William Dalrymple – The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire

William Dalrymple – The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire

The East India Company (EIC) was one of history’s largest monopolies. Its story is relevant to today’s antitrust debate, and the larger question of where the private sector ends and the public sector begins. Dalrymple seems eager to paint a portrait of capitalist and corporate greed, but the facts won’t quite allow it. He grudgingly allows that the EIC was not a free-market institution, but he often insists on treating it that way just the same.

The EIC was a public-private partnership from the start, and received government bailouts. It had de facto taxing authority in India, a power no fully private company enjoys. The EIC had its own 200,000-strong army, twice the size of the British army. The East India Company was a government in everything but name, and it acted like it, to the point of toppling India’s existing government in 1765 and replacing it with itself.

Contemporary economists and philosophers such as Adam Smith and even the conservative Edmund Burke opposed empire and its accoutrements not just on moral grounds, but on fiscal grounds. Ventures such as the EIC cost the government more than they made from it.

Dalrymple doesn’t go into this as much as he should, but the EIC’s story shows that there is no bright line where the private sector ends and government begins. This kind of philosophical discussion would have been very useful for clarifying his message.

The lessons from the East India Company’s story apply to today’s climate of too-big-to-fail, bailouts for politically connected industries, and subsidy programs for businesses big and small. All of these nearly always come with political strings attached, and mix together the public and private in ways few outside of the economics profession expected. Beneficiary companies become executors of government policy, rather than engines of value creation.

In the EIC’s case, this meant corruption, coups, atrocities, war crimes, and racially motivated mass murders. Today’s rent-seekers’ interests are mostly limited to greed, fortunately. But they are still worth fighting about, and EIC’s cautionary tale is useful for that fight.