The Corporation That Changed The World, Outlook India, 10-Jul-06

Robbins starts by asking why the East India Company -- which at one point serviced almost 20 percent of English GDP, controlled ports, warehouses and shipping and dominated the financial world of the City of London as also its physical landscape -- is so singularly absent from the contemporary physical and imaginative landscape of London. He fills us up on the role and influence of East India Company in contemporary British economy and society, how it came to be regulated, how it became a ‘mercantile sovereign’. But this is more than a history of the East India Company. It is also a passionate plea for restraining the power of the modern Corporation and a reminder that unchecked economic power always has political consequences and how monopoly and free trade are mutually exclusive. Can a museum in England today display an 18th century Bengal gown without mentioning the conditions under which it reached England, he asks? Can the statue of Robert Clive continue to adorn the entrance to the Whitehall without our wondering whether the British have really rethought their past? >>>