East India Company

by Brian Gardner

For over 200 years the East India Company, a joint-stock corporation of London traders with shares which were daily bought and sold on the Exchange, functioned as the de facto government of India, exercising sovereignty over some 250,000,000 people. Gardner (The African Dream, 1970) traces the Company's history from the 1609 voyage of its first envoy, William Hawkins, to the carnage of the Sepoy Mutiny, in the wake of which India was finally made a Crown colony. In his hands it's a tale of self-justifying imperialism -- another rehash of the ever popular myth of how the British blundered into Empire while pursuing only peaceful pounds and shillings. The long line of Governor Generals who administered India following the ouster of the Dutch and the French are endowed by the noblest of Kiplingesque virtues: ""lt was duty, and duty alone, which spurred him on,"" writes Gardner of Cornwallis; and the same goes for Warren Hastings, Richard Wellesley, Bentinck, and the rest. Under their self