On This Day in History: December 31
The British East India Company
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Libertarians. These brainless invertebrates make me want to start swearing like a mom with a red-wine hangover walking barefoot through a LEGO-filled living room. “Oh, the free market will regulate itself.” Yeah fucking bullshit. If you permit capitalism to run amok, it sure as shit will, and the British East India Company was the epitome of greed gone fucking bugshit bonkers, trafficking in human misery.
--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: December 31, 1600--
Formed on New Year’s Eve, 1600, the British East India Company grew to become the most powerful company the world has ever known. How did they do it? Ruthlessly violent exploitation, muthafuckas! And Queen Elizabeth I was totally behind it. She gave the English businessmen who started the company a royal charter and said go forth and conquer and exterminate and be wealthy and all that cool imperialist shit.
They sailed to India and set up shop, trading tea, spices, silk, cotton, and dyes. Sounds perfectly capitalistic and utterly above board, doesn’t it? Oh, forgot about the opium. Opium was a big one. And if you didn’t want to buy it, well, they had a big navy and army and they’d fucking make you buy it. You’ve heard of the Opium Wars? That.
Eventually they got tired of just having trading posts and decided, you know what, we should just own this place. It’s ours now. Suck it, foreigners. Oh, and pay us taxes too. They’d evolved from merchants into empire builders, taking over most of the Indian subcontinent, parts of southeast Asia, and Hong Kong. At its height it had an army numbering more than a quarter million soldiers to control its stolen lands. They also traded in enslaved people, because when you’re that fucking evil of course you do.
After almost three centuries of fuckery, the company eventually came to ruin and dissolution toward the end of the 19thcentury, not because of any moral outrage at home over the atrocities committed, but because English political and business interests realized they were getting fucked out of opportunity by the British East India Company having a monopoly.
To this day, the world’s global economic-political structure remains influenced by the actions of the British East India Company. Its toxic legacy of corporate exploitation remains ever-present.
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Well put, Mr. Fell. Read a book once called The Company. Horrible. Make ya wanna weep. The brutality and over the top sociopathy, just incredible...
Today’s liberalists call themselves conservatives. It’s how they rope in the ignorant screaming about less government. Well here you go. They just want less regulations on companies to screw everyone and become authoritarian. Honestly, don’t know why the rich can’t get enough.