The Governor and the Princess

Abstract

Although the British East India Company looms large in history, those who study its trajectory understand that it wasn’t so much a company as an epic character, with all the heroic hubris and high drama of a Lear, an Odysseus, or a David turned Goliath. The company started with a small a group of London speculators in 1600, but in less than two hundred years it had transformed into a corporate empire and is the prototype for today’s global capitalism. At its peak in the late eighteenth century, the East India Company ruled over a fifth of the world’s people, generated a revenue greater than the whole of Britain, and commanded a private army a quarter of a million strong.¹ Everyone from the upper and middle classes knew someone who served in the company, and many families had sons, brothers, husbands, and/or fathers who worked as clerks, soldiers, sailors, and traders. Everyone consumed company-traded goods, transporting Eastern commodities in their blood.² In many ways, the East India Company defined what it meant to be British.