The East India Company came here as a trader and ended up owning the country.
The parallels between the East India Company and today's state-owned firms are not exact, to be sure.
The East India Company controlled a standing army of some 200, 000 men, more than most European states.
The East India Company was a microcosm of this uncertainty half military, half commercial, a state within a state.
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In 1600, Queen Elizabeth I granted a charter to the "company of merchants of London trading to the East Indies" -- the East India Company.
When Kidd's activities in the East Indies, as it was then known, threatened the East India Company's business interests, they secured his downfall, said Wareham.
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The army, navy and the East India Company were the main routes out, with the brothers and sometimes their wives and partners covering huge distances.
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Sailors from the Indian subcontinent, some of them from the region that is now Bangladesh, were recruited by the East India Company from the early 18th century.
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The finance minister, Amit Mitra, an economist and former boss of India's main business lobby, stands in an office in Writers' Building, once used by the East India Company.
It said a relationship of suspicion and unease dates back to the days of the East India Company which, by 1830 "had become a government in all but name".
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The uprising was ruthlessly put down, but the shock it provoked in London brought about the dissolution of the East India Company and the establishment of the British Raj.
Before that, the colonising of America and the gradual takeover of India by the East India Company were chiefly commercial projects that were dependent on private capital and private risk.
In the heyday of the East India Company, the single biggest cause of death of the company's employees was not mad dogs or scorpions, but the familiar drug of alcohol (aggravated by bad diet and lack of exercise).
"If abuse of power, lying in court, withholding evidence, bribing trial witnesses and generally rigging a trial are evidence of corruption, then the East India Company -- together with the Admiralty -- were as corrupt as they come, " concluded Konstam.
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"After he attacked an Armenian merchant ship, the East India Company pulled strings to have him arrested on the grounds that it was not a legitimate target for a privateer -- even though it was sailing under a French pass, " he explained.
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The British Crown consequently took control of India from the East India Company and reorganized the government to address many of the tensions that led to the rebellion, which included granting greater religious tolerance and integrating Indian members of the higher castes into local governments.
Although the East India Company flourished a very long time ago, in a very different world, its growth, longevity and demise have lessons for those who run today's state companies and debate their future, lessons about the benefits of linking a company's interests to a nation's and the dangers of doing so.
Probably unknown to Kidd, however, was that his backers were rivals of the powerful East India Company, the ruthless multinational corporation that exported exotic goods from the Indian sub-continent.
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Ever since the British East India Company began exploiting India's riches, India has feared business development--especially foreign business development.
It was actually a means of keeping the East India Tea Company in business by limiting the source of tea to the colonies.
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Americans regularly brewed Twinning's tea for a while in the 1700's, but then, in 1773, the British government passed the Tea Act, a measure designed to give an advantage to the British East India Company.
Throw together all the output from Hollywood and Silicon Valley to Wall Street and Tin Pan Alley, and you have a commercial empire that would have been the envy of the British East India Company or Cecil Rhodes.
It was the Dutch, nearly a century later, starting in 1598, who wrote the very first chapters, introducing sugar cane, importing the first slaves, and giving the island the name by which we know it today, Mauritius, after a wealthy shareholder of the Dutch East India Company.
The Kennemerland, a Dutch East India Company merchant ship that was outward bound from Holland to the East Indies.
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