The East India Company, the original corporate raiders

somehow relevant: TV Series "Taboo" Very good one, explores the time and doings of the East India Company (not as a main theme)

I only partially enjoyed the show... The sets, costumes, etc were all phenomenal. The story/dialogue at times was a bit boring at times, and overdone at times.

Either way, it's cool to see that the East India company was real, and about as terrible as the show makes them seem.

I fondly hope for a reverse wealth drain from UK to India at the same scale or more.

> It is actually amazing how little British folks today know about their own historical misdeeds, they may accept the issues towards USA and other countries but tend to downplay atrocities magnitudes higher in India and other countries

To add to this, it's not just the British. The Portuguese, French, Dutch, Danish, and Swedish (among others) colonized parts of India long before the British did, and the Portuguese and French also kept their colonies in India much longer. When people talk about India's independence in 1947, that's just referring to the independence of British India. The French stayed until 1962, and the Portuguese held their colonies until 1975.

Amusingly, most Portuguese and French people I've talked to under the age of forty[0] or so are genuinely shocked to learn this.

On the other hand, most British people are apparently proud of their colonial plundering[1], so I guess everyone has a long way to go still.

(P.S. If you're thinking of responding to this with a comment about how the British "improved" India by industrializing it, or all the "benefits" India got from being plundered for 450 years, please save us all the trouble and don't. These are typical revisionist talking points that are easily debunked as ahistorical with some basic research, and they're put forth to distract from the sheer volume of wealth that was stolen, the amount of infrastructure that was destroyed by colonial regimes, the genocides and other war crimes that were committed by the colonizing countries, and so on. For most of recorded history, India (Bengal in particular) was the world's largest economy - over 25% of the world's GDP[2] - and every discussion that attempts to rationalize that loss after colonization without recognizing the value that was destroyed, stolen, or outright murdered ultimately into revisionist white supremacist history, which is not what HN is for.)

I know I'll get eventually downvoted for this, because talking about the brutality and legacy of European colonialism is always unpopular on HN for obvious reasons, but it's important enough that it needs to be said.

[0] ie, young enough that this wasn't in their lifetimes

[1] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/british-people...

[2] https://www.coursera.org/learn/passport-to-india/lecture/uYU...

Hmm, the South Sea Company.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhyKYa0YJ_5CwbTgovbJJ...