MERCHANTS OF DOOM

Captain Henry Wilson of the East India Company launches from the Pelew Islands, circa 1784.

There’s a key scene in Taboo, the BBC’s recent Dickensmeets- Goodfellas period drama starring Tom Hardy as the adventurer and would-be shipping magnate James Delaney, in which he’s summoned to a meeting with a bunch of sombrely frock-coated men in a densely draped sepulchral chamber. They want a piece of land he owns on the west coast of America; he steadfastly refuses to sell, describing the body they represent as “the beast with a million eyes and a million ears… conquest, rape and plunder are your methods, your school.” The words seem a little harsh to describe a trading organisation that began its life shipping commodities including cotton, silk and tea between the subcontinent and Elizabethan England, but then, the East India Company (E.I.C.) was no ordinary mercantile concern. At its height it commanded a private army of 260,000 men — twice the size of the British army — and had effectively subjugated vast tracts of South Asia. In Taboo, it’s implicated in various murderous conspiracies, with some historians opining that it got off relatively lightly. “Throughout the 19th century, the E.I.C. was the equivalent of the C.I.A., the N.S.A., and the biggest, baddest multinational corporation on Earth,” Taboo writer Steven Knight has said, “all rolled into one self-righteous, religiously motivated monolith.”

The E.I.C.’s “million eyes and million ears” were the bedrock