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The Corporation That Changed the World

How the East India Company Shaped the Modern Multinational

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The Corporation That Changed the World

By: Nick Robins
Narrated by: Simon Barber
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About this listen

The English East India Company was the mother of the modern multinational. Its trading empire encircled the globe, importing Asian luxuries such as spices, textiles, and teas. But it also conquered much of India with its private army and broke open China's markets with opium. The Company's practices shocked its contemporaries and still reverberate today.

The Corporation That Changed the World is the first book to reveal the Company's enduring legacy as a corporation. This expanded edition explores how the four forces of scale, technology, finance, and regulation drove its spectacular rise and fall. For decades, the Company was simply too big to fail, and stock market bubbles, famines, drug-running, and even duels between rival executives are to be found in this new account.

For Robins, the Company's story provides vital lessons on both the role of corporations in world history and the steps required to make global business accountable today.

©2012 Nick Robins (P)2017 Nick Robins Asia Economic History Economics Europe Great Britain India South Asia England Capitalism China Business Socialism Taxation

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All stars
Most relevant  
Excellent narration.

Detailed, well researched and well presented. The author understands economic consequences. He presents actions and reactions, leaving the reader generally agreeing that they naturally flow as cause and effect. Although his comment that the 5% UK GDP increase due to abuse of monopoly in India caused the Industrial Revolution was a bit much.

This long and compelling book details the abuse of monopoly power and shows that the situation grew significantly worse once the East India Company’s trading function was replaced by a governing administrative function.

Following his detailed evidence which clearly shows:
Don’t grant monopolies
Don’t give privileged tariffs
Don’t use force to impose trade agreements,

The author perplexingly concludes the opposite in his final chapter. He wants more Govt, more interference in the market, more globalisation.

It is a tribute to this author that his authoritarian outlook was not obvious until the final chapter. The book is well worth reading.

Schizophrenic but well worth reading

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An sharply written, beautifully read tale of greed, pride, and violence that has transformed the history of the world.

A gripping and powerful tale

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fair and unbiased history of the world's first mega corp and how it affected east west relations

enlightening

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Focus of this good book is on the corporate affairs of the EIC, very much a London basis. It covers this very well though matters such as stock price and dividends and board structure seemed to be covered incessantly rather than once off and there was a lack of any local focus such as the life of a clerk in London and Calcutta or how weaving was organised or the journey from tea plantation to cup. The few anecdotes about India were repetitive - instances of hand mutilation to stop weaving capabilities, that their pay went down (never up) but gave no indication of normality rather than exceptional circs. So , good for what it covered - I did finish it - but felt it missed a lot it could have covered. Did not like the performance much, rather robotic akin to computer voice and with treatment of breaks, headings, but it was clearly read. I needed to speed it up a bit

focus on corporate

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I didn't know much about the East India Company before making this purchase and it was a pleasant surprise to discover that it delivers on two levels; firstly as a gripping piece of history and secondly as an analysis of how global corporations can turn rotten. The story of "John Company" is a swashbuckling roller-coaster ride which starts in 1600 with Elizabeth the first's blessing for a company of trader/pirates. And despite the highly respectable facade which the company maintained in England Robins makes a compelling case that for the next 350 years or so they remained in the drug trafficking and extortion business with trade in exotic commodities like tea and precious gems maintained as a respectable if not particularly profitable sideline. The author gives us an exciting narrative in which rakish ne'er do wells go to exotic locations, do dreadful deeds and return with a mountain of cash overcoming, along the way, every obstacle put in their path. Just as a story it's great stuff although what the company actually got up to in India and China left me feeling that they were basically a gang of brutal narco-terrorists.

Robins is also interested in the way the company was run, how these governance arrangements effectively created a doomsday effect which meant that irrespective of the founders' ambitions to make money through mutually beneficial trade the EIC would ultimately turn corrupt in the search for larger and larger profits. Finally he extrapolates those insights into some thought provoking conclusions about our current world of globalization and multi-national corporations.

It's clear that an enormous amount of research went into it but the writing is so good that this was a very easy listen and the narrator helped with a clear, characterful performance. It'll be a shock if I listen to a better history book this year.



Fascinating

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Yeah this book has been a fucking roller coaster both emotionally and mentally. It’s very appropriate for the modern day as there are a lot of insights that can be applied to modern businesses.

Excellent

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A thorough, intelligent and engaging exploration into the most influential company the world has ever seen.

The book charts the history the company directly made (the colonisation of India, the fashions for Indian fabrics and Chinese tea, the first mega corporate bailouts and the opium wars of the 19th C) and was also the history it helped make inadvertently (the American revolution with it’s tea imports, the inclusion of India into the empire the philosophy of Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, James and JS Mill and Karl Marx).

It finishes, as it starts, with a plea that the EIC’s* history is better remembered. It’s erasure from London history via plaques, statues and museums, the author calls ‘suspicious’ and he is right. We are living in an age of a culture war where the huge damage these institutions did and the pain they caused is being deliberately ignored. Nick Robins concludes with lessons that can be learned from the EIC - but only if we wish to learn them.

* EIC - East India Company

Not a book but a treatise!

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Outstanding documentation of the East India Company and its legacy and social and political effects with a fantastic narrator. I'd fully recommend this for anyone, expert or not.

Outstanding

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