The History of East India Company: Corporation That Conquered a Subcontinent

In 1600, two hundred and eighteen London merchants received a royal charter granting them a licence to compete for a share of the East Indies spice trade. By the time it was finally dissolved two hundred and seventy-four years later, that same private company had raised an army larger than Britain's own, conquered most of the Indian subcontinent, and ruled directly over some two hundred million people who never once had a say in the matter.This is the story of how that happened - told not through the abstraction of policy and profit alone, but through the individual people who built it, profited from it, resisted it, and were eventually destroyed by it. Robert Clive, a suicidal young clerk who found in warfare the outlet his troubled temperament had never located elsewhere. Warren Hastings, whose seven-year impeachment trial became one of the most sensational spectacles of the eighteenth century. Bahu Begum, whose independently held fortune made her one of the Company's most formidable obstacles in northern India. Tipu Sultan, whose rocket artillery innovation outlived the war he fought to defend his kingdom.It is also the story of a famine that killed millions while the Company's own profits doubled. Of an opium trade deliberately engineered to addict an entire nation. Of a private army recruited with its own eventual rebellion specifically in mind. And of the rebellion that came anyway - the one that finally, unavoidably, forced Parliament to strip a corporation of the sovereign power it had spent two and a half centuries accumulating.This book covers the Company's own rule, from 1600 to 1858. The formal British Raj that followed is a separate story, for a future volume in this series.Part of The History of... series.