The East India Company: The First Corporate Empire And Its Long Shadow
When the Trinity Longroom Hub hosted the Edmund Burke Lecture, the focus wasn’t nostalgia or polite history. It was a straight look at how one private corporation — the East India Company — reshaped India and, in many ways, reshaped the modern world. Historian William Dalrymple didn’t waste time sugar-coating anything. He went right into the heart of the matter: how a small trading venture from 1599 grew into the most powerful and dangerous corporation in history.
A Company That Became a Conqueror
The East India Company began as a modest trading outfit looking for pepper and textiles. Within a century, it wasn’t just trading. It was conquering. It built forts, raised armies, toppled kingdoms, and slowly replaced the Mughal Empire’s authority across huge parts of the subcontinent.
Dalrymple reminds us that the Company was never driven by any “civilising mission.” It had one motive: maximise profit for its shareholders. Whatever stood in the way of profit — a king, a village, a famine — was brushed aside. India’s treasures started moving to collections in Ireland, Scotland, and England because for the Company, “loot” wasn’t a crime, it was an operating model.
The Blueprint For Modern Corporations
1599 is not just another date. It marks the birth of an idea: a joint-stock corporation with limited liability, built to operate across continents. Dalrymple stresses that the Company’s corporate structure became the prototype for today’s multinationals — vast entities that can influence governments, escape punishment, and operate with shocking autonomy.
It’s no surprise that many of the behaviours we see in modern corporate giants — aggressive expansion, regulatory capture, political lobbying — have eerie parallels in the East India Company’s playbook.
Exploiting a Power Vacuum
After Aurangzeb’s death in 1707, the Mughal Empire fractured. The Company saw opportunity. With a private army that eventually became more sophisticated than most European state forces, it filled the vacuum. And it used that power ruthlessly.
Robert Clive stands out in the lecture: a military genius, but also an insider trader and a master manipulator. His victory at the Battle of Plassey wasn’t heroic warfare — it was bribery, backroom deals, and pure corporate greed dressed up as empire-building. Clive’s actions didn’t just expand territory; they rewired India’s economy in favour of a private company headquartered thousands of kilometres away.
Profit Over People: Bengal Famine 1772
One of the most chilling parts of Dalrymple’s lecture is the Bengal famine. Even as people starved, the Company continued squeezing taxes. There was no governance, no accountability, no moral compass — only quarterly returns. The result was mass starvation on a scale that should permanently shame any system that allowed it.
The Beginning of the End
By 1772, the Company collapsed under its own corruption. Bankrupt. Rotten from inside. Parliament was forced to step in. By 1774, the British state took a majority stake, pulling the Company into the machinery of government. What followed was the slow merging of corporate power with imperial power — a merger whose effects would shape the next two centuries.
This is where Edmund Burke enters the scene. He tried to prosecute Warren Hastings for the crimes of empire. Dalrymple argues Burke understood the nature of the beast — a corporation without ethics — but he picked the wrong man. Hastings wasn’t innocent, but the system itself was the real culprit.
Why This History Still Matters
Dalrymple closes with a warning that is painfully relevant today:
“Corporations have neither bodies to be punished nor souls to be condemned.”
The East India Company may be gone, but the model it invented thrives everywhere. Corporations that are richer than many countries. Corporations that lobby governments. Corporations that escape punishment while their decisions destroy lives.
The world didn’t just inherit technology, trade, and legal systems from that era. It also inherited a dangerous blueprint — one that we are still struggling to regulate.
Understanding the East India Company isn’t about revisiting colonial history for sentiment. It’s about recognising how corporate power, left unchecked, can behave exactly like a state — or worse, like an empire. And India witnessed the consequences first-hand.