By Dr. Kalim Siddiqui

This article is a deep dive into the evolution and expansion of big global corporations or Multinational Corporations, and especially the role capitalism, colonialism and imperialism played in that expansion, using the example of the British East India Company. 

I. Introduction 

The fall of the Mughal Empire had a big impact on businesses in India. The artisans were generally dependent on the patronage of ruling elites and once they lost power, their demands for luxury goods declined.  

It is important to study the evolution and expansion of big global corporations also known as Multinational Corporations (MNCs). The East India Company was established in 1600. The Company participated in international trade and exploration and operated trading posts in India. The East India Company (EIC) is among the first global companies, so it becomes more crucial to examine its growth and the state support it received during its expansion period to become the world’s most powerful global company not only in terms of revenue and resources but also as a military force. We must not be confused by its name; the East India Company was solely owned by British merchants and traders.  

Since 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union and with the end of the Cold War, the world has become a unipolar world and the United States (US) emerged as the sole leader of the world. Soon afterward, the US launched neoliberal globalisation and integration of markets, where foreign capital, trade, and financial liberalisation were seen as the leading forces to support economic growth and neoliberalism became a new mantra for success. International institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, and the World Trade Organisation (WTO) were given the task of imposing neoliberal globalisation on the developing countries, who were advised to open their doors for MNCs and foreign capital, which was supposed to help them out of the economic crisis and it was claimed that following such policies would improve people’s living conditions in the developing countries (Siddiqui, 2015). 

Under US-led neoliberal globalisation, big corporations have been assigned to play a major developmental role. At present, the US, EU, and Japan and their nationals own more than 87 % of the world’s largest multinational companies and account for 88 % international trade. And some MNCs when their assets and sales are compared to aggregate GDP are wealthier than many countries and rank top 100 economic entities (Roukis, 2004). For example, Indian businessman Tata’s assets alone are greater than Pakistan’s GDP.  

Since the colonies became independent, direct rule by the former colonial powers ended. But in some countries, they managed to keep the military presence and indirect control of their former colonies continued. The former colonies are now ruled by their financial and MNCs rather than military occupation. In the post-colonial period, the nations were politically free and continued to have regular elections and some sort of freedom, but economically and financially still dependent and controlled by the former colonial powers, which is known as the neo-colonial relationship (Siddiqui, 2024). Under such relationships, the former colonial powers openly interfere in the internal affairs of the country.  

We often read in the press that US, EU, and British diplomats regularly meet the national political leaders of developing countries. For instance, such interference is visible in Pakistan, Egypt, Jordan, West Africa, and several Latin American countries (Siddiqui, 2022a). Such practices undermine sovereignty and independent development in the colonies and their leaders, rather than working for their communities, they try to safeguard the interests of foreign powers, their businesses, and strategic interests. All these lead to regular outside interference, which brings instability and undermines long-term socio-economic development in the former colonies.  

In recent years, foreign university campuses have opened in developing countries, which is supposed to transfer skills and knowledge to the former colonies. However, the colonisers still impose their view of history on the formerly colonised people. Such development would negate the great spirit of decolonisation of the 1950s, which began soon after the Second World War due to the collapse of the economic and military strength of European powers.  

II. The East India Company  

The setting-up of the East India Company (EIC) coincided with a dramatic expansion of Britain’s foreign commercial activities, which was mainly due to expectations of huge profits to be made through trade and colonial ventures. Historians have published a huge volume of work to understand how and when the British Empire was developed. It is narrated that its development is rooted in the Atlantic world, through the occupation and colonisation of Ireland and then through the invasion of overseas territories, the plundering of their resources, and the development of settlements in North America, the Caribbean, Australia, and New Zealand, all of which have received a great deal of attention than their activities on the Indian Subcontinent. 

The concept of primitive accumulation was formulated by Karl Marx in his book Capital, Volume I, where he analysed capitalism in its initial stage of development and structural change, especially in England, the Netherlands, and France. Primary accumulation had taken place along two trajectories, with land and labour playing a central role in both cases. At home, people were being thrown out of their lands by various devices such as legal enclosure measures, so as to use the land to yield more profit for capitalist landlords and to drive them into factories. This process started in England in the seventeenth century and spread to most Western European countries in the nineteenth century. Abroad, it consisted of grabbing other peoples’ lands and turning the previous owners into wage workers or virtually turning them into slaves. Extracted as much surplus value from the colonies as it could, very often not even leaving them with their subsistence requirements and causing large-scale famines.  

There are some whose research focused on Asia. For instance, Brenner’s (1993) study Merchants and Revolution depicts the EIC as a business corporation that began with the sole aim of importing spices from South Asia and selling them to European and North American markets. The Company was launched by groups of British merchants who dominated London’s politics, commerce, and trade. According to him, the new business group was different from the older groups with its interests in the export of England’s woollen goods. Towards the end of the sixteenth century, the investment opportunities available to English merchants grew rapidly due to improvements in navigation technology and higher returns. Consequently, the new groups of merchants sought to take advantage of new prospects of higher profits across the world.  

Trade was the actual reason why the East India Company came to India in the early 17th century. India was then exporting manufactured goods produced by small producers all over the world. The Indian manufacturing sector had been quite advanced before the Industrial Revolution. The EIC began operating with the aim of buying Indian goods, including spices and manufactured products, and exporting them to Europe and Britain, as these goods were in great demand. However, once British EIC got established and made networks in India, it tried to interfere in internal governance matters in order to get the supply of cheap products from India to be sold in Europe and the rest of the world in order to make higher profits.  

The EIC became the world’s first corporation to be organised based on shareholders’ membership. In 1599, it had over a hundred investors to fund the Company, which amounted to £30,133, a petition to Queen Elizabeth I for a Charter. By 1614, the EIC had undertaken a series of successful voyages that had profits of 155 %, with dividend payments ranging from 16 percent to 300 percent. As a result, the EIC was able to raise £400,000 in investment in a very short period of only two weeks. As Smith (2018:1130) notes: “Within this environment, where investment in overseas ventures was increasingly common, the EIC was one of the most popular companies and had attracted at least 536 investors by 1613. The sum raised during this period by the Company would suggest that after running for 13 years, the average investment in the EIC had risen to just under £1,000. These new investors created an organisation that was able to send multiple voyages to Asia, build its dockyard in London, establish a colony in Ireland, and begin to dominate the social and political life of many in the City of London.” 

However, twelve years later by 1625, the EIC started to face financial difficulties, although profits were still high. Increasing difficulties in South Asia, particularly with the Dutch, made the Company less attractive to investors. Despite all these challenges, the EIC attracted investments of £418,991 from 1614 to 1624 through its first joint stock starting from 1621 and raised more funds through a second joint stock that valued up to £1,629,040 in 1632 (Smith, 2018). On the operation of the EIC, Dalrymple (2019) argues: “In August 1765 the East India Company defeated the young Mughal Emperor and forced him to establish a new administration in his richest provinces. English merchants collected taxes using a ruthless private army, this new regime saw East India Company transform itself from an international trading corporation into something much more unusual: an aggressive colonial power in the guise of multinational business.” The survival of EIC depended on its military superiority and it was imperative to preserve military discipline, which led prominent colonial officials to fear the circulation of ideas and information that might kindle unrest within the army.  

The concept of colonialism is closely linked to that of imperialism, which is the policy or ethos of using power and influence to control another nation or people, which underlies colonialism. The subjugation of indigenous people — and the exploitation of their land and resources — has a long and brutal history (Siddiqui, 2022b). Colonialism is where a foreign country takes direct control of a territory, production, and economic resources of another country. Colonialism is defined as control by one power over a dependent area or people. It occurs when one nation subjugates another, conquering its population and exploiting it, often while forcing its own language and cultural values upon its people. By 1914, a large majority of the world’s nations had been colonised by Europeans at some point (Siddiqui, 2019). 

The British presence in India was largely determined by the nature of the economy and the administrative structures, which the British occupied. For example, in the mid-18th century, India was a major exporting country and had a large pool of labour supply, which the British employed in an army led by British officers. In contrast to other colonies such as Australia, New Zealand, and Canada where the native population was massacred and eliminated to make way for extensive British settlements, British policy in India was shaped by Indian society, where initially a huge number of British officials learned Hindu philosophy, religion and even converted to Hinduism and Islam (Siddiqui, 2022c).  

The East India Company was initially charted by Queen Elizabeth I in 1600 and it was the most powerful commercial company of its day. The charter authorised the setting up of what was then a radically new type of business: not a family partnership – until then the norm over most of the globe – but a joint-stock company that could issue tradeable shares on the open market to any number of investors, a mechanism capable of realising much larger amounts of capital.  

The Company traded as a globalised commercial company and then faced a formidable competitor in trade in the Indian Sub-continent where it began its operation in the very profitable business of spice imports. Portugal was already well established on the West coast of Goa and the Indian Malabar coast, while the Dutch established settlements and commercial activities in Indonesia. The French merchants were already present in Bengal and South India. The British were newcomers to the spice trade and were not liked by other European merchants, who saw them as new competitors. The East India Company gradually established a commercial presence in South India Malabar and West coast and with great efforts were successful in obtaining concessions from the Mughal Emperor Jahangir. Then, a large part of the Indian subcontinent was ruled by Mughal rulers. 

The EIC extended its control on the East Province of Bengal, which was then one of the richest regions of the world, after Robert Clive’s victory at the Battle of Plassey in 1757 by defeating Nawab of Bengal. The Battle of Plassey was fought between the East India Company forces led by Robert Clive and Siraj-ud-Daulah, the ruler of Bengal (also known as Nawab of Bengal). The rampant misuse by EIC officials of trade privileges infuriated the ruler. The Nawab of Bengal was betrayed by his military commander, Mir Jafar, and as a result, Siraj-ud-Daulah lost the Battle of Plassey on 23 June 1757 and the EIC took over the administration of Bengal. 

In the first quarter of the 19th century, the EIC expanded enormously in military terms to over a quarter of a million troops and deployed a formidable naval force that patrolled the sea surrounding India and the Arab sea. As Roukis (2004: 944) notes: “By 1820, the Company extended its profitable opium trade, placing increased pressure on China to allow greater importation. There was a strong British demand for Chinese tea. The Company was granted a license to grow opium in India for sale in China… Chinese opposition precipitated the First Opium War (1840), which China lost, and Hong Kong, as a part of the peace settlement, became British possession… The opium trade continued with its devastating effects on the Chinese. A Second Opium War broke out in 1857, again to China’s detriment, and England obtained new prerogatives, including unrestricted travel in China and the right to preach Christianity.”  

It is important to understand the relationship between wars and capital accumulation. The opium wars were launched in the 1840s by the then-dominant economic and military forces such as Britain and France (Siddiqui, 2020a), who favoured mercantilism backed by their military powers and saw a useful policy strategy to accumulate capital for national wealth (Marx, 2010b). 

But Britain was unable to dominate economically Qing China and imports of Chinese goods to Britain were steadily rising and British merchants had to pay for precious metals, especially silver. At the start of the Industrial Revolution, tea consumption was rising among British people. This meant the outflows of silver were taking place and British products had no demands from the Chinese.  

The reason for the wars with China was that Britain imported tea and other goods from China, which resulted in trade imbalances even though then Britain was an advanced economy. Britain chose opium export to China to reduce its trade imbalance. This opium was to be produced in colonial India and smuggled to China, as China legally did not allow this drug to be sold in China. British merchants knew that opium was prohibited by the Qing. Under such circumstances, Britain could sell opium only by starting wars (Trocki, 2002; Siddiqui, 2020a). 

As Karl Marx argues: “The silver coin of the empire, its lifeblood, began to be drained away to the British East Indies…. Up to 1830, the balance of trade was continually in favour of the Chinese, there existed an uninterrupted importation of silver from India, Britain, and the United States into China. Since 1833, and especially since 1840, the export of silver from China to India has become almost exhausting for the Celestial Empire the strong decrees of the emperor against the opium trade, were responded to by still stronger resistance to his measures. Besides this immediate economic consequence … [the opium wars, exorbitant taxes, and the likes] acting together on the finances, the morals, the industry and political structure of China…the English cannon in 1840 …. Broke down the authority of the emperor and forced the Celestial Empire into contact with the terrestrial world.” (Cited in Xie, 2023: 539-40) 

Hence, Britain employed an illegal and immoral strategy to launch opium wars to accumulate capital. The earlier policy was how Britain began its hegemony in Europe and where it got money to finance its ambitions (Marx, 2010). It seems the British hegemony had a close connection between Queen Elizabeth I’s reign (1558-1603) and piracy. The Queen gave the highest honour to a leading pirate Francis Drake because of the wealth he provided to Britain. According to Takeda´s (2012: 19) estimation: “Drake gave 600,000 pounds to the government and 300,000 went into Queens pocket. At that time six hundred pounds equalled three years’ fiscal budget for the government.” (cited in Xie, 2023: 549). The British government rewarded Drake by making him the mayor of Plymouth and he was heralded as a national hero. 

The Industrial Revolution in Britain could not have continued without India’s role as a trading partner, as India earned substantial amounts of silver from China and used it to purchase industrial goods from Britain, allowing the latter to accumulate capital needed to reinvest after the 1870s. During this period India, not China, provided a huge market for British industrial goods, and thus no wonder India was seen as the most valuable colony in the British Empire.  

Popular socialist and anti-war activist Rosa Luxemburg´s view on the aspects of imperialism was directed to all forms of colonisation and control of underdeveloped countries. She emphasised that imperialism represented the last phase of capitalism. She pointed out the fact that capitalist enterprise, having arisen from a non-capitalist society, just to earn higher profits seeks on ‘‘competitive struggle for what remains still open of the non-capitalist environment’’ and especially by availing itself of colonial expansion. Luxemburg opined that separating agriculture from manufacturing and thus destroying former peasant economies seemed to be a strategy in the colonies to secure supplies of raw materials and create markets overseas for the manufactured goods for the capitalist powers. Britain began the policy of ‘‘free trade’’ as its economy progressed after the 1830s. Germany’s national policy was protectionist, and capitalism historically combined free competition in much of the domestic commodity market with fierce monopolist struggles in the foreign trade sector.  

European powers namely Britain, France, Spain, and The Netherlands colonised the Americas, Asia, and Africa and began plundering these regions’ natural resources and people at an industrial scale unknown to previous human history through slavery, mining, and plantations (Siddiqui, 2020c). This generated a huge surplus into the hands of European powers, which was then invested in armaments and military to maintain supremacy and to keep rivals at bay. The other Empires such as the Mughals (1526-1857), Ottomans (1299-1922), and Qing (1944-1911) simply could not match the European power who had occupied all the continents, and most of the countries, and this coincided with the expansion of industries and technology, especially railways, steam engines and telegraph. Moreover, Britain and France began industrialisation, with increased use of technology and a rise in productivity that could not be matched by other Empires. Despite the talk of human rights and democracy, the European powers were very brutal in the colonies and brought repeated famines, deindustrialisation, poverty, and environmental destruction (Siddiqui, 1990), and a huge transfer of resources from colonies to the European powers (Marx, 2010a). The European powers used extremely brutal methods to plunder resources from the occupied territories with huge loss of lives of indigenous people, which could be called genocide. However, the colonisers have yet to acknowledge and say sorry to the victims. 

Mughal revenue officials in the provinces of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa, were dismissed and replaced by a set of English traders appointed by Robert Clive – the new governor of Bengal – and the directors of the EIC. Dalrymple (2015) notes: “It was at this moment that the East India Company (EIC) ceased to be a conventional corporation, trading silks and spices, and became something much more unusual. Within a few years, 250 company clerks backed by the military force of 20,000 locally recruited Indian soldiers had become the effective rulers of Bengal. An international corporation was transforming itself into an aggressive colonial power.” Further, Dalrymple (2015) notes: “Using its rapidly growing security force – its army had grown to 260,000 men by 1803 – it swiftly subdued and seized an entire subcontinent.” The EIC attacked, subjugated, and plundered South under the guise of business corporation unknown to human history. It almost certainly remains the supreme act of corporate violence in world history. History shows that there exists a close relationship between the state and the corporation (Dalrymple, 2015); Siddiqui, 2020b). 

The document signed by Emperor Shah Alam – known as the Diwani – was the legal property of the company, not the Crown, even though the government had spent a massive sum on naval and military operations protecting the EIC’s Indian acquisitions. A proportion of the plunder and loot of Bengal was taken over by Clive. His personal fortune was then valued at £234,000 and he became the richest man in Europe. The Battle of Plassey in 1757 was won thanks to treachery, forged contracts, and bribes rather than military prowess. 

As for The Treaty of Allahabad, Clive had dictated the terms and a terrified Shah Alam had simply waved them through. As the contemporary Mughal historian Sayyid Ghulam Husain Khan put it: “A business of such magnitude, as left neither pretense nor subterfuge, and which at any other time would have required the sending of wise ambassadors and able negotiators, as well as much parley and conference with the East India Company and the King of England, and much negotiation and contention with the ministers, was done and finished in less time than would usually have been taken up for the sale of a jack-ass, or a beast of burden, or a head of cattle.” (Cited in Dalrymple, 2015). 

Sir Thomas Roe, the ambassador sent by King James I to the Mughal court, met Emperor Jahangir in 1614. During this period, the Mughal king was the world’s richest and most powerful. His father Akbar ruled one of the two wealthiest nations in the world, rivalled only by Ming China. His rule stretched to most parts of current India, including Pakistan and Bangladesh, and most of Afghanistan. He ruled over five times the population commanded by the Ottomans. His capital city Agra had a population of then more than 740,000, which was far larger than any city in Europe. Another major city was Lahore, which was larger than London, Madrid, Paris, and Rome combined. This was the period when the Indian economy accounted for 26 percent of all global manufacturing. In contrast, Britain then contributed less than 2 percent of the global GDP. 

After colonising Bengal province, the EIC profit rose dramatically, and single-handedly, it reversed the balance of trade, which from Roman times on had led to a continual drain of western bullion to Asia. The EIC smuggled opium to China, and when the Chinese government opposed it, Britain went to war, which is known as the opium wars, in order to seize an offshore base in Hong Kong and safeguard its profitable monopoly in narcotics. The Company exported Chinese tea to Europe and North America, where it was dumped in Boston harbour triggering the American War of Independence. 

By 1803, when the EIC captured the Mughal capital of Delhi, it had trained up a private security force of around 260,000 – twice the size of the British army – and had more weapons than any nation-state in Asia. The Company had by then built a vast and sophisticated administration and civil service, and London’s docklands and by 1810 generated about 50 percent of Britain’s trade.  

Although the Company’s share price had doubled overnight after it acquired the wealth of the treasury of Bengal, less than two decades after taking over the Diwani (revenue/rent collection), the East India bubble burst after plunder and famine in Bengal in 1770 led to the deaths of one-third of the state population (i.e. 10 million people) (Siddiqui, 2020b). The EIC had become synonymous with ostentatious wealth and political corruption and in 1767, the company bought off parliamentary opposition by donating £400,000 to the Crown in return for its continued right to govern Bengal. But the anger against it finally reached ignition point on 13 February 1788, at the impeachment, for looting and corruption, of Clive’s successor as governor of Bengal, Warren Hastings. It was the nearest the British ever got to putting the EIC on trial, and they did so with one of their greatest orators at the helm – Edmund Burke. Hastings survived his impeachment, but parliament did finally remove the EIC from power following the Indian rebellion of 1857, some 90 years after the granting of the Diwani and 60 years after Hastings’s trial. On 10 May 1857, the EIC’s army rose against their employer, and on successfully crushing the insurgency, after nine uncertain months, the company distinguished itself for a final time by the hanging and killings of many thousands of Indians, who opposed EIC’s rule, and it was the bloodiest episode in the entire history of British colonialism in Asia (Dalrymple, 2015). 

During the late eighteen and early nineteenth centuries, and the expansion of the British empire in the Indian sub-continent, there were opportunities for individuals to acquire wealth and power. Several men accumulated huge wealth in India through opportunities afforded to them by the EIC, with lucrative careers and the possibility of generating money through commerce and trade. Wealth was generated through a variety of means such as through administration, trade, army officials, and officials in the EIC. Moreover, Britishers supplemented their incomes through illegal trade, which gave them extra income on top of their salaries. “A species of merchants and adventurers who have come to India solely to acquire wealth and who aim to return home as soon as they have acquired enough of it. They are temporary sojourners, not settlers. Ultimately, the aim was to return home, ideally in a better financial situation than when they left for India… majority of those who went to India wished to return home one day, …” (Rees, 2017: 166)   

Networking operates differently depending on the social status of the individual involved. Rees (2017: 169) further notes: “The Company servant and free merchant Joseph Fowke made powerful connections when he married Elizabeth, the daughter of J. Welsh, who was a cousin of Lady Clive. The Clive family created an important and influential cross-border network of East Indians, of whom the Fowke family was to form a part…. Francis journeyed to Bengal in 1773 to become a writer and rose to become to resident at Benares. On leaving India in 1786 he had accumulated a fortune in the region of £70,000 by trading in opium and diamonds. It was through Francis that Welsh connection was forged when he purchased an estate in Radnorshire and built a country house called Boughrood castle near a former medieval castle of the same name.” 

The majority of those who went to India were employed by the state or its surrogate the East India Company. The conquest of India produced huge employment opportunities in the military, trade, and civil services, an occupation which became very attractive for young males of low socio-economic status with a heavy representation of Irish and Scots. As Marshall (1997: 91) argues “Public employment on this scale was made possible by a system of taxation which the British inherited from Indian regimes that they had displaced. This gave them a public revenue on a scale unmatched by any other British colonial enterprise. After 1765 the revenue of Bengal alone amounted to about one-quarter of public revenue of the British as a whole… With these resources the British could maintain an establishment in India greater than that of Britain itself and construct an elaborate administration as well… [However], there was virtually nothing that a British person could do that an Indian could not do more cheaply. Indian soldiers were much cheaper than British soldiers. The survival of the Indian states was a constant reminder that there was an alternative structure of administration to be staffed by British officials. Indian learnt European professional skills, such as medicine, the law or engineering, with ease.” 

III. Conclusion 

The East India Company was the first great multinational corporation, which was formed as today’s joint-stock corporations. The most powerful among them do not need their armies: they can rely on governments to protect their interests and bail them out. The EIC remains history’s most terrifying warning about the potential for the abuse of corporate power – and the insidious means by which the interests of shareholders become those of the state. Nearly four hundred and twenty-five years after the Company began its operation, it is more important to understand the role of big corporations in undermining development and subjugating the Indian people and its sole purpose was to receive higher returns and plunder the resources.  

After the occupation of Bengal province in 1757 and with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in England, the British interest in exports gradually moved to selling British manufactured goods into India. In the late 18th and early 19th century with the start of the industrial revolution in England, the British markets were closed to Indian manufactured goods, while Indian markets were opened to British goods. The British ruling elites began to see Indian manufactured goods as competitors and did everything to undermine it. Their strategy shifted towards securing the supply of raw materials from India for emerging new industries in England and also turning India into the market for British industrial goods. British manufactured goods had free entry into Indian markets and Indian industries had no tariff protection. As a result, the British colonisation of India destroyed local industries and prevented any positive development from taking place towards the development of industries in the country. Only after the First World War in 1919 did Britain allow India to establish some tariff protection for local industries which led to the expansion of industries in areas like cotton textiles, jute, iron and steel, and so on.  

The developing countries must understand the role of global companies such as EIC in transferring wealth to Britain and undermining the sovereignty and independent development in India from the mid-18th to the first half of the 19th century. This was also the period when rather than economic prosperity, India witnessed famines, de-urbanisation, de-industrialisation, and falling of real incomes. Therefore, again the Western developmental model based on MNCs needs to be seen and carefully scrutinised in the light of the past. 

The study has found that in the past, corporations like EIC were able to establish and expand globally, as the company had always relied on the state for help and support. With the current drive-in support of globalisation, which will lead to the integration of domestic markets into a global market, this will certainly provide larger markets and resources for global companies who would be able to operate globally to benefit from opening markets of the developing countries. There is no doubt that China has benefited from MNCs in recent decades through MNCs, especially by getting greater access to modern technology and capital, and by increasing exports. However, if MNCs´ operations are not checked, it would undermine nations’ sovereignty and would lead to the monopolisation of resources and the marginalisation of the people in developing countries.  

About the Author

Dr. Kalim Siddiqui is an economist specialising in International Political Economy, Development Economics, International Trade, and International Economics. His work, which combines elements of international political economy and development economics, economic policy, economic history and international trade, often challenges prevailing orthodoxy about which policies promote overall development in less-developed countries. Kalim teaches international economics at the Department of Accounting, Finance and Economics, University of Huddersfield, UK. He has taught economics since 1989 at various universities in Norway and the UK.

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