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

Episode Date: September 6, 2018

Robert is joined again by Michael Swaim to continue discussing the 'era of heroic commerce.' Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hello friends, I'm Robert Evans, and this is Once Again Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history. This is part two of our episode on the age of heroic commerce, and my guest with me, as with the last episode, is the eminent, the itinerant, the excellent Michael Swame. Thank you, the auspicious Robert Evans for having me. Yay, you know what's fun. Good portents abound. Adjectives.

Yeah, I love them. That little blue triangle. And adverbs. Oh. Little orange circle, I think. Did you do that method? I don't know what we're talking about. Okay.

I learned with the system where you put symbols for every part of speech. That sounds exhausting. So to me, a conjunction will always be a little pink rainbow. Oh, okay. That's good to know. Actually, I think that's preposition. Fuck it. Let's talk about some evil.

Speaking of prepositions, I'm going to make a preposition. I don't think you are. I think you mean preposition. Yeah, I know. That one didn't come out. I was going to try to tie that in more smoothly, but then you caught me, just ripped it apart. So where we are in the story, we got this guy, Robert Clive, and Robert Clive has conquered Bengal, like a big chunk of India, and he's rich as shit.

And the East India Company's got like tens of millions of people that they don't really have to take care of, but they kind of control, and it's getting weird. And everybody back in England is like, this is getting weird. And also corporations are spreading throughout the world and starting colonies all over the place, extending European domination to every corner of the globe. They're collecting rent. They are starting to do that, and they are starting to carry out taxes and stuff. That is beginning in this period of time.

But mostly what's happening, mostly the thing that the company is doing in this big area they now control, is being corrupt as shit. Now, corruption had always been endemic among the East India Company's foreign officers. That's why you did it, is so that you could take a bunch of stuff and come back home and be rich if you survived the tropical diseases. So everybody skimmed a little bit off the top. That was kind of built into the system. Clive had just done what everybody else had been doing when he took the 300,000 pounds

of golden jewels and stuff, but the cup that he'd been skimming from was the biggest cup anyone had ever stumbled across. So that's the situation. And it was unprecedented. And people started to ask the question, do we want it to be okay for our corporate officers in foreign countries to be this corrupt? Because that's something we as British people are fine with. It's not like he's a brilliant innovator.

No. It's just the most. No one has ever had the opportunity. This is ballooning out of control now. This seems like it could go bad places. And some of that is people who have a human sense of it's wrong or plundering the world. A lot of it is other rich guys who are old money and are just don't like it. We're just like, this is a threat to our fortresses of money that we have built in our places.

Exactly. Now this gross guy is rich. Yeah. This uncouth guy who joined because he likes beating people up is too wealthy. Exactly. So Clive leaves India after conquering Bengal and governing it for a while. And he goes back to England. And to give you an idea of how modern this period is, he takes all this loot that he

earned from conquering Bengal and he deposits it with the Dutch East India Company. And then when he gets back to London, he withdraws it from them. As cash? Yeah. As cash. Okay. They didn't like transport his jewels. No.

Because he could. He was like, there's no way. This is way too much shit to send across. I'll give it to them. They'll give me the cash value and I'll take it out in London. Boom. It's done. Just upload it to the cloud.

You're good to go. Yeah. They'll bring out how to do that sort of shit. So yeah, again, this is becoming a very modern time period. So Clive gets back to England and he's rich and he's popular for a while. He buys a shitload of mansions, but all is not well because his boss, Lawrence Sullivan, does not like him. Now Lawrence Sullivan is the chairman of the company.

So Clive, in addition to all of the money he had gotten, was guaranteed a giant yearly payment from all of Bengal. So basically, the prince that he put in power was like, we'll give you a huge fortune every single year because you put me in power. He's just free to write up that contract and have the boss sign it and then it becomes reality? That's why the company challenges it. I just don't understand how people take pure will and make it reality.

How does he get people to go along? They don't want to. His own company takes him to court. They're like, you're not allowed to make that deal. You're not allowed to make that deal. We never voted to confirm this giant annual payment for you. You worked it out directly with the prince, but you were working with the company at the time and this is our area.

So they're not saying this money should go back to the Indian people. They're saying this should go to us, not you. So they go to court over and they fight in court for a while. So they're battling in court while things in India are starting to go sour for the company. They're making a lot of money because they've found a bunch of different ways to tax and sell and suck Bengal dry, but they start being rebellions as a result of this. So now the company is spending more and more money putting down rebellions and eventually they agree to confirm Clive's big annual payment in exchange for him going back to India and

fixing the shit that's gone wrong since he left the last time. But that makes it sound like it's Armageddon, like he's the only man in the world who can do this. Don't they have other trustworthy mercenaries? They do. They think he's special, but as he's traveling back to India, they learn that he's really not because some other guy puts the rebellion down. First?

Yeah, first. British guns are just so much better than everything they face. So they agree to give him his money and he leaves over there because they're worried they're going to lose control of the region because of these rebellions. And then when he's in transit, some other guy beats them. You can tell, like you don't need this guy. Yeah, you don't need any guy. You've got cannons.

You have guns. It's the guns that you need. It's the guns. And in fact, actually Clive's big contribution winds it being that when he gets there, things are going so well that the company has almost invaded Delhi, the capital of India, and conquered the whole Mughal empire and he stops them. Like Robert Clive is like, this is gone too far. Makes me look unessential also.

It seems like he may have just actually gotten scared at how much things have escalated. This could be bad. Yeah, you launch a new Starbucks franchise and somehow you accidentally now took over city hall. Yeah, exactly. So he writes a letter when he's justifying his corporate bosses why he stopped the army. He writes a letter that says, quote, to go further, it is in my opinion a scheme so extravagantly ambitious and absurd that no governor and council in their senses can adopt it unless

the whole system of the company's interest be first entirely new modeled. Said the guy who's like, but acquiring 300,000 pounds of gold, that is not overly ambitious. I think he would say that was never his goal. He found himself in a war and he won and then they handed him all this stuff. What am I going to do? Say no. That is an option. Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, but he didn't. And I don't think most people would. To be fair, I think most people who are the kind of people who could be in Clive's position. I was going to say most people would never get in that position. There's no way to get to there. But anyone who's capable of being in that position is probably going to be like, yeah, hit me the fucking money. I already came this far.

I'm already here. So Clive basically thought that the company already had a sweet deal. They weren't officially in charge of anything. They were in control because guns, but they didn't have to do anything aside from occasionally fight and cash checks. The Indians were still nominally at least leaders of their own land and they were outside of Bengal, they were still in control. So the East India Company didn't have to worry about this giant subcontinent that they had

no business interest in, most of. This changed on August 12th, 1765, when Robert Clive, with worry in his gut, signed a deal on behalf of the East India Trading Company with the Mughal Emperor that guaranteed the British East India Company formal control over three big chunks of India in the lives of almost 30 million people. So we'll have the graphic up on the site, but you can see outline there. This is what the East India Company after this agreement now controls. That's land they own and govern.

So now. Okay. It's about a fifth. About a fifth of India. The largest country in existence, I believe. One of them. Yeah. That was up there with China.

China and Russia. Yeah. Wow. So. But what I don't understand is to what level did they control people's lives because I assume they have no interest in going in and being like, we're going to make laws and moral codes. They just want to loot the place.

That is the point of today's episode. But now they are in charge of it. So they are now the government in a big chunk of India, right? So that's the situation after this thing. It's weird that they'd even want to be. What's the profit? Clive did not want to be, but I think they got greedy. And so while Clive is in charge, he tries to cut back on the shocking amount of corruption

and graft that he sees amongst the company officers. He bans his officers from taking gifts or bribes, although he doesn't give up his own bribes, so people don't take it super seriously. He increases salaries to try to make people want to steal less, and he restricts the company's monopoly so that some sort of local economy can exist, so that the East India Company is not the only people who are allowed to sell products to Indians, so that they can have a functioning society. So he tries to pump the brakes to some extent.

They had one before he showed up. Just let them do what they do. He also does nice stuff like he gives a shitload of money to the pension fund for the company army. Again, he's one of these people. He starts this road, but he does not seem to be running unchecked in that direction. He's not like Jan Kuhn. Poor new money is evolving into old money, like you talked about on the Koch Brothers

episode where it's time to get philanthropic now and resuscitate my image, gloss over all that shit. It's possible. I don't know the man. But eventually, his health isn't great at this point. He winds up heading back to England and other people take over for India, and he winds up in court again, fighting the company for access to his yearly bribe, basically, because they won't give that up.

So where do they keep him hired? Can't they fire him? Well, when he leaves every time, he stops working for them, essentially. And so then there's big legal fights in the court, because they don't want him to just forever get a fortune every year. They want that fortune every year. Right. But it seems like they keep coming back and being like, okay, we'll give you your old

job back. Go sign this deal. Well, they thought they needed him, and now they know they really don't. Right. Andy's starting to say we should be prudent and they're like, fuck that. We should steal slightly less. This guy has served his purpose. Get him out of here.

So the East India Company now, after Clive leaves, is essentially, yeah, the government of a big chunk of India. And if you're a government, you need to provide things for people, rather than just take tax money. Like, you take tax money, but you provide roads and libraries and EMTs and firefighters and the FDA and shit. The company doesn't provide anything. They just take pretty much.

And so that's the situation in 1770 when a famine hits, and it's a bad one. And we will get into the famine in a little bit. Right now, we're talking about Clive because this famine is a disaster for his image. He's not in charge when it happens, but it goes big in the press and it looks bad for him. And he's basically portrayed by a lot of the media as a greedy idiot who had ruined India, even though a lot of other people had ruined India, as well as Robert Clive. And here you are throwing him under the bus a full 200 years later.

Can we leave Clive alone? I mean, he had tried to clamp down on the shameless theft. He did see the problem coming. So he winds up in court and has a big legal case where he tries to essentially defend his legacy. And during the court proceedings, he delivers a famous speech. So it's like one of those really like movie ready moments from history. So he's being cross-examined about robbing Bengal blind and accused of plundering India.

And he says quote, I mean, that's literally just the same as you want the truth. You think I stole a lot? I could have stolen a lot more, motherfuckers. Why does the loophole exist if I'm not supposed to exploit it? That classic justification we hear all the time to this day. So he was acquitted, but he didn't last that much longer. He was very sick from all of the tropical diseases he'd picked up overseas. And he also might have been suffering terrible regret for his actions in the famine.

He is described as having had a nervous disorder. It's also possible he had severe PTSD. There are numerous times where people exploded next to him, like would be shot by cannons and just the guy next to him would burst. So you don't mean got mad at him. You mean physically exploded. Yeah. Yeah.

Like was burst by a cannon. So he lived through horrible combat. So it's possible he was just a broken mentally at this point. Then he drowned on gold. No. In 1774, he stabbed himself to death in the throat with a pocket knife. Oh. Yeah.

At home alone? Yep. At home alone. That's a crazy method though. People knew he was depressed. He'd always been depressed. But yeah, he cut his own throat with a tiny knife. Wow.

So he was gone. This is the end of Robert Clive. But the British were still in India and they would stay there for nearly two centuries. Now Merchant Kings mentioned the famine in passing, but didn't get into much detail on the matter. It was a famine. It was very, very bad. So I decided to do a little bit of extra digging.

And I ran into a college textbook called the East India Company and the Natural World. It had a whole chapter on the famine and thanks to the Bountiful Goddess of Capitalism, Springer allowed me to buy just that chapter for $30. Oh wow. What a deal, right? We had $30 for a single chapter excised from the book, okay, whatever. Capitalism. It's different from the stuff we're talking about today because reasons.

Anyway, I read the chapter and it's really good. Nice. I'm going to quote from it now. According to the report from the famine commission, in a period of 90 years from 1765 when the British East India Company took over the Duwani of Bengal to 1858, Bengal experienced 12 famines and four severe scarcities. Now some of those famines would have occurred with or without the British East India Company because famines are a thing, they've always been a thing, right?

But once you delve into it, their whole period of rule is basically a master class in how to fuck over an entire subcontinent. In essence, in order to compensate for the minimal amount of actual government work the company needed to do in order to turn a profit, they just started jacking up taxes on rural workers and on farmers and usually these taxes weren't kind so you'd pay with whatever it is you were growing at the time. So the company commercialized agriculture in India and tried to turn it into an almost industrial operation to maximize output.

So there'd been a bunch of small independent farms and villages and whatnot and now the whole countryside was basically one giant big food production plant. Workshop. Yeah. It also made it impossible for the farmers themselves to handle bad years. Everything was sold every year. Nothing was set aside for the bad times. There wasn't enough leftover after the taxes for the individual farmers anyway.

The British East India Company had disrupted the intricate cultural systems that had formed during and before the Mughal Empire. In the past, when there was a bad year and the rains didn't come, villages had standing arrangements with other villages to help each other out with food. These were local insurance plans that were present all across India and particularly in the farming regions of Bengal. It was a very common way to stop people from dying horribly when a famine hit. Presumably have been working for a thousand years.

Yeah, exactly. And we're like, stop doing that now. No, now you all work one giant farm together. This will be better for us. So now when famine hit, everybody worked for the company. Nobody had anything extra. There were no more insurance policies. They'd all been taken and taxes and sold.

Well, from that same chapter. Bengali society was divided between the Zamindars, the hereditary revenue collectors of the Mughal Empire and a broad base consisting of some landless laborers and a large number of poor cultivators, most of whom were sharecroppers. So taxes started to ratchet up on these people in the late 1700s. The company started jacking up taxes really hard in the 1750s and by the mid-1760s they were like doubling every couple of years. The agricultural reforms the corporation put in place didn't really work out, yields

started to fall, so they're actually growing fewer crops because it turns out a bunch of British guys' ideas on how to farm Indian land did not work as well as what the Indians had already been doing. And going to a totally different culture with different land and just telling them, do this, I think this would work for you for farming. You have to do it or we'll shoot you. Try it out. Yeah.

Give it a shot. Let us know how it works. But don't tell us if it doesn't. We're not really interested in that. So would they ration food back because it is in their interest to keep people alive at all? You'd think that, right? No.

You would think that, right? You'd think it's in your interest that the people- To keep some workers alive? Yeah. Yeah. You would think that. Oh. Oh boy.

Other people did not. So the price of grain started to rise as the company takes over. And the company has no vested interest in selling cheap grain to the people growing grain to pay them grain taxes. So when the famine hit, the company just reacted with a kind of sociopathy. I think we're coming to expect from the British East India Company. Oh, because they're not even paying a portion of their income. They pay in grain anyway.

Yeah, exactly. So they're like, well, you're going to give us all your grain anyway. Why should we even give you some back when we just get it all anyway? Yeah, we're just going to get it all anyway. And you're like, so that I continue living? And they're already gone. They're already walking off with the grain. Jesus.

Thanks again. Yeah. So here's another quote from that chapter. The effect of the famine was to enshrine free market economics as part of the colonial policy all over the empire. Periodic famines were seen as a check to population growth. As Mike Davis notes, by the 19th century, these Malthusian ideas, which were voiced all throughout the colonial period, resulted in the pursuit of free market economics and,

quote, India like Ireland became a utilitarian laboratory where millions of lives were wagered against a dogmatic faith in omnipotent markets overcoming the inconvenience of dearth. This was a policy that was to become, quote, a mask for colonial genocide. So you want to talk about colonial genocide? First, let's talk about some ads because it is time. I need something to gird myself. I need some time. Gird yourself with these products and or services that support the show.

And we're back. Fabulous ads, they like wrapped me in such a cozy feeling that I feel like I have the buffer I need for what's going to come now. Well, what's going to come now is we're going to talk about how free market economics became a mask for colonial genocide. We're getting to the genocide part of that now. Getting to Charles Cook boner. He would have loved this period.

He would have been just a pig in plot. Just stealing money, watch selling people into slavery. Justifying it with bizarre nonsensical statements. He would have been great. He would have been super good at this. Really was born in the wrong time, although making this time that time, doing his best. It's just business. This is like the beginning of that ethos.

It's just business. It's just business. Nothing personal. Yeah. So it's worth getting into exactly how different the famines caused by the East India Company's management were from the famines that had come before in India and in every society in human history. There had been famines in India shortly before the company's period of dominance, including

one that lasted from 1670 to 1671. Thousands of people had died. One to 300 every day during the months that the famine was active. It was a terrible time, but the Mughal government, shitty as it was by that point, had taken action to mitigate it. The government had repaired and built new irrigation works. They'd created reservoirs to make sure they'd be able to grow crops during the next dry season.

They cut taxes so farmers would be able to keep more of the food they'd grown. They'd set up free kitchens and given out grain to try and reduce the number of people who starved to death. In other words, they were a fucking government. The East India Company was not. So starting in the 1770s, all of India started to learn the difference between the two. The great Bengal famine of 1770 lasted from 1769 to 1773. Okay.

See, I'm like, a famine's supposed to last a season. Yeah. Right. That's not supposed to be happening for four years. Yeah. So the last famine had lasted less than a year and killed thousands. The last famine lasted four years, it would kill millions. The great Bengal famine was made a lot worse by the fact that, in the years leading up

to it, the company had kind of sort of gutted the local economy and shipped all of their silver away to merry old England, or rather, China. See, economics isn't my strong suit, but I did manage to find a very detailed article on The Wire, an independent journalism website that publishes in Hindi and Urdu, and it focuses a lot on historical economic stuff in that region of the world. The article is called The Role that Currency Played in the Great Bengal Famine of 1770. It breaks down how the company spent its tax revenue. This is talking about one district.

In Burbholm district, out of 90,000 pounds connected through taxes and duties, a net surplus of some 60,000 pounds was employed for the purchase of silks, muslins, cotton cloths, and other articles to be sold in Leidenhol Street, the headquarters of the company. In short, the revenues of Bengal supplied the means of providing the expenditure for purchases in Bengal, reducing the net annual influx of specie, which is hard currency, to a pittance. So the company was taking taxes, making a shitload of money, using it to buy products Indian people needed, and then it would sell those products back to them for a profit and

ship the hard currency, the silver and gold, back to England and out of India. The two primary impacts of this on England were, number one, a few people got very, very, very, very rich. And it's always a few people, like, what's crazy to me is countries will swallow up and destroy whole other countries, and only 18 people were involved. It's like the country that crushed the other country doesn't even benefit from this. No. Well, England does in one way.

I'm sure they get the tax bump. Well, no, this is how England gets tea. Oh, okay. Yeah, I've heard this story. Okay. So the Chinese were the only place to get tea. Right. You know?

China was the only place where it grew at this point, not anymore. And China only wanted silver for tea. They wanted the specie, the hard currency. Now this is sounding like a Sid Meier civilization game. Yeah, that's exactly what's happening. Only want silver. Here's another quote. The relatively undervalued silver in Bengal proved a profitable source to finance the

growing tea trade with China. Within a span of just three years, some 720,000 pounds of specie was sent out of Bengal to China. The widespread corruption and plunder by the servants of the company not only transferred the wealth of the country to these individuals, but was also sent out of the country through ingenious means. Now this meant that very quickly Bengal's hard currency ran out. The parts of India the company owned only had so much silver and gold and whatever.

The sheer lack of currency meant that Indians could no longer buy and sell things. The local economy collapsed and this also meant that suddenly the company had no money. Since they weren't willing to send silver over from India so they could just buy things, the company sort of twiddled its thumb and failed to import grain from outside to avert the millions of deaths. In fact, they banned the importation of grain between different regions of India and seized boats to prevent it. Here's what one company-

Well, selling them products down at the company's store. Well, they're not buying those anymore. Because they're out of all the mothers, no money left. Which is why the company doesn't have the money to stop the famine. Jesus. Se vicious circle. No one's at fault. Right.

How could it possibly ever have been prevented? This is just what had to happen. No one could have foreseen this. Is the Irish potato famines- sorry to quiz you on stuff you did in research, but was that also corporatization fuckery? Not in the same way, but it involved a lot of very rich landowners being. We will be talking about that and talking about Queen Victoria at some point. Here is a quote from a company worker at the time about what Bengal was like during this

famine. This is a guy who's watching it as a white dude who has enough food. Quote, all through the stifling summer of 1770, the people went on dying. The husbandmen sold their cattle, they sold their implements of agriculture, they devoured their seed grain, they sold their sons and daughters, till at length no buyer of children could be found. They ate the leaves of trees and the grass on the field, and in June 1770, the resident at the Durbar affirmed that the living were feeding on the dead.

Day and night, a torrent of famished and diseased stricken wretches poured into the great cities. At an early period of the year, pestilence had broken out. In March, we find smallpox at the Morshedabad. The streets were blocked up with promiscuous heaps of the dying and dead, and turment cannot do its work quick enough. Even the dogs and jackals, the public scavengers of the east, became unable to accomplish their revolting work, and the multitude of mangled and festering corpses at length threatened the existence of the citizens.

And even through all this, the East India Company keeps increasing taxes on the farmers. Which must not even mean anything anymore. Like, fine. No, they're still growing food, it's just being taken from them, while they're starving. So why don't they just eat the food that they're harvesting right then? Some of them do. There's guys with guns there watching, but yeah. And they've got to, like, bad things will happen if you don't pay your taxes.

Well, what's crazy is they treat it like it's business, like they have some God-given right to do this because they created this abstract thing we call like a business plan structure. But really, it boils down to robbery, because at the end of the day, it's always just like, well, why couldn't China come trade directly for silver with India? Well, because we'd kill them all and we'd shoot it. Yeah. But that's what it comes down to, the guns, the end, yeah. Yeah, so the taxes on the Bengalis people are higher in 1770 and 71, the year the famine

starts, than in 1769 to 70, the year that preceded the famine. I mean, you work on a grain farm and you go home and eat your dead sibling? Well, you sold your children. Your children, you sold a long time ago. So in April of 1770, quote, astoundingly, the council acting on the advice of the Muslim minister of finance, Mohammed Reza Khan, added 10% to the land tax of the ensuing year. But the distress continued to increase at a rate that baffled official calculation. In the second week of May, the central government awoke to find itself in the midst of universal

and irredeemable starvation. So some company officers advised basically cutting taxes and giving back some of what they'd taken so the people wouldn't starve to death, but that just didn't happen. I can't, I'm so, because they want some living people to work the fields. I really thought their response would be, give them all a pittance of food. They're even like, I don't know if we should even give them that. It's not the company is a big force, like the company is a big force in making some of these calls, but a lot of it's just individuals being like, yeah, but if we give some of it

back, then I'll be able to steal less. And I want to be home in a year with a pile of money. So I'll just keep stealing for another year. Still totally reliant on most of the people being like, and that's worth watching everyone starve to death around me while I'm here. If we've learned one thing about corporations from the last 400 years, it's that they have a great deal of foresight. And never murder and poison themselves out of like sci-fi movies where there's a desert

planet, but so, but the evil corporate lady lives in like a glass pyramid filled with water always seems so over the top. But it's real. Oh yeah. It's reality. Boy howdy has it happened. Yeah, by May 1770, one third of the bingolese population, six out of every 17 people, was dead.

Company officials estimated one half of the cultivators and pairs of revenue will perish with hunger. The sheer scale of the devastation was terrible. For the company's bank statement. By October, the company started to notice that an awful lot of the workers they relied on had been quote destroyed by the famine. Started to. Oh, so we're already using business devil speak.

We're already euphemizing it. Some of our bipedal product was destroyed in a transaction. Yeah. Quote, the failure of a single crop following a year of scarcity had wiped out an estimated 10 million human beings. So that's the death toll of this first famine, 10 million. The famines continued though, off and on through the 1770s. In 1780, another big famine hit and again, one third of Bengal just died.

Revenue plummeted. The British government started to get involved. Even to people at the time, what was happening was seen as horrific and the press attacked the East India Company. By 1784, the British government started to pass the first regulations limiting the company's powers. Really limiting any company's powers. This is the birth of regulation and corporations.

It's because a corporation killed 10 million people, probably more like 12 to 15 at that point. Roughly a holocaust to a holocaust and a half worth of human beings. You hear me slowing down because my brain's just grappling with actually trying to absorb and... Oh, and there's another famine. Absorb that that's real, that we were like, this way of organizing humans seems to be making money.

Oh, it also kills people. Well, that's fine. Unless it goes too far, when did it go too far? When did we go like maybe it has gone too far? When 10 million people were dead. Well, 10 million people died. And then 10 years later. Maybe we should do something.

Probably five or six million people died. And then in 1800, 10% of all of India died. There's not even a death count for that one. It's just roughly one-tenth of all of India died. Today there's a billion people in India today, but I'm sure a couple hundred million. If we're trying to take the whole East India Company's death toll from famine, it wouldn't be outrageous to assume somewhere in the 20 to 30 million deaths by the course of this whole period.

So it's good to know that humanity does have a point where you're like, is this too many people dying? Like you can't. For me to have slightly bigger houses. So yeah, in 1784 they start regulating the company and 1788 Edmund, or someone, Burke, I forget which Burke, gives a speech at the impeachment trial of India's governor general because they're like, you've killed like 20 million people. You should probably not have this job anymore.

So Burke called the company, quote, a rogue state waging war administering justice, minting coin and collecting revenue over Indian territory. Horace Walpole, a wig member of parliament, said at the time that, quote, the oppressions of India and even of the English settled there under the rapine and cruelties of the servants of the company have now reached England and created a general clamor here. To such monopolies were imputed the late famine of Bengal and the loss of three million, they didn't know the whole total of its inhabitants. A tithe of these crimes was sufficient to inspire horror.

So the famine of 1770, 1780 and 1799, it is likely, and these are other historians than me saying this, that the famines the East India Company brought on to India were the single greatest atrocity, the single worst disaster of the entire 1700s of that whole century. It was the beginning of the end for the East India Company too, although businessmen would continue to trade and profit off of her for nearly a century, India continued to suffer famines which led to unrest and war, which led to uprisings and crackdowns. This led the East India Company's army to expand, which led them to take over more and

more of India until pretty soon they controlled basically all of India and had an army of 200,000 soldiers. A guy named Lord Wellesley eventually wound up in charge and he became the company's most successful general. He's the guy who expanded them from sort of the eastern coast of India all the way into what's now Pakistan and eventually Afghanistan. According to the wonderful book Return of a King by 1796, quote, the company was expanding rapidly out from its coastal factories to conquer much of the interior, Wellesley's

Indian campaigns would ultimately annex more territory than all of Napoleon's conquests in Europe. Wow. Yeah. This eventually brought the East India Company to the doorstep of Afghanistan. In 1816, the British East India Company extended an offer of asylum to Shah Shuzha, the exiled king of Afghanistan. In 1839, due to a basically minor dispute with the Afghan government, the East India Company

invaded Afghanistan, conquered the country, and placed Shah Shuzha on a throne as a puppet. Lord Auckland, who was the guy who had ordered the invasion, and the company quickly lost interest in their conquest of Afghanistan and immediately invaded China next. It seems like they feel that, well, you got to invade something. You got to invade something. That's not mandatory. You're allowed to stop. Well, let me explain it to you, Michael.

They'd been selling opium to China and it had created a horrific endemic drug problem that was crippling the local economy and killing people. The Chinese government banned opium sales, and so they had to invade China to keep selling them deadly drugs. It's like, yeah, we fucked up India till it stopped bleeding money, so we have to move on to a new place and fuck that place up till it stops bleeding money. I'm of the opinion that the great heroes in history are probably the Afghan people. Because the East India Company is on a tear, killing people by the millions conquering

land, and then they take over Afghanistan. And they find themselves the rulers of Afghanistan, a country that has nothing of value for the East India Company. It's not profitable, so they have this huge army in Afghanistan that they start needing to cut back on, and they can't cut back on the army because Afghanistan is big and hard to control, so they stop paying bribes to all of these local warlords, which means the local warlords start attacking the army, which means there's eventually a gigantic revolution in Afghanistan that ousts the garrison, the company's giant army in Kabul, and wipes

it out in the mountain passes of Afghanistan. And these are British soldiers with muskets, unrifled guns that aren't good at very long range. The Afghans have these weapons called jazale cheese, which are basically sniper rifles. So they're hiding in the mountains, murdering huge numbers of British soldiers and their Indian sepoys, and they just massacre this entire British army. It's a huge, huge disaster. And this disaster comes after years of declining revenues for the East India Company and ballooning

expenses. Finally, all of this helps kill the East India Company as a global power. In 1858, the British government finally decided that letting a for-profit enterprise govern the lives of tens of millions of people, and like a fifth of the world, was a really bad idea. Instead, they give it to a queen. Yeah, because I feel like the Afghan uprising just delayed what were already... So it was like there was this weird chance at the very beginning of corporate history

that corporations and governments could have merged and become one in the same, and the East India Company could have been literally the empire and just own the world. And they stopped that from happening for 500 years. It's still gonna happen, but it couldn't happen really fast. There's news today that President Donald Trump is considering a plan by Eric Prince, the founder of Blackwater, to basically put private mercenaries in charge of the war of Afghanistan and have a guy who Eric Prince has described as a visoroy run Afghanistan for the Western powers.

So there's a chance the Afghans might get to stop the next-age corporate government. Because named six to the council of operants, like everything's becoming so high fantasy. I will tell you one thing about Afghanistan. Nobody wins when they fight there, other than not even the Afghan people don't even win. Everybody loses, but you don't win. And usually when you quote unquote win or are holding it for a while, you're just there being hot, standing around. And it's worth noting that when we invaded Afghanistan, the guy we put in charge of the

country was a dude named Hamid Karzai, who was a descendant of Shashuja, the people the East India Company put in charge of Afghanistan, who was then massacred after the revolution. It's a small, small, awful world, dumb, dumb world. So yeah, in 1858, India becomes the property of Queen Victoria, who we will almost certainly discuss in a subsequent episode. The East India Company survives for another few years, but it is dissolved for good in 1874 by the East India Stock Redemption Act. This merchant.

Wherever shall we get our tea? Who's to say? At this point, I'm sure there's competitors. So that's the era of heroic commerce, the age of heroic commerce. Wow, what a slog. What does that have to do with the Boston Tea Party? They just brought the tea that ended up being thrown out. Yeah, they were selling the tea.

Yeah. It's really just like the militarization aspect, and that's crazy that we're going down that road again. And I left out, because we didn't really talk about North America. There's a lot of the story of these companies in it. We didn't even, because there's just so much. Totally, because I don't know about 95% of that, but the things I do know, it's so, this is like the template for like Iran Contra, all kinds of shit that I do know about that

I'm like, oh, this is the first time people are like, let's do this particular kind of fuckery. It's the template for Iran Contra, it's a template for all these ideas, it's a template for colonialism, and thus all of these colonial wars have their start here. This is a big part of the origin of our problems with race in the United States, because these corporations really jumpstart the slave trade, because they're depopulating these islands of the natives, and then they need to move slaves in to work the spice plantations. It seems like it's almost, and it's inevitable because you're reaching this technological

threshold where now we have compasses and sextants, we can get further away. It's just like, in any community, there's going to be some bastards, you have job security for sure, and this is the first time that you're like, oh, the bastards operate on a global level now, because it's the first time this Clive motherfucker can go all the way over there and fuck everything up and come all the way back. It's remarkable. It's the birth of something horrible, some Cthulhu type monster. Yeah.

That is destined to destroy us all, I firmly believe. This is to get, not even the tiniest bit political, just to explain some of my own beliefs, because I've received some negative feedback from people over a few episodes for anti-capitalist rants and stuff. Whoa, on what, the internet? That's not the internet I know. I'm not anti-capitalist. I'm enjoying a delightful bag of Doritos right now.

I understand that, God damn, that's good. I think they'd have to eventually pay you for it to be considered capitalism though. Yeah, that's fair. Even me buying the products is capitalism. Me enjoying a good, clean, fancy new phone is capitalism. It's not that I'm saying, oh, this system all needs to be torn down tomorrow and I have a solution. It's that I'm saying, when we start talking about how all the deaths from communism and

stuff, like you'll hear on the right, people will be like, communism's killed, 90 million people. There's a lot, tens of millions of people have died under communist governments. I will never argue that with you. But if you think capitalism's death toll isn't as high or even much higher, because it's been going on for 400 years, you are not paying attention to the actual facts and the actual history. Everything we do that we elevate to an ideology kills buckets of people.

That's what people do. So don't get on your high horse if you like capitalism. I'm not going to argue with you about the right way to run the world, because I don't know what it is, but don't get on your high horse because whatever you believe, there's blood on your hands or there's blood on the hands of the thing that you believe in. I don't like this show. I couldn't agree more, as Jack Johnson's saying about, so long as he's a wise man, my friend, we've all got the blood on our hands.

I think this is, I was really happy to be on this episode because it echoes something I do definitely believe, there's no bigger bastard than the abstract system that develops its own momentum. Yeah, because Robert Clive, if you'd told him when he came to India, your actions will kill tens of millions of people, I think the guy might have killed himself. And we don't think of him as a Hitler. Yeah, because he never planted this. Exactly.

So it's just, there's nothing will fuck you up like a group of self-interested people who none of them think of themselves as guiding the thing. The thing just, it's too late now, the thing's rolling. Yeah, and they don't think about the larger system, they're just like, how can we get money out of this place? They don't think about, what allows a region this large and densely populated to not get wiped out by famine constantly? Is it maybe that they've built systems over the course of millennia that we should pay

attention to? It's not your job to think that, you're in sub-block C6 of District 9 and you're supposed to make this number. Your job is to increase tax revenues by 4%. And that's all you're supposed to care about. And you kind of trust that someone, well, if there was going to be a famine that would kill everyone, someone up the chain is on top of it. The boss is nobody wants a famine.

Exactly. Like. Oh. Damn, dude. Yeah. Anyway. Anyway. You want to plug your stuff?

No. I don't want to be associated with. You can buy all our wonderful products on, we are opening a merch store soon, but you can find the content that might inspire you. And what island is your merch store operating? Exactly. It's the only island with the right cotton for our shows. Yeah, our baseball caps are currently being freightered over from the Cayman Islands already

sketchy money-wise. But over at Small Beans, Small Beans is the name of my outfit. And you can find all of our content there. We do podcasts, sketches, occasional songs, all kinds of stuff. Sure. And I am personally on Twitter at Swame underscore corp. You can find me on Twitter at I write okay. I have a book on Amazon called a brief history of vice and you can find this website on the

internet at behindthebastards.com. And you can also find us on Twitter at at Bastards pod, you can find us on Instagram same way. And that's the episode. So check back in next Tuesday and there will be another episode and probably something just as depressing and frightening. That's my goal. I hope it is.

I hope it really is. So have a good week and I love about 40% of you.