East India Company

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

When Elizabeth I chartered the East India Company on the last day of 1600, she licensed a group of London merchants to trade with Asia, nothing more. William Dalrymple's account of the Company's rise, The Anarchy, traces how a joint-stock trading concern with a few armed merchant ships became, within two centuries, the effective ruler of most of the Indian subcontinent, governing more people than Britain itself and answering, in practice, to its own shareholders and directors before it answered to the Crown. The turning point was less a plan than an opportunity seized amid Mughal decline: Robert Clive's victory at the 1757 Battle of Plassey delivered the Company's control of Bengal's revenues, and the Company converted a trading privilege into a taxing power almost overnight, using Indian tax income to fund further conquest. What followed was a private company running an army larger than most European states, appointing governors, waging wars, and leaving famine-strained Bengal to pay for London dividends, a scale of corporate rule that alarmed even its own government, which imposed growing oversight through the 1773 Regulating Act and 1784 India Act. The Company outlived neither the scandal of its power nor the shock of the 1857 Indian Rebellion, after which the British Crown dissolved its rule and took India directly under its own administration in 1858, closing one of history's clearest cases of a corporation becoming a state.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

By the late eighteenth century the East India Company fielded an army of some 200,000 men, larger than the standing army of Britain itself and organized into three presidency armies, Bengal, Madras and Bombay, each recruiting overwhelmingly from Indian soldiers, sepoys, under a comparatively thin layer of British officers. This was not a national force answering to Parliament but the private security arm of a commercial enterprise, raised, paid and directed to protect the Company's trade, extend the Company's revenue, and, increasingly, to fight the Company's wars of conquest against Indian states, from Mysore to the Maratha Confederacy to the Sikh Empire. Encyclopaedia Britannica's account of the Company notes how thoroughly this arrangement blurred the line between commerce and sovereignty: a body accountable to shareholders in London was, in practical terms, making war and peace across an entire subcontinent. The arrangement finally broke in 1857, when grievances among the Company's own sepoys, over pay, promotion, and rumors that new cartridges were greased with cow and pig fat offensive to Hindu and Muslim soldiers alike, ignited the Indian Rebellion. The British government answered the uprising by abolishing Company rule outright in 1858, absorbing its army and administration directly into the Crown and closing the unusual chapter of a corporation maintaining an army that could conquer, and nearly lose, an empire.