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The East India Company, the original corporate raiders

theguardian.com

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Re: The East India Company, the original corporate raiders

#31

Post by baq »

bherms wrote: post #4
NiklasMort wrote: post #2

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 just wanted to say that your post implies that the East India Company could be thought of as fictional and that shocked me. I mean, I've learned about it in school, so I also had no idea it existed before that (I'm not English), but it's concerning that it isn't taught.

Re: The East India Company, the original corporate raiders

#32

Post by jorams »

chimeracoder wrote: post #24
adamnemecek wrote: post #7

Even though they mention it, I came across this chart a while back that shows just by how much bigger it was than the recent largest corporation https://i.pinimg.com/736x/14/4a/6c/144a6c7feb3823f5fd4baa562... It seems to have originally come from here https://i.pinimg.com/736x/14/4a/6c/144a6c7feb3823f5fd4baa562...

> Even though they mention it, I came across this chart a while back that shows just by how much bigger it was than the recent largest corporation FYI, that's the Dutch East India Company, which was separate from the British East India Company, which this article is about. The British East India Company was actually much larger .

> The British East India Company was actually much larger.

Do you have any sources for that? Most things I can find mention the opposite. For example, from Wikipedia[1]:

> Between 1602 and 1796 the VOC sent almost a million Europeans to work in the Asia trade on 4,785 ships, and netted for their efforts more than 2.5 million tons of Asian trade goods. By contrast, the rest of Europe combined sent only 882,412 people from 1500 to 1795, and the fleet of the British East India Company (EIC), the VOC's nearest competitor, was a distant second to its total traffic with 2,690 ships and a mere one-fifth the tonnage of goods carried by the VOC.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_East_India_Company

Re: The East India Company, the original corporate raiders

#33

Post by chimeracoder »

BlackJack wrote: post #27
apsec112 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAICT, the British Empire gets much more criticism for its various evils than other historical empires do. Very few people in the West, for example, even know about the ethnic cleansing of the Greeks under the Ottoman Empire ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_genocide ), and that was less than a century ago. Probably the worst European colonialists were the Belgians, of all people, under King Leopold II ( https:/…

The Mughal's did bad things too, but some of their kings like Akbar at least tried to integrate society and not cause religious strife. The Mughal Empire did a lot of bad things in India, especially nutcases like Aurangzeb, and Indian people recognize those bad things. The problem, as I understand, is that a lot of British people don't know all the bad things the Empire did, or don't learn about it the way German peo…

> Churchill's decisions directly lead to the death of millions of people in India. He's no better than Hitler

It gets even more ironic than that. During the 1940s Bengal famine, things were so bad that the Axis powers offered to step in and send humanitarian aid. Churchill not only refused, but he tried to prevent the newspapers from printing news of the offer, so that people wouldn't know how truly unnecessary their starvation was.

Lest I be mistaken, this is not to say that the Axis powers were somehow anything other than evil themselves. But it does highlight the level of hypocrisy of the British to claim the moral high ground when their own leader was intentionally starving millions to death out of spite. (And yes, it was spite - read what Churchill himself said on the topic).

Re: The East India Company, the original corporate raiders

#34

Post by apsec112 »

OzzyB wrote: post #30
apsec112 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAICT, the British Empire gets much more criticism for its various evils than other historical empires do. Very few people in the West, for example, even know about the ethnic cleansing of the Greeks under the Ottoman Empire ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_genocide ), and that was less than a century ago. Probably the worst European colonialists were the Belgians, of all people, under King Leopold II ( https:/…

> Very few people in the West, for example, even know about the ethnic cleansing of the Greeks under the Ottoman Empire ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_genocide ) Fewer still know about the "Turkish Genocide" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_genocide ) but that's more to do with cherry-picking "historians" such as yourself. Of course that Wikipedia page redirects to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecut…

"cherry-picking "historians" such as yourself."

I've never claimed to be a historian, and it's impossible to not leave lots of things out in a Hacker News comment, especially if the scope is as broad as "all historical atrocities". I didn't write these Wikipedia pages, I'm just linking to them out of convenience since I can't link to copyrighted history books.

Re: The East India Company, the original corporate raiders

#35

Post by nonamechicken »

itissid wrote: post #16
chimeracoder wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 an…

When things like the bengal famine happen because of just diverting India's supply chain to the WWII how the F * do you put up with something like that. If you haven't seen it already read the wikipedia entry[1] and pause and think for a moment, they denied food shipments for almost 2 full years in a famine. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943

It's not just one famine. There have been many. It's estimated that anywhere from 10 to 40 million died in these alone. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/india-35-millio...

Re: The East India Company, the original corporate raiders

#36

Post by baursak »

rmdundon wrote: post #26
baursak wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crimes of Britain is pretty informative Twitter account on this topic. Here's a sample of a lot more recent British history: https://twitter.com/crimesofbrits/status/905035282046742528

Interesting. However, when anything, such as that video, mentions "zionism", that automatically triggers my anti-Semite radar.

I also used to think that anti-Zionism = anti-Semitism, until I learned more about it. There are plenty of anti-Zionist Jews, both inside and outside Israel. This short clip explains the difference pretty well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7dJLP3L0Xw

Re: The East India Company, the original corporate raiders

#37

Post by Balero »

travmatt wrote: post #17
newyankee wrote: post #5

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 India is important because it was the crown jewel of the British empire and was completely destroyed of its soul by the colonialists with very clever mixture of politics, military and ot…

I've heard some Brits complain about American misdeeds throughout the Middle East without a hint hypocrisy crossing their face.

These are individual people. If the British government was to complain, then that could be considered hypocritical. But an individual person can't be held to account for actions taken, by others and (quite probably) before they were born.

Re: The East India Company, the original corporate raiders

#38

Post by trentmb »

apsec112 wrote: post #34
OzzyB wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Very few people in the West, for example, even know about the ethnic cleansing of the Greeks under the Ottoman Empire ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_genocide ) Fewer still know about the "Turkish Genocide" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_genocide ) but that's more to do with cherry-picking "historians" such as yourself. Of course that Wikipedia page redirects to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecut…

"cherry-picking "historians" such as yourself." I've never claimed to be a historian, and it's impossible to not leave lots of things out in a Hacker News comment, especially if the scope is as broad as "all historical atrocities". I didn't write these Wikipedia pages, I'm just linking to them out of convenience since I can't link to copyrighted history books.

> I've never claimed to be a historian

That's why they put it in quotes.

Re: The East India Company, the original corporate raiders

#39

Post by chimeracoder »

jorams wrote: post #32
chimeracoder wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even though they mention it, I came across this chart a while back that shows just by how much bigger it was than the recent largest corporation FYI, that's the Dutch East India Company, which was separate from the British East India Company, which this article is about. The British East India Company was actually much larger .

> The British East India Company was actually much larger. Do you have any sources for that? Most things I can find mention the opposite. For example, from Wikipedia[1]: > Between 1602 and 1796 the VOC sent almost a million Europeans to work in the Asia trade on 4,785 ships, and netted for their efforts more than 2.5 million tons of Asian trade goods. By contrast, the rest of Europe combined sent only 882,412 people…

Hm, not offhand, but one reason for the discrepancy may be the way Indian trade is counted versus trade with other parts of Asia (both companies did trade outside the Indian subcontinent as well). Furthermore, the Dutch company was much more organized in its earliest days, being the first publicly traded company, so it's possible that the British company reports are underestimated, depending on the timeframe we're talking about .

I'd have to go back and check, though; I'm not certain.

Re: The East India Company, the original corporate raiders

#40

Post by guelo »

rmdundon wrote: post #26
baursak wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crimes of Britain is pretty informative Twitter account on this topic. Here's a sample of a lot more recent British history: https://twitter.com/crimesofbrits/status/905035282046742528

Interesting. However, when anything, such as that video, mentions "zionism", that automatically triggers my anti-Semite radar.

All colonialism can be criticized except zionism?
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