Dutchmen. Would Verhoef please leave his soldiers, arms and guns under the tree, bringing only his senior negotiators to them so that they could talk safely without the soldiers shadowing the talks? So this is a sign of how arrogant these Europeans are. Verhoef is like, of course. Then his second to command Admiral Ackbar like, it's a trap. And he's like, shut up, Ackbar. We're going in. You're always wrong. The prisoner's like, oh my, I don't think it's on the FNX.

Shut up, you filthy Englishman. Dutch courage shall prevail. So he goes for the meeting with a few dozen of his aides and stuff and they're all massacred. And the Admiral's decapitated and his head is mounted on a stick. Just like in a Paul Verhoeven movie. Just like in a Paul Verhoeven movie. So this marked the start of a general uprising against the Dutch across the islands. Luckily for the company, they had a thousand armed men and more than a dozen warships.

So the next company leader, the guy who gets promoted when Verhoeven gets his head cut off, is a guy named Simon Hoenn. And he immediately starts burning down villages, executing islanders and stealing everything that isn't nailed down as a revenge for the killings. His forces were eventually beaten in battle and had to flee to their boats. But then they just enacted a naval blockade. People had been trading with the Spice Islands for a while now. So their population had grown. They'd been doing very well. They were no longer self-sufficient in terms of food. They required trade from other islands and from outside.

So he just starts starving them. This is so Star Wars now. A trade blockade on Coruscant has prevented the Spice from... Is this the long, long ago Lucas was talking about? The very episode one, yeah. So they got this naval blockade going and it works. The locals surrender because they don't want to starve to death. And the entire island of Nera becomes property of the Dutch East India Corporation.

In whose eyes? In everyone's eyes. Including the people of the islands. This is the military conquest. They surrendered. The company said, in the agreement it was stated, this is to be kept by us forever. We just own this island now. This is the first time that it happened. Not a lot of leverage when it comes to trade, back to the trade table.

So look, I know you own us now, but the spices are still good, right? Well, Hoenn sailed away from the band of islands, and the islanders went right back to trading with people they pleased, albeit just kind of quietly this time. So they haven't figured out force projection a lot yet. So the natives are still able to get away with some stuff, but the stage had been set for the Dutch East India Corporation's rise to power. By 1623, the end of its original 21-year charter,

its forces had engaged in naval battles with every major sea power on the world. Because they're trading all around Asia and Europe at this point. They're going up into China, they're just sending boats everywhere, and they're constantly fighting with people. Yeah, it's like the wire. It's inherent to trade that, well, when you get there, you're going to have to fuck some people up. You're going to have to shoot some people. Then you control the corner, then you can start selling the product.

Yeah. And this is, a lot of companies will set up posts and stuff, and they'll maybe conquer the post, but they weren't taking much land beyond that. Or fortresses, it sounds like, which I'm imagining as flying steampunk fortresses, and please don't disappoint me with that. That's perfectly fine. Yeah, no. But the Dutch East India Company starts actually trying to do more than that,

trying to actually rule land to an extent. And they're not good at it at first, but that's where their ambition starts to head. So in addition to fighting the local peoples, they're also fighting the British East India Company at this point. There are sort of fighting them in the market, but there's also street fights in these towns and these islands between company representatives and stuff,

and things gradually start to escalate. And this brings us to a guy named Jan Peterzoon Cohen. Now, Cohen was born in 1587. He served as a junior merchant in Verhoeven's fleet and distinguished himself by quite literally writing reports. He wrote really good reports on how to make more money in these islands. He was that guy. He was a guy who just makes his living writing these long reports.

You know, fuck a guy like that. You know what I mean, Robert Evans? Yeah, you hate that. Someone who just researches shit. He just sits around researching and type, type, type in a way. Can't stand it. All right, so this guy I hate already. This guy you hate already.

The only syllable I remember is Zoon. Yeah, Cohen. Yeah, well, Peterzoon. Okay. John Peterzoon. I'm not even going to try to pronounce Dutch. John Peterzoon. So by 1614, Cohen rose to become the second in command of the company's operations in the Spiceries, which, to be fair, was as much about not dying of tropical disease

as it was about merits other than that. Very hard of darkness. That's a real important point. Who's at the top? The British guy who hasn't died of malaria yet. Yeah, he was just born immune to malaria, so he's the boss. Yeah. Everyone else died in a month.

So Cohen starts looking over the broader economic situation in the Spiceries, and one thing becomes very clear to him. And this is a quote from the book Merchant Kings. Spices grew in such abundance in these regions that there was no shortage of supply. Hence competition from the English could not be tolerated, because this would lower prices in Europe and make the business unprofitable.

Which is literally like the epitome of evil, because on the pole from empathy too, it's like, yeah. So there's this thing everyone in the world wants. Oh, it turns out God has left such a bountiful amount of it that everyone could just have it, and it's fine. Well, we better burn most of it, like keep it locked in this box. And they do that throughout this period. They will exterminate Nutmeg from several of these other islands,

just to make it easier for them to control. Like they'd be like, well, these islands are too far off, and we don't have enough ships to... So let's just kill all the Nutmeg on them so that it's... Dude, the flamethrowers burn the Nutmeg. No one else gets Nutmeg. I had to say, they're evil, but it smells delicious around here. It's a delightful scented island.

Yeah, so Cohen's solution was for the company to expand throughout the region and get a total monopoly. This way they'd have the power to restrict the supply of spices in Europe and thus always charge really high prices, which was necessary because they were running an increasingly large navy and army, and that shit don't come cheap. So in order to achieve this vision,

Cohen called for the creation of an even larger corporate fleet so that he could assault the Spanish and the Portuguese and the Philippines and Macau and China. He also advocated sending Dutch colonists and slaves to colonize these newly conquered territories all throughout Southeast Asia. It was a beautiful dream, and the Council of Seventeen, who were the board of directors for this...

I know, right? It sounds so sinister. This whole story is so... It should take place in the future instead of the past. This should be 300 years from now. Or maybe time is cyclical because this really feels like what our corporate culture we currently have is gonna return to, ultimately. Like people start sniping CEOs and shit.

Yeah, this is gonna happen. It sounds like in 20 years this will happen, but most of the players will have robot arms. Exactly. And it'll be cool as hell. It'll be better. Our version will be higher-effects budget. Yeah, way higher-effects budget. So yeah, the Council of Seventeen gets on board,

but to actually achieve his goals, Cohen knew he would first have to kick the British out of the Banda Isles. So there's a bunch of different islands they're concerned with and a lot of other trading ports, trying to really lock down the Bandas. So two of the islands, Ai and Run, had not signed any kind of agreement with the Dutch.

They were still free and independent. Here's how a book, The Honorable Company, describes the political situation in those islands at this point. In the best tradition of Southeast Asian, Adat, consensus, each villager island was in fact a self-governing and fairly democratic republic. They could withhold or dispose of their sovereignty as they saw fit, and whereas the inhabitants

of neighboring Nera and Launthor had already been bullied into accepting a large measure of Dutch control, those of outlying Ai and Run had managed to preserve their independence intact. So in other words, Ai runes so far away. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. But why were they able to maintain that? Is that because they were militarily stronger or just remote?

They were just further away. Okay, so my flock of seagulls pun scans. Yes, it does, but I hate it, and I'm not happy that you made it, and then it's on this episode. Anyway, it's happened. It can be cut in periods. No, it's happened. There's no cutting on this show.

So in 1615, the company under Cohen sent a thousand soldiers to Ai to subjugate the locals. The invasion was however defeated in Repulsed because the natives had been armed with British guns and trained by British troops, not troops of the British government, but troops of the British East India Company. It begins.

So yes, multinational corporations were funding insurgent armies to fight each other 400 years in the past. Wow, yeah. And the idea of governments just funneling guns to a convenient ally that you have no control over in the long term. Just give them all our weapons. They'll do it for us. It'll be fine.

The real lesson of history is that no one has ever learned anything ever. Yeah, I always feel like, yeah, learn history so that you know what the repetition is going to be. Yeah. Not or you're doomed to repeat it. You're doomed to repeat it. You're going to repeat it. People only do the same things. They're bigger and bigger guns.

Exactly. See how that works out for us. So the next year, Cohen sends another army to invade Ai. He also sent a message ahead of them to the English soldiers helping to defend the island, saying, quote, if any slaughter of men happened, they would not be culpable. So the English company runs away because they don't want to die,

and Ai gets conquered. So sci-fi, I'm sorry. It's amazing, right? The honorable company and council of 17 lay waste to Ai or spice. Oh, boy, it's about to get wasted. Oh, no, bad.

Yeah, no, it's terrible. Now, at this point, the English are still active in Ruin and other islands in Indonesia. So Cohen's, you know, he's not finished kicking them out yet. He wrote a letter to the council of 17 around this point that inadvertently sums up the military industrial complex today, quote, your honor should know by experience

that trade in Asia must be driven and maintained under the protection and favor of your honor's own weapons and that the weapons must be paid for by the profits from the trade so that we cannot carry on trade without war nor war without trade. And no, I don't under...

Everyone who lays the foundation of the military industrial complex, how do you not scan that as, oh, and that seems bad. Oh, this might end really badly. They're like, sir, what's the report from the front? Well, we have chained our trade to violence and violence to trade

in a never ending, only accelerating freight train of who knows what will happen. Good, good report. Carry on. This seems like an endless road to more profits. Feels like it'll never go badly for us. The gravy train will never stop.

This seems sustainable forever. So on April 30th, 1618, the company promotes Cohen to head of Eastern operations and basically gives him a mandate to... Congrats. Well deserved. I know, right? He got a plaque. He did.

Got that cannon on National Broccoli Day. He missed his kids' Dutch baseball games a lot. But, you know, it was worth it in the end. I'm sure. Because his kid's gonna go to Dutch Harvard. So yeah, once Cohen was in total command, things quickly got even more violent. The fighting in the islands were sort of

the Dutch and the British are still kind of holding an uneasy peace. There are more and more street fights. There are more and more naval battles between the fleets of the corporations. Soldiers start fighting in the jungle. But, sort of while Cohen is working on eliminating the last of the British from this area,

the English and Dutch governments go behind his back in a range of peace treaty for the two corporations. And kind of force it on them. Because they're like, you're going to draw our countries into war. And like, England doesn't need to be at war with the Netherlands. Overspices that there's plenty of.

A thousand miles away. We don't want this. So the governments make peace. Break it up, fellas. There's a lot of ideas about this. Because if there's one thing he loves, it's fighting the British East India Corporation. And I love that this is maybe the first time in history a human had the impulse,

how dare the government regulate my corporation. My corporation is more important than the government. I think this is where that begins. Because this is the first time that I'm aware that a government really stepped into a multinational corporation and was like, what the fuck?

Yeah, yeah. There's so much nutmeg. Why are people dying? So Cohen, yeah, has to deal with the fact that the British East India Company is now his friend and ally. He grumbles about this, but he turns his attention to fucking over a completely

different group of people. The remaining unconquered Banda Islands. So he assembles an invasion force and he subjugates the remaining free indigenous people of the island chain. He burns their mosques. He requires them to pay taxes and sweet, sweet spices. So when certain people among the islanders fight back

and start massacring his patrols and basically draw the company into a guerrilla war, Gian Paeters and Cohen go scorched earth on their asses. He captures 45 tribesmen, beheads eight tribal elders in public and then quarters the rest, which means he just cuts them in four. One officer working for Cohen

at the time stated that, quote, things are carried on in such a criminal and murderous way that the blood of the poor people cries to heaven for revenge. So that's one of his employees being like, we're the bad guys. This is really clear to me. He's like quarter that man.

He's quartering everybody. He's fucking, I'll tell you one thing about Gian Paeters and Cohen, he's always able to fucking clean his laundry because he's got quarters coming out that, oof. You nailed his name that time too. Well played. Thank you. So subjugation was not the only thing Gian Cohen was out for.

His plan for the islands was, in essence, genocide. Here's how merchant kings describes it. Quote, he wanted to populate the islands to replace their inhabitants with imported slaves and indentured labor under company control. He proceeded with the ethnic cleansing of the Banda Islands. Over the next several months,

company troops burned and destroyed dwellings rounded up entire villages and herding captives into ships so that they could be transported to Batavia and sold as slaves. Thousands of men, women and children died of disease and starvation during the voyage. Out of a total population of perhaps 13 to 15,000,

barely a thousand of the original residents in the Banda Islands. Holy shit. Yeah. How much right can you think you have to reform the earth? That's crazy. Like showing up at a place and being like, yeah, let's move that over there, build these

buildings, kill all these people. Just all of them. Would it change your opinion though, to know that there's nutmeg? Yeah, what are they? That's what I was going to ask. Don't you dare forget cloves. At home, are people outraged or are they just like, I love me them spices. They're a good company.

Oh, they are nutmegging out hard. And they're building, like the government gets taxes out of this in duties and they're building nice new buildings and yeah. Stadia or what have you. If you're just a dude in the Netherlands, you're like, shitload of money's coming in from over here. And I'm sure your average person on the street in the 1600s

doesn't have their app over going like, oh all this shit's evil. No, and by the height of the Dutch East India Corporation, it's responsible for something like half of all of the trade in Europe. Wow. So they become huge. To the point where people just take it for granted like, well, they're just always there,

they're McDonald's, what are you going to do? It would be fair to say they're even bigger in this society as a force for like the life in commerce than Amazon is today. Like half of the trade. They are enormous. They're like Googles on. Yeah. And they just had to genocides

in people. So you might think that for any rational man or even a moderately crazy genocidal man, this would have been enough. But it was not enough for Jan Petersen Cohen. He decided unilaterally to renege on the peace treaty with the British

East India Company that his government had negotiated. He arrested all of the English people on the islands, tortured and executed a huge number of them, took all their goods and destroyed everything that they built. Wow. So he's not even because a lot of times evil bastards will

have the ability to dehumanize foreign or exotic peoples. But he's, he'll kill anyone. No one is a human to Jan Cohen. That's what I mean is like he doesn't, it's not a thing where he has any justification. He's like, I'll kill anyone who opposes me. He doesn't just,

he has fucks, but he took half of his fucks and he executed them in front of the other half of his fucks to keep them quiet. Exactly. Like that's the man here. So we're going to talk more about Jan fucking Cohen and then we're going to talk about a motherfucker named Robert

Clive and a little subcontinent called India. But first, do you love products and services and using currency to purchase those things? You know it. That's why I'm here. It's the best. Off we go. During

the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series,

Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI

spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good badass way. He's a nasty

shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little

band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories.

But there was this one that really stuck with me. About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Kreklev, is floating in orbit

when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in

space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put

forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize

that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on Trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. We're back when we're talking about Jan, Peasters and Cohen.

Jan, piece of shit, Cohen. It's a real piece of shit. Real the piece of shitest Cohen there's ever been. I wonder if the Cohen brothers, it would be weird if... Ethan Cohen's a real piece of shit, man. It would be weird if we've been talking about ancestors to both Paul Verhoeven and the Cohen brothers,

the three greatest directors of all history. They hear this and have a bare-chested fistfight to resolve the conflict. Or make this into a sweet-ass movie. There you go. Because I think if you're going to have the Cohen brothers and Paul Verhoeven team up on a movie... That's a bizarre team up.

You need Verhoeven for how bloody this story is. You have the Cohen brothers direct the peaceful native people in their plight, and I think you have Paul Verhoeven direct the Dutch. After the landing happens? Yeah. Jan's corporate masters were angry

that he had disobeyed them and massacred the British company, but he'd also guaranteed them sole world monopoly over Nutmeg and Mace, two of the most valuable things on the planet. So they gave him history's first slap on the wrist corporate punishment and also gave it in with a gigantic bonus.

A literal golden parachute. Well, he stays on. No, they're not going to kick him out, he's really good at this. So one of the company's directors looking out at the burnt farms that had replaced a once thriving society in the Banda Isles said, quote, this is fine, this seems good to me.

Oh no, he said, there is no profit at all in an empty sea, empty countries, and dead people. That's, I agree, at some point if you burn everything the fuck down, where are you getting the Nutmeg, dude? Well, he was right eventually because this all does collapse

for the Dutch India Company, but for a while it's super profitable and the Dutch East India Company becomes a profitable corporation on the planet. Cohen died of a horrible tropical disease in 1629 at age 42, so he didn't last that long, but the company lived on. By the end of the century it had a private fleet

of more than 150 merchant ships and 40 warships and employed 50,000 people across the world, including a 10,000 man private army. It eventually sank into decline in irrelevance and by 1799 it was dissolved under a tremendous amount of debt.

So yeah, the Netherlands continued to govern much of Indonesia until 1949, but the Dutch East India Company was not the most successful or the most notable East India Company in all of history. That title goes to the people they defeated in the battle for the Spiceries, the British East India Company. So, after Cohen

massacred a bunch of their people in the Banda Isles back in 1623, the British East India Company had hit a wee bit of a rough patch. The company took on more and more debt and had to sell most of its assets in order to stay alive. The only reason it didn't get dissolved and go out of business is that it maintained a small trading post on India's northwest coast.

Now, the company limped along through the 1630s and 1640s when Oliver Cromwell took away its royal monopoly over Indian trade at the same time as he took off the king's head. By early 1657, the British East India Company was near death and its governor suggested ending it all together.

But ol' Oliver Cromwell was like wait a minute! Maybe this thing just needs a little tune up. And he issued the company a new charter. It would again have a monopoly on trade within the Indies, and it would also have to organize itself differently. So, as I said before, the Dutch corporation had been similar

in organization to today's corporations. You know, it accumulated wealth, invested on projects and was able to, you know, operate the way a company operates. The British East India Company had not functioned that way. The new charter was basically a rip off of the Dutch East India Company's organizing principle.

So that it could compete with a company like that and develop an effective navy and army. The government even ceded the reformed British East India Company with 750,000 pounds of capital. But is this after the Dutch East India Company had already collapsed? No, no, no. This is when it's the biggest thing in the world. Okay, because I thought it was like

they saw a train crash and they're like, let's do that. No, no, this is like the 1650s. Right, when they're in the midst. They're making a shitload of money, hand over fist. So they're emulating success. Exactly. Much like Coke has to palely imitate PepsiCo's delicious brand of umbrella product.

Yes, yes, and much like all other tortilla chips are a pale imitation of Doritos. Oh, they taste like ashes in my mouth. I know, I know. I would rather boil my tongue and lard. Now, Oliver Cromwell died two years after reforming the company. When a new king took over Britain, that king

issued a royal decree that granted the company even wider powers to quote, wage war, administer justice, engage in diplomacy with foreign princes, acquire territories, raise and command armies, and capture and plunder ships violating its monopoly. Wow. So, as kings like,

you're basically a government, but just to make money. Yeah, get out of jail free. Instruct the laser cannons. Yeah, well, funny that you bring up laser cannons. Oh boy. Because this company's new focus was not Spices. The British D.C.C. Company was not stealing Spices. Please say lasers.

Say lasers. The 1600s equivalent, because India just happened to be the world's largest reservoir of salt Peter. Now, salt Peter forms from animal droppings after they've been left to sit and calcify for a while. And it was the indispensable ingredient

in gunpowder. Whoever controlled India's salt Peter supply would basically control Europe's ability to shoot people. If you know Europe in the 1600s, shooting people's kind of their thing. So, the British company focused on India and spread.

By the 1700s, they had established control over three separate presidencies along the subcontinent. And these are fairly small territories. They're still just setting up trade. Sometimes they control like a city and a little bit of the surrounding territory, but they're not capturing territories, right? They're starting trading posts.

Some of those turn into cities, some of them are based around cities, but they don't control vast swaths of land yet. And they're not saying, here are our soldiers we own this whole city. They're just saying here's our little building. Here's our little building. We're here to trade. For now. For now.

Yes. We'll just see what happens later. We'll just see what happens later. It'll probably go great for everybody. Well, we love his mutual profit. Now, the fact that Indian Salt Peter was behind most of the gunpowder used in Europe's many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many,

pretty much constant and unending wars meant that the British East India Company was not the only corporate power vying for control of the subcontinent's resources. Their old enemies the Dutch were there, as well as French, Danish, Swedish, and Australian corporations all fighting over the Indian Salt Peter. Did these places not have animals

that shit to make their own Salt Peter? Not like if you've been to India. It's a beautiful country. Fascinating culture. Poop everywhere? Yes. Absolutely. It will not, like when I read like, oh, Salt Peter comes from poop and India had the most. It was, because I spent a lot of time and it's like, oh, of course. Yeah, that's the place

where there would be all the Salt Peter. Interesting. Yeah. And they've been, you know, India's been developed for a very long time. So long history of animal husbandry, a long history of cultivation, and so there were just huge reserves of this stuff sitting around. Nice. And it just so happened that

the Mughal Empire I don't know why I said nice. They have a lot of poop. Good for them. It's not about to be good for them. So the Mughal Empire who ruled most of India was in decline at this point. And as it

declined, the French and British corporations particularly grew more powerful. So these corporations all had armies on the subcontinent, usually a mix of regular government troops and corporate soldiers, basically mercenaries along with cadres of local troops trained to a rough approximation of European standards. And these armies were there

to defend against other corporations. But they'd sometimes make military alliances with like local princes and stuff who were more or less independent because again, sort of the centralized nature of the Mughal government's breaking down at this point. So you've got local princes and whatnot, Nahwab's kind of vying for

more and more control. And I'm sure the local forces they trained were just as effective as the local forces we trained nowadays. You know? It's easy to transmit that kind of knowledge. It really is. So this is the world that one Robert Clive is born

into in 1925. Now, have you ever heard of Robert Clive? No. He's one of the most important people who's ever lived. Wow. Yeah. I mean, yes. I know everything about him. You can skip it. Like Jan Cohen, he is a monster, but at least to me

he's also kind of a likable monster. I kind of want to see a movie about this guy. And I credit that to the decades I spent reading adventure novels set during the colonial era like King Solomon's Mines. Clive isn't objectively bad person, but holy God, he had chutzpah. So he was born into the aristocracy,

but like the poor aristocracy. So you would think of this guy as like lower middle class. They got a nice house, but his dad's working all the time and like, he doesn't have a lot of prospects for the future. You know, while he's a kid, he keeps getting expelled from schools because he can't stop pulling pranks. Okay.

At one point, a bunch of his friends get together and they form a protection racket to extort money from local business owners. So he's like a thug from a young age. Oh yeah, that old prank of beating the shit out of people if they don't pay you. Yeah. Classic Clooney. Clooney did that on set all the time. All the time.

This is just a prank. This is a prank. This is a prank. Give me your money. Yeah. He really grows up and decides to take a job in India with the company because again, he doesn't have any prospects in England. And if you want to get fucking rich in this period, you roll the fucking die of a tropical disease

dice and get a job with one of these companies. You death of a salesman, it just go into the jungle and come out a millionaire. Yeah, that's the hope. Or die of malaria. Or both. A lot of people did both. So yeah, he gets a... And he's not...

He's going to sound like an action hero to get through with this. He is a small man. He's not good looking. He's sick all the time and he is manic depressive. Okay. I also like to think he's just a Mesa holic. He needs that maze. He's got to be where the maze is. No, that's further south, man. We're in India.

Although he's probably loving the curry. The curry family, yeah. So in 1745, Clive gets a job working as a clerk at an outpost in Madras. He's 20. There are only about 300 guys there from the East India Corporation. 20 soldiers shows up and tries to conquer the place.

Now the company men hole up inside the fort, but rather than fight, they just drink all of the liquor in the fort. And then once the liquor runs out, they surrender. Which is... That means they probably knew they were going to surrender the whole time, but they're like, wait, wait. Give us a minute. Give us a minute.

They're probably going to take the liquor if we let them out. So we should drink it first. I should say they all surrender except for Robert Clive. He dresses up in the traditional outfit of a local interpreter, paints himself in blackface, and escapes with a few of his colleagues. Oh, not nice.

Not nice. They hike 150 kilometers to the company's last intact coastal fort and get there just in time to warn them that the French army is on its way. This gives the British company men enough time to get the local ruler, the Nawab, to raise up an army of 10,000 men to defend them. So the French show up with 1200 men

and they easily beat this army because I wish we could know if he was manic or depressive at each time. I'm guessing this is a manic fucking show run for him. Is that diagnosable in the 1600s? No, but people since then because he wrote a lot and he had a

biographer who hung out with him all the time. So there's enough info that people are like, it seems like he was manic depressive. It seems like it. Sure. So yeah, the French beat the army that's raised up to defend the last sort of British company port on the coast

but the delay in fighting them gives the Royal Navy enough time to show up and save the day. So in 1748 that little trade war ends and Robert Clive realizes that he kind of loves being in terrifying danger so he volunteers. Definitely manic. Yeah. I feel like I could kill

a million French guys. This is great. So he volunteers for service in the militant wing of the East India Company. He basically transfers over to the armed division. Right. Request to be in the fighting section. And his request is granted

because he did a really good job the last time. So he immediately gets a promotion and he winds up in a pretty sweet position where he basically gets a cut of all of the trade within a certain small area. So he starts making good money and the thing that the trade war had driven home to Clive is that Europeans were just way better

at fighting than everybody else. Again, that was like a 1200 man French army versus 10,000 Indian soldiers and it wasn't even a hard fight. There's a lot of reasons for this. It's not that these guys are superhuman or genius. It's that number one, they have guns and fairly modern cannons.

And number two, none of these soldiers usually want to be fighting for the side they're with. They're kind of prescading into it. These aren't large professional armies that are motivated. They're just like guys, this local ruler's forcing to fight and they run pretty easy. Right. They come to fight another day

whenever they want. Yeah. If they want, but they don't really want to fight because they're farmers. Right. That's true. It kind of balances out, but still. And that's the other thing is that all of the European soldiers in here are soldiers usually for decades. If they live long enough, they'll have 20 years

of fighting experience. And is it almost all spent overseas? Yeah. It's not like now where they have regular like go home for you. Because it takes like two years to get home. It's just crazy to imagine that you sign up for my life is just totally detached from my home now forever.

Every society has a certain amount of violent off balance people. So Europe trains them really well, arms them and sends them away from Europe. Yeah. It's like the beginning of the space program. This is just a bunch of asshole astronauts being sent out. We're just like, we got to get Neil Armstrong out of this

fucking planet. Such a prick. Send him away. Send him to the moon. Yes. This show has always had a strong anti-astronaut vibe. And I'm glad that you caught on to that. Yeah. You got to really hit an astronaut. They're bastards. Yeah. Gaddafi would agree with you.

Yeah. They should all commit suicide. Yes. The hollow life of an astronaut. The empty existence of an astronaut. Just kill myself. Yeah. So, yeah, Robert Clive realizes that European armies are just

unbelievably good compared to anything particularly that the Indian rulers can put together. And he realizes that with enough soldiers there's basically no native force in India who could stop him from doing whatever he wanted. Now, he did not turn straight to conquest. He just saw this as a service he could

offer the local rulers. Basically, I want trade in a certain reason. You're the guy in charge. I can help you beat whatever local enemies you have. And it won't, it's not even hard for me. I send my guys out for a couple of weeks. It's done. And then, you let me get your shit at a lower price or whatever.

We set up a deal. Right? Yeah. So, that's kind of, that's his first idea. It's just to rent his mercenaries out in order to get better trading deals. Right. Punch that guy in the face and we'll give you a Costco Club Card. I get it. That's when all this is happening. The Empire is dying. Regional leaders are getting

more and more power and he's just renting his army out. And basically, the different European companies just start sort of backing puppet rulers in the regions where they're active because it's easy for them to prop up a government and it makes it easier if they can know the government's going to be supportive of their company. And they've learned from the mistake

of like, don't have your mercenaries try to turn into judges and magistrates and lawmakers and shit. Yeah. Just let the company remain. There's no nation building here. Because it's not worth the investment. Yeah. So, they're leaving the state intact. They're just making sure the ruler won't do anything they don't want. Or knows

that they'll be killed if they do. Yeah. It's a pretty sweet position because they don't really have any responsibility over anything. Other than fighting every now and then. Yeah. Robbing people at gunpoint is usually a pretty advantageous position to be in. Yeah. So, at one, you know, at various

points, the puppets of these corporations go to war with each other. And during one of these little trade wars between the puppets of the French and the puppets of the English, like the different puppet rulers they put up, Robert Clive talks his way into a major military command. He takes a force

of 200 English company soldiers and 300 mercenaries on a daring jungle march. They go 100 kilometers in six days and they capture the enemy capital, a town called Arcotte, 100,000 citizens. They don't even have to fire a shot. So, Clive takes command of the town's fort. He orders his men not

to loot or take bribes because he doesn't want any trouble with the locals because he knows that there's going to be a big counter attack coming. Just a quarter. Only quarter. Only cut him in four. No, but he's really, he's not that kind of guy. He really is trying to win hearts and minds, as it were. He's just trying not to lose them. Okay. Because he knows the people,

they don't care about the local ruler either. They're just pissed off that everything is chaotic. Chaotic. They don't care which puppet he's in. He just like, don't give them a reason to hate us. Like, there's no benefit to that. Right, right. To us in that. So, yeah, Clive takes command of the fort. He and his men start

to like fortify it for the counter attack and the counter attack comes. Clive and his men wind up surviving like a 50 day long siege from this like massive Indian army. 10,000 men who have been partly trained by French soldiers. So, they're a little bit better than the Indian armies

usually are. And they have several dozen war elephants that are covered in metal plates on their heads that are basically meant to batter down this fort. We've reached Act 3 of the movie. Yeah, we've reached Act 3 of the movie. But, being a military genius, Robert Clive realized that elephants don't like being shot by rifles.

So, he just had his men do that repeatedly. Genius. He's a brilliant man. That wily son of a bitch. So, the muskets of that era weren't really good at killing elephants, but they scared the shit out of them and the elephants stampeded and trampled their guys on their own like, you don't have to kill the elephant. You just have to make the elephant

be like, fuck this. Fuck this. Fuck yeah. So, the army retreats and a few hours later Clive and his men are relieved by reinforcements. So, at this point, Robert Clive, 20-something dude, had seen more adventure than most people in two lifetimes. But, he was still like, fuck it, I want more action.

So, he takes charge of the reinforcements and he leads an attack on the guy who'd just been laying siege to him. Clive bribes hundreds of the enemy's best soldiers to defect and adds them to his army. And he spends the next few months just winning a series of skirmishes and slowly demolishing this Indian Kings army.

Everywhere he conquered, he took bribes and cuts of all of the riches in the region and just took it. Some of them went to the company, some of them just went to Robert Clive. So, by the time this whole war is over, Clive has fuck you money. So, he goes back to England for a while. He's out there manafortin' it up.

He's one of the guys manafort we'd be trying to burnish the image of, for sure. He would be like, yeah, he's a real inspiration. So, he goes back to England for a while once this trade war ends. And he does the fancy rich British gentleman shtick for a spell. He gets married. He's sort of famous at this point. Prime Minister

William Pitt, the elder, called him quote, the heaven born general. Wealth and politics quickly grew boring for him though. So, when Clive heard the company was having more trouble with the French, he took the opportunity to go back to India and do more war stuff. So, this time he winds up in Bengal, a super productive

and agriculturally rich region of the country. A local Nawab, his soldiers trained by the French, had just conquered the city of Calcutta, which had been sort of a British trading city, and he'd captured the English fort there. Now, the area around Calcutta had both a lot of cotton and also the world's largest reserves of high

quality salt peter. So, the British can't really afford to lose this area. So, Clive takes a fleet and 200 soldiers, and he sails back to India to f**k s**t up. Oh, okay. I thought you were saying Clive took it. Like the British, he's the India company that is f**king England. No, no, no.

We're taking over England. No, no, no. He's going in to get it back. Yeah, it gets conquered by an Indian army that's backed by the French, and the British decide to take it back. They go easier on the ratio of elephants to soldiers and they're able to win this time. Well, there's just not that many guys. There's

like a couple hundred dudes, right? Yeah. And they're not really well organized. So, yeah, they get beat. So, they call the sociopaths to come in and mop up. And sociopath real f**king hard. So, Clive winds up back there and he's great. You know, he wins a bunch of battles. He scares a bunch of elephants and makes them run through

enemy ranks. That happens a number of times. It's like the classic Clive move. And the British East India Company stock raises 12% off of his victories. Everything culminates in the Battle of Placie. Now, this is one of those battles, like the Battle of Hastings, that everybody should know about. It's one of the most

important moments in the history of both India and of the British Empire. So, Clive, with 3,000 soldiers, only 1,000 of whom are European, fights a local army of 50,000 men and he just wipes the floor with them. They're basically charging cannons and gun lines with swords

and it just doesn't work. Clive is not a military genius, although he gets that reputation at the time. The consensus now more seems to be that he was just competent and didn't f**k anything up and was very brave and it wasn't hard to win a war like this because, again, you've got disciplined soldiers with muskets

and cannons and the natives are charging you with swords across an open field. As long as you're able to just barely keep them in line and be like don't run, we'll win. We'll win! And these guys, these are all hard sons of bitches who have been killing people for decades.

Belgians in the Congo have been there for f**king 15 years doing this shit. They are rough sons of bitches. I can't even wrap my head around the mercenary concept because I just, it's so crazy to be like, hey, here's money, kill that guy. And then someone else comes along and they're like, here's more money, I don't know, kill that guy? You're like, okay.

We're gonna shoot this guy. Money's good, but I'm good at shooting people. Kill the guy who paid you before because here's more money. Can I stay drunken on opium for forever? Of course, it's the 1600s. That seemed to be part and parcel of being a mercenary at this time.

You're just never sober. Just shitting your pants, taking opium, killing people. Yeah, that's these guys. So, with the victory at Plessy, Clive instantly rockets from having fuck you money to fuck the world money. He's one of the richest humans on the planet

after this. He places a new guy on the throne of Bengal, which is a huge chunk of India, and is given a cut of all of the wealth and like the wealthiest part of the Indian subcontinent. So he's given 300,000 pounds, and not pounds in terms

of British currency, 300,000 pounds in golden jewels. Just for him. Like, he just gets that loot. 300,000 pounds of shit. 150,000 tons. There's only one reason to accrue that in physical gold.

He's Scrooge McDucking that shit. He is Scrooge McDucking that shit. Why would he need it as physical gold in jewels? Now, his men get another huge chunk of money, like half a million pounds of wealth. So they all get rich too, but not nearly as rich as Clive. And the company gets also huge, huge

amounts of money. And also the British East India Company winds up with a total monopoly, pretty much on high quality salt peater. So the British government, from this point on, basically has the power to cut every nation on earth off from gunpowder. Doesn't that play a key role in the American Revolution?

In every war that happens. I guess that makes sense. The Seven Years War, the French and Indian War, a big part of why the British win is because they own the gunpowder. I see. I'm just a musical merit, so I know that 1776 song about salt peater. Yeah, so

Clive is appointed governor of Bengal, but Bengal is still technically ruled by a local dude. But for the first time, the company finds itself in control of more than just a few ports. They're more or less in control of this whole region. They're not officially Because they don't want to be.

Because they don't want to be, but they really are running this now, because they think there's a lot of money in it for once. They just get, as soon as they conquer it, the guy they put on the throne gives them huge amounts of money. So they start to get a taste for eating big chunks of land. Right? That's kind of where the East India

Company is. And nation building or just owning them and sitting on it? No, they don't give a shit about nation building. They just want to take the money. But back at home in England, this starts to scare people. Both the company having this big chunk of land that's larger than England and contains more people in it, which is

weird for everybody. And it even scares Clive a little bit. In 1759, he writes this to a company officer, so large a sovereignty may possibly be an object too expensive for a mercantile company, and it is feared that they are not of themselves able without the nation's assistance to maintain

so wide a dominion. It took that long? Yeah. You start a business and you're like, we own most of Canada. Parts of Texas are like, have we gone too far? Is this, is this not what a company should be doing? No one has this till now, but should we own the moon?

Yeah. I mean, we just make Build-A-Bears. This is gone maybe too far for Build-A-Bear. So the sheer amount of wealth Clive acquired in one fell swoop after the Battle of Placie also terrifies everybody in Britain. This is a

semi-modern state. We're not talking the Roman Empire where generals are meant to plunder things. This is a place with press and like civil rights rules and like limitations on the power of government and stuff. Nothing like this. Clearly not though, or like they can be within England they do. Right.

Obviously not compared to what we'd consider, but like this is still weird for them. He's across the border doing crimes. Well not just doing crimes. This is an officer of a corporation and under Clive is not just company troops, but Royal British soldiers and the Royal British Navy.

So the British government soldiers are fighting under the command of a corporate officer who just took hundreds of thousands of pounds in plunder. This is weird for everybody. And like kept as much as he wanted. Yeah, so people start to speak up and be like this might not be okay with England.

We need to talk about this. And Bengal is not at this point the only chunk of land that's been taken over by corporations. We just talked about the Dutch, but obviously like in Canada the American Northwest was like the Hudson Bay company by this point controls a million square kilometers of North America. So it's

starting to be a thing and it's starting to get weird to people. And also it's probably worth noting that in 1660 the British government issued a charter to the company of Royal adventurers trading to Africa. This would become the Royal African company by 1689 the Royal African company had shipped roughly 100,000

slaves out of Africa and into the new world. So there it is. Yeah, the Dutch East India Company the guys from the beginning also founded the new Amsterdam colony. Their mismanagement gave it over to the English and it eventually became New York. So like this is what else is happening at this time. Robert Clive is

back in England with all of the money in the world and starting to fend off some like legal challenges as a result of how much he's taken. So maybe your education was different than mine Michael and people listening maybe you all learned about this stuff when you were a kid but prior to my research here the only thing

I knew about the British East India Company was something to do with the Boston Tea Party and that they were bad guys and at least one of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, right? I knew that in narratives of this time period they're seen as like an evil empire so I was ready for that to be true and it is true. It's super true

and it's true that their actions built the modern world in very many ways they embody what's possible when a gigantic business enterprise is completely unencumbered by the rule of law or conscience but what we've seen happen here isn't just the birth of free enterprise utterly devoid of regulation

international corporations that cannot be regulated it's not just that this is the birth of colonialism because this is now when these companies start thinking about colonies not just as a place for like people to move or whatever for whatever but like this is part of a trading empire that we've set up

and like a planned community and so I mean there's several movies where the evil plan is to like just reshape people on a genetic level until you have the perfect worker or whatever and this is almost that like let's just change the whole world do whatever the

fuck we want. Yep. Now in the 1850s the British annexed Mandalay in modern day Ruyard Kipling wrote a poem about life as a colonial soldier there that I think sums up very well the attitude many of these corrupt corporate officers had towards the vast domains now under their charge.

I'm just surprised the government's not already pushing back harder like they don't see this as an existential threat I guess because it enriches them so much right? Yeah and we'll be getting to that in the next part of this but I want to read you this quote from Kipling's poem Mandalay that sort of I think it helps me get into the head of these people

and I'm going to do it in a British accent. Okay, great. Ship me some ways east of Suez where the best is like the worst where there ain't no tin commandments and a man can raise a fist. That's the attitude here. Yeah. Yeah, there's no god out here.

Let's go to international waters and get drunk do whatever we think is best. Do whatever we fucking want. Next. Yeah. So if you want to see what it looks like when a bunch of cash hungry corporate types winds up in charge of one of the most populous nations on the planet and realizes that there are no specific rules about what they can do,

you'll have to tune into the next episode of Behind the Bastards because this is again a two-parter. We will be dropping the next part on Thursday and it's going to get ugly, not just as ugly as it's been but as ugly as anything last century was. This so far

compared to other episodes I've heard is tame in terms of detailed graphic detail about the individual atrocious No. So you're like now you have the overview to the blood and guts now. Yeah. So Michael. Yeah. Michael as you have never gone by

in my life. Miguel Ito sometimes. Yeah. So you got any plugables before we close this episode? Well my Twitter handle is at Swame underscore corp but now I want nothing to do with I thought it'd be cute I'm a corporation

I'm a brand you know. Yeah. But now I realize that I'm destined to colonize the earth and crush people under my boot heel. Yes. And it doesn't feel good. No. But if you want to follow my progress on conquering the earth that would be at Swame underscore corp and as you mentioned at the top very graciously

our own podcast and sketch network is called Small Beams and you can find us on Patreon Instagram iTunes and etc. All right and I am Robert Evans you can find me on Twitter at I write okay just two letters and you can find this podcast on the internet at behindthebastards.com

where we'll have all of the sources for this episode and next episode you can also find us on Twitter at at bastard's pod you can find us on Instagram in the same way so thank you for listening and we'll be back next Thursday with part two of the age of heroic commerce

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