Power and Betrayal: Rise and Fall of the East India Company
Reading Time: 23 minutes The East India Company started as a commercial enterprise but became something much greater: a sovereign power. It raised armies, signed treaties, collected taxes, and waged war across the Indian Ocean world. It has few equals in human history for a cautionary tale of corporate power run amok: a corporation founded to make money grew adept at wielding violence, law, and politics to extract profits—and often did so beyond the control of governments.
At the heart of the Company’s history is a cycle of capital, war, and betrayal. Agreements with local rulers turned into annexations. Trade wars like the Indian wars and Opium Wars turned merchants into mercenaries. But the same traits that allowed the Company to grow made it vulnerable to rot: corruption, violent extraction, and backstabbing partners sparked rebellions and revolution.
The Corporate Empire Model
A chartered company was a business authorized to perform the functions of government. The charter issued by parliament or a monarch could grant monopolies over trade routes or territories, the authority to construct forts and sign treaties, and, if necessary, the power to wage war. That mattered because it extended the priorities of commerce into the toolbox of statecraft. Competition could be eliminated by force of law, and rivals treated like criminals rather than competition. Armed with a charter, businesses became politicized.
A classic examplethe VOC—the Dutch East India Company. Established in 1602, it built vessels, fortified ports, and an administrative bureaucracy across Asia all to protect its trade. The company didn’t just sell spices—it stole markets and destroyed competitors. When the British East India Company arrived on the scene, it learned from Dutch successes and failures. Monopoly contracts could be enforced with cannons and marching soldiers as much as with market share and negotiation.
The Hudson’s Bay Company demonstrates this corporate model at work in North America. Created by royal charter in 1670, the company enjoyed rights over the entire Hudson Bay watershed. It acted like a private government over hundreds of thousands of square miles. It constructed trading posts and administered relations with dozens of Indigenous nations. And just as it had in the Indian Ocean world, the company’s monopoly was intertwined with military force. Warfare in North America might look different, but the logic was the same: monopoly and empire went hand-in-hand.
And monopolies drove everything. If a company could corner the market on any particular good—tea, silk, spices, beaver pelts—it could charge any price it wanted and crack down on “illegal” competitors. Monopolies also made war likely. They stole customers from locals and enraged anyone who tried to bypass the company to trade directly. Companies built forts to protect their warehouses and hired soldiers to enforce a monopoly at the point of a sword.
That’s when the lines between business and government began to blur. A fort was simultaneously a warehouse, a courthouse, and a barracks. A private army served as “security” but also foreign policy. Given time, chartered companies learned to require control over land to control trade, and control over people to control land. All of this—the logic of corporate empire—made violence bureaucratic and conquest look like accounting.
From Traders to Power Brokers
The East India Company arrived on India’s shores as a trader, and its first strongholds were mercantile and maritime. Company buildings sprouted up in Surat before moving inland toward Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta – wherever ships could dock, warehouses could store goods, and wealth could be tallied. These enclaves were built to be centers of commerce, not seats of power. But when you put down permanent roots, you take on local politics, local rivalries, and local insecurity as well.
Early on, the East India Company had just one mandate: to maximize profit by buying Indian goods cheaply and selling them at higher prices elsewhere. In order to do that, you need Indian princes to grant you permission to trade, protect your merchants, and offer reasonable terms on customs and taxes. The East India Company made bargains for all these things. But bargains are transactions of advantage, and they rarely remain evenhanded for long. One foreign trader’s concession comes at the expense of another’s privilege, and any dispute over duties can become a political contest of wills.
Indian rulers grew weaker under Mughal rule in certain parts of India and began vying with one another for dominance. The Company’s “trade problem” devolved into a “security problem.” Warehouses needed guarding, and forts attracted guards who turned into soldiers. Warships loaded with commodities began to resemble moving artillery batteries. Armed merchants protected their warehouses by force because it was often the easiest way to win a commercial dispute when judges were fallible, and trade competitors were weaponizing merchants against each other.
The Company even found it could become a power broker among Indian rulers. Lend a king money? We can send him extra troops. Should his father decide to retire, support his claim? Commerce itself became linked with statecraft.
A friendly ruler could offer better tax rates and access to more markets. An unfriendly ruler could jeopardize the Company’s presence altogether. One concession at a time, the Company found commercial incentives leading it to make political choices.
By the time it had put down significant roots in Calcutta and elsewhere, the East India Company was no longer simply participating in Indian commerce. It was participating in Indian governance, using “protecting” warehouses as a pretext for territorial control. These turns toward coercion didn’t happen because anyone decided they should. They happened bargain by bargain, crisis by crisis, escalation by messy escalation until the Company found itself governing territory in order to defend profits it used to simply earn.
The First Great Betrayal: Plassey 1757
India had many rich provinces, but Bengal was among the wealthiest in the Indian Ocean world by the mid-eighteenth century. It produced vast quantities of textiles; traded prolifically by river; and generated colossal land revenues. Control of Bengal could change the balance of power in Hindustan. But it was also politically fluid terrain. The Mughal Empire was crumbling. Factions maneuvered against each other at court. Wealthy intermediaries could make deals with gold and promises. Political fortunes could turn in response. Amid this flux, a commercially motivated trading company could tip the scales simply by throwing its weight behind a faction.
Company officials first arrived in Bengal to negotiate predictable conditions for trade. Stability soon gave way to conflict. Arguments over customs duties, fortifications, and private trade poisoned relations with Siraj ud-Daulah, the Nawab of Bengal. Both sides felt the other was exceeding their authority. Bengal was, however, too rich a market to abandon, and Company officials began to view political intrigue as a resource to be tapped.
The East India Company developed assets within Bengal’s ruling establishment. It looked for individuals who could connect it to the army and to court politics: men who might be tempted by the promise of power, profit, and position. Of these men, the most significant was Mir Jafar, the commander-in-chief of the Nawab’s army. Promises of compensation swayed him to plot against Siraj ud-Daulah, ensuring that what became known as the Battle of Plassey was a foregone conclusion.
On the morning of June 23, 1757, East India Company forces engaged Siraj ud-Daulah’s army at Plassey. Though outnumbered, the Nawab technically had the forces to win. But if you half-fight a battle, you invite defeat. Many of Mir Jafar’s troops refused to fight, and the Nawab’s command structure broke down. Bengal fell not with a struggle, but a schemed defection.
The Company now had Bengal at its disposal. Siraj ud-Daulah’s defeat demolished his reputation. He attempted to flee and was captured and killed a few days later. Plassey demonstrated the Company’s potential to influence succession and policy by exploiting existing fault lines. They had paid off short-term allies to defeat Bengal’s leader and won the leverage that came with it. Plassey was thus a turning point in Company history because it treated political manipulation as just another instrument of imperial control.
Soon it did more than trade in Bengal: it began to dictate terms. The Company’s access to revenue, appointments, and military might grew exponentially. Control of Bengal’s state apparatus became more important than control of a single city’s factories or fortifications. Bengal was not “opened” at Plassey because resources were suddenly available to the Company. It was opened because Company officials had found a new recipe for victory: they did not need to conquer Bengal to gain control of it.
By working with corruption, negotiating alliances, and strategically waging force, the Company used trade as leverage and turned leverage into political domination. As such, Plassey was not only a battle that laid the foundations of Company rule. It was an idea—a paradigm—that would be refined over the next century as the Company began its slow course toward becoming ruler.
The Case of Mir Jafar Betrayed After His “Reward”
Mir Jafar was installed on the throne of Bengal, but he was an East India Company-backed king who owed his position to contract rather than consensus. Under the terms of that agreement, the Company provided support in exchange for gifts, privileges, and influence. Mir Jafar’s court was full of political rivals from the start, but his position was additionally compromised by his lack of legitimacy.
Financial considerations were the first issue. As one summary of events put it, Mir Jafar “was surprised to find the treasure very small,” but he attempted to keep his word and make payments to the British. Stress naturally arose from meeting the Company’s demands without undermining the state’s ability to pay. When a ruler must pay his creditors before he funds his position’s stability, confidence in his leadership erodes quickly.
Supporting the terms of his agreement with the Company meant that they soon had greater say over official appointments, trade privileges, and revenue collection. Mir Jafar was at once a pawn in his own court and a source of profit to satisfy. Even members of his own camp who had helped him reach his new heights no longer respected the Nawab as an independent ruler. If he couldn’t serve their interests, they would find someone who could.
That’s when the idea of “betrayal” starts to reverse course. Mir Jafar was gifted sovereignty by the Company; when he could not or would not play by their rules, the terms of his installation were retroactively changed. Seeking foreign support to balance the British was portrayed as an act of betrayal and used to justify disposing of him altogether.
The cold, practical takeaway was this: if the Company could install a man of their choosing as Nawab, they could unseat him when convenient. In 1760, Company officials compelled Mir Jafar to cede the throne to his son-in-law, Mir Qasim. Mir Qasim was viewed as a better choice to keep the contract favorable. The message for elites in Bengal was also clear: the position of Nawab was now a bargaining chip, and real power lay in securing favor with the Company.
Mir Jafar’s replacement also exposed another feature of Company rule. They didn’t need to formally annex a territory to dictate its leadership. They only needed control over the forces of money, military might, and official recognition. Granting these things to a puppet ruler allowed the Company to install, meddle, and overthrow at their leisure.
The East India Company’s behavior had begun to trend toward authoritarianism in other ways. Robert Clive infamously addressed Parliament, saying, “Mr. Chairman, at this moment I stand astonished at my own moderation!” He was speaking of his share of the spoils from Bengal, but the attitude rings true for how Company officials saw their right to take anything at all. By that way of thinking, Mir Jafar’s “reward” was designed to feel temporary from the start.
Betrayal of Mir Qasim and the Road to Wider War
Mir Qasim was installed as Bengal’s “substitute” Nawab when the East India Company determined Mir Jafar was expendable. Framed as a change for administrative efficiency, the rationale could not have been clearer: the Nawabship was going to be used as a tool of Company policy. Mir Qasim knew when he took power that his seat was secured by foreign support, but he wanted to govern as a Nawab and not as a Company contractor.
Mir Qasim initially moved to increase Bengal’s revenue and centralize administration. He wanted a more reliable income from provincial officials. To achieve this, he pushed on two fronts that directly impacted the East India Company’s rights in Bengal. Company servants had been given extensive trading rights, often allowing them to forgo duties that taxed Indian merchants. Bengal lost revenue from taxes that the Company didn’t pay.
Mir Qasim tried to tax the Company’s traders, equalizing the trade field. Company officials insisted these were not negotiable privileges, but entitlements they had earned through politics. The issue was presented as a financial loophole, but was actually about authority – who had the right to dictate economic policy within Bengal.
Increasing tensions between Mir Qasim and the Company officials eventually led to outright conflict. The Company was not going to accept a Nawab who would tell them how to conduct business, and Mir Qasim would not maintain the status quo that kept the wealthiest traders beyond the state’s power. Sabotage, retaliatory raids, and political intrigue turned into a full-scale war. The Company would characterize their campaign as restoring trade and stability to Bengal, while Mir Qasim viewed it as an attack on his rule.
When Mir Qasim became expendable, the Company employed the same solution it had already tried once before: deposing him. With the support of their army, the Company installed the old Mir Jafar on the throne. It didn’t matter that Mir Jafar was weak or had already been proven ineffective. All that mattered was that he would not challenge the Company’s decisions. Mir Jafar’s return to power would not restore order; it would remind everyone at court that the Company could change the Nawab at will.
War also spread outside of Bengal. The conflict escalated existing tensions outside of the Company’s influence, drawing in old rivals and alliances. The Bengal war marked the start of the Company’s transformation from traders to warlords. They now had a reason and an excuse to return to northern India with armies. What started as a battle over trade rights ended in military footholds across India.
The ultimate impact of the conflict would be a deeper reliance on military force by the Company. The Company learned that threats and violence could accomplish what politics and diplomacy could not, and that control of revenue was more important than trade itself. Indian rulers also learned that their sovereignties could be threatened without direct military action – through political “agreements”, replacement of rulers who stepped out of line, and economic pressure enforced by armed men. The years after Mir Qasim’s defeat would see the Company’s rule become less like a business enterprise and more like its own army-state.
Company Rule as Extraction System
The Company behaved like a revenue state first and a trading partner second after Bengal. It stopped aiming primarily at purchasing goods; it aimed to control the cash they made possible. Taxes on land and customs became pillars of power. Whoever could access revenue could pay soldiers, prop up friends, and weaken enemies. Profit depended not just on successful voyages across the sea, but on extracting regular income from land.
Company officials tried to make revenue collection as predictable, enforceable, and large enough to fund expansion. Assessments had to cover civilian employees’ salaries, military expansion, and any other associated revenues. When shortfalls occurred, officials leaned on subordinate intermediaries and village elites to fill the gap. In many districts, tax rates stayed the same even if harvests plummeted. The system externalized risk to cultivators while insulating the Company’s treasury from local conditions.
Monopoly furthered this extraction. The East India Company defended its privileges on staple goods and trade routes, and it treated any competition as a crime against civility. Private trade by Company servants often became official policy because those who administered rules were the same ones who broke them for profit. The economy that sprouted from this had prices and access dictated by power rather than negotiation.
Such is the background for “drain” politics. Money left India through salaries, private remittances, dividend payouts, and imports purchased by Indians but shipped back to Britain. Sure, Indian revenues financed governance and warfare. But a significant portion exited the country as profit or “home charges.” Critics of the Raj later lambasted this outflow for starving India of investment and keeping too many poor, even as trade volumes grew large.
Company officials staffed this revenue machine with bureaucrats. They required surveyors, accountants, tax collectors, and clerks to map territory, measure production, and compel obedience through paperwork. Paper became power. A neighborhood could be reduced to lines in a ledger. A disagreement over payment could become a matter for the courts. Company administration was no longer peripheral to trade. It was foundational to their rule.
If revenue and bureaucracy expanded control, so did the local courts. The Company instituted judicial structures to keep things “orderly.” At the same time, courts protected Company property and allowed colonial officials to monitor subjects. Contract, debt, and property laws were all used to establish “certainty.” But whose certainty? Colonial courts usually favored the party that could pay bribes, produce documentation, or had recommendations from allies. For the general population, justice was often perceived as slow-moving, costly, and hostile.
The East India Company squeezed merchants, peasants, and elites in different ways. Merchants faced the weight of privileged Company trade and arbitrary shifts in governance. Peasants faced high taxes, indebtedness, and land loss when unable to pay. Elites who mediated power between communities were now forced to negotiate with Company officials (or lose status). Company rule may have looked tidy on map sheets, but it was often Extractive bargaining power from Indian society and into a state bent on profit.
Internal Betrayals and Corruption
The Company presented itself as an efficient monopoly. But its most significant hemorrhaging was self-inflicted. “Rogue traders” conducted private business through Company vessels, passes, and contacts. They purchased and sold goods through unlicensed channels, avoided duties, and flouted the monopoly with impunity. If one set of hands attached to a Company ship far away could make the bureaucratic handbook into a freelance opportunity, many would.
Private enrichment became both a boast and a recruiting poster. Men traveled to India poor as junior clerks and returned rich as “nabobs” sustained by gifts, commissions, and trade “for private account.” Bribery didn’t always hide behind curtains. It could be justified as custom, gratitude, or political exigency. Once currency moved through channels of personal relations, enforcement of rules grew arbitrary and easily bent.
Illicit side dealing could also flourish because Company officials sat at both ends of the negotiation table. The same men who negotiated trading contracts could artificially inflate or deflate prices. The same men who collected taxes could excuse any individual from paying. Put simply, corruption was power. With a bribe, one could ensure protection or permits, favorable judicial decisions, or monopoly gifts masquerading as policy.
Company directors in London could not micromanage their agents’ activities in India. Information traveled slowly; months would pass between instructions sent and their resultant actions. And crises arose in India that needed immediate adjudication. That gap gave Company men in India cover to justify acts of self-interest as necessary. Scandals came to light too late. Compiled into narratively convenient heaps of paper by now-rich offenders who could pay lawyers and allies.
War as Business: The East India Company on the Battlefield
War was never an “emergency” for the East India Company. War was industry. Battles determined who received revenue, tariffs, and treaty negotiations. When profitability relied on predictable market access, the Company discovered it could manufacture “stability” through force much faster than diplomacy. Soon, the Company’s army would transform commercial competition into political dominance.
Campaigns in India took place across a patchwork of princely states. One year’s ally was next year’s adversary. Company support meant troops, loans, and political recognition. Diplomatic “favors” then had to be repaid—when they were not, war could be presented as a tool for defense or restoring order. The cycle repeated itself: alliance, dependence, disagreement, and then military “solution.”
Company wars in India were rarely about borders. They were about who could claim revenue and dictate succession. The Company could strike at any state that interfered with its routes or influence, and expand its reach through new treaties after victory. Wars made states indebted—through indemnities, territory loss, and “subsidiary” alliances. Soon, there would be no end to the conflicts that kept the Company “stationary” and its “partners” dependent.
Nor was the Company’s rule secure. Its army was mainly composed of Indian soldiers. These “sepoys” were commanded by Company officers and paid for with Indian revenue. This system allowed the Company a massive fighting force at a fraction of the cost of deploying British manpower.
At the same time, military labor changed the meaning of legitimacy. If ruling meant little more than funding an army, what stopped soldiers from concluding it served foreigners or corrupt interests? Loyalty is sustained by payroll, pride, and trust. Trust can break.
In 1857, it did break. Sparked by grievances over pay and promotion, fears of religious persecution, and anger at the Company’s increasing intrusion, a loose coalition of soldiers and civilians launched a bid to overthrow Company rule. A shaky authority shuddered and nearly collapsed when its Indians turned away. The revolt lingered like a doubt in regions where Company forces recovered, and the consequences of military rule could no longer be denied: if the East India Company needed an army to govern, maybe it shouldn’t be governing at all.
This irony was lost abroad. The Company’s monopolies granted profitability in Asia and connected it to empires rising far from India. Battles over opium trade terms between the Company and the Qing dynasty broke out in the First Opium War, an international conflict that turned trade, finance, and imperialism into martial capability. War made commerce something more than transactions. War made commerce an exercise in coercion backed by states.
By the century’s middle, warfare was embedded in the Company’s business model. And like any profitable venture, it exacted its toll. Further conquest opened revenue and land to profit, but each victory spawned resistance, massacre, and outrage in its wake. The Rebellion of 1857 made that contradiction collapse: the Company had established a state but lacked a nation to support it. The lesson had been learned. Soon, the Company’s days of battlefield capitalism would come to an end.
Political Backlash in Britain
Almost from the start of its rule as a territorial power, Britain feared what it had unleashed. Accounts of bribery, private wealth, and violent rule fed anxieties that an empire run for profit by shareholders was overseeing the lives of millions with insufficient oversight. Corruption was the word on everyone’s lips: the Company’s conquests in Asia appeared to produce venality at home, with members buying Members of Parliament, manipulating elections, and turning colonial profit into domestic power.
Successive rounds of parliamentary enquiry and reform tried to claw back some state control. The Regulating Act of 1773 was Parliament’s first attempt to control the way Company officials governed Bengal by centralizing the bureaucracy and creating checks on the company’s powers. It did not end corruption, but it firmly established that Britain would no longer allow the company to regulate itself. Pitt’s India Act of 1784 ramped up pressure with a government-appointed “Board of Control” to oversee all aspects of Company rule. Government officials now separated commercial activity from political governance, leaving the British state in firm control. From then on, the Company would continue to make profits, but decisions about the empire would come from London.
Questions about corruption and greed became theatre with the impeachment trial of Warren Hastings, Bengal’s first Governor-General. Edmund Burke, who managed Hastings’ impeachment, understood the issues at stake were constitutional: “the East India Company has not arbitrary power to give him,” he declared. Empire could not be an excuse for tyranny. Hastings’ impeachment trial captured the public imagination and made accountability, rather than efficiency, the paramount critique of Company rule.
The debates were economic as well as moral. The East India Company’s proponents argued that its trade and revenues made Britain wealthy and powerful around the world. Critics highlighted the instability endemic to monopoly and extraction. Bribery scandals and international conflicts like the opium wars suggested that private enrichment came at public expense. Reform began to mean reducing Company privileges, opening Indian trade to British competition, and treating India as the nation’s responsibility rather than a source of revenue.
Those arguments culminated in the Company’s loss of legitimacy after the Indian uprising of 1857. Parliament passed the Government of India Act of 1858, which transferred rule of India from the Company to the Crown. In less than sixty years of territorial control, Britain had gone from creating the Company to dissolving it in favor of state control. By the mid-nineteenth century, Britain had issued its verdict: a corporation could trade, but it could not safely rule an empire.
The Fall and Transfer of Power
The 1857 military resistance in India exposed many of the weaknesses in the East India Company’s strategy. Conflict made apparent how rapidly power could evaporate if people in army camps, provincial towns, and courts of justice ceased to accept the Company as authority. In places where British power was restored, it was an extraordinarily costly exercise in lives and money, exacting a tremendous political toll on the Company’s reputation. Violence may have prolonged Company rule in certain territories, but by the close of the rebellion, the Company appeared less like a sovereign ruler and more like an unsustainable and hazardous venture, with no further excuse for its continuation.
In London, these realities cemented sentiments that had been brewing for years, as evidenced by parliamentary investigations and debates into the Company’s conduct. Parliament had increased its scrutiny and partial control over the Company since the 1770s, but the events of 1857 made this halfway form of governance feel insecure. If running the Indian territories required a standing army, a massive revenue infrastructure, and everyday decisions of imperial discretion, then Britain could not outsource those duties to a corporate body. Violence in India provided Parliament the excuse it needed to abolish the Company: failure was no longer a corporate shortcoming but an imperial crisis.
1858 marked the official transfer of sovereignty from the Company to the Crown. The company rule did not end suddenly; the Company instead relinquished its governing authority. In the new regimen, India would be administered by officials who received directives from the government in London and who were politically accountable to Parliament. Power would be consolidated in the imperial bureaucracy: authority would be vested in the offices of the British Raj. Politically, corporate sovereignty had been terminated.
The Crown was anxious to signify what the empire would not look like going forward. Queen Victoria’s 1858 Proclamation declared all Indians would enjoy “the equal protection of the law” and their religion would be protected. This was no doubt lip service, but it had a symbolic value in reassuring subjects and attempting to restore faith in the government by promising that sovereignty would not be exercised for corporate profit.
Military, fiscal, and administrative systems did not begin anew with the Raj. Logistically, it would have been impossible to replace the institutions that helped constitute the Company’s rule: offices of revenue, district collectors, judicial procedure, calendars, statistics, and record-keeping. Even the maps remained. Taxpaying expectations continued, and with it, many of the same categories that divided people lived under British rule. This was perhaps most apparent in land and revenue relations.
Peasants and landlords likely felt the Raj’s presence most directly in its continuation of preexisting forms of revenue extraction. Relationships between the local elite and the collection of revenue, as well as plans to make rural society knowable to officials, persisted after 1858 (albeit under different names). It was still the state’s job to pry money from the countryside.
The logic of the military did too, though it was reregulated after 1857. Patterns of recruitment, command, and access to weapons would be altered to attempt to limit violence. But if 1857 exposed India’s financial and martial vulnerability as a colony, the British Raj never wavered from governing with a large military funded by Indian revenues. The company rule ended because it had governed as a fiscal-military state without political constraint. The Raj inherited its apparatus and then set out to govern more effectively through domestic politics.
Legacy Power and Betrayal as a Template
The East India Company helped pioneer a new form of imperialism based on private capital and public force. The chartered company model demonstrated the power of empire by contract, monopoly, and violence at a time when representative democracy was not yet equipped to regulate it. This pattern of elite-driven accumulation spread globally for a reason: where it functioned, everyone benefited. Investors accrued capital. States expanded influence. Societies elsewhere paid the cost.
But while the Company’s history has international relevance, it also contains a warning rooted in its corporate culture. When trade monopolies are allowed to operate their own courts and militias, violence becomes a resource for profit, not a failure of negotiation. “Security” starts to merge with conquest. That is why Checks and Balances matter: an extractive system incentivizes predation, grows rapidly, but also encounters resistance, scandal, and reform movements powerful enough to destabilize the status quo.
Reasons like these are why Plassey lives on—not just as a battle but as a synonym for treason. It illustrates the strategy of Bangladesh’s 1757 revolt in a single scene. The Company did not conquer Bengal through commerce and colonization alone. It secured the territory by ensuring it had allies within the opposition. After Plassey granted control of the region, Delhi rewrote the political rules to legalize its newfound client network. Rule by transaction—buying up insiders, turning them into rent-seekers, and declaring the whole arrangement “legitimate”—can take hold wherever elites hold access to public authority.
At its peak, the Company held sway over the opinions above. If that power were concentrated today, these debates would be about private markets taking control of the state. Whatever we call it, history suggests that the chaos produced by corporate domination will find a birthplace somewhere. That is why studying monopolies like the East India Company remains relevant: its triumph was built on “market logic” wielded as political power. The lesson of its demise: when institutions generate wealth faster than they can be controlled, the people who pay the price are never the ones sitting at the tables of power.
