The Corporation That Changed the World

How the East India Company Shaped the Modern Multinational

By: Nick Robins

Narrated by: Simon Barber

Length: 11 hrs and 49 mins

Publisher's summary

The English East India Company was the mother of the modern multinational. Its trading empire encircled the globe, importing Asian luxuries such as spices, textiles, and teas. But it also conquered much of India with its private army and broke open China's markets with opium. The Company's practices shocked its contemporaries and still reverberate today.

The Corporation That Changed the World is the first book to reveal the Company's enduring legacy as a corporation. This expanded edition explores how the four forces of scale, technology, finance, and regulation drove its spectacular rise and fall. For decades, the Company was simply too big to fail, and stock market bubbles, famines, drug-running, and even duels between rival executives are to be found in this new account.

For Robins, the Company's story provides vital lessons on both the role of corporations in world history and the steps required to make global business accountable today.

©2012 Nick Robins (P)2017 Nick Robins

Insightful and incisive

My ancestors worked for the East India Company for several generations. This book was helpful in understanding the system in which they worked. Of course, each of us is responsible for our own actions, but we also work within systems. The wrong system can make us all worse than we individually believe ourselves to be. The EIC was such a system.

The last chapters and epilogue tie the story of the EIC directly to the problems of today, with lack of sufficient regulation leading to unbridled power being concentrated in the hands of a few very large corporations.

The narrative delivery is very British! It’s a fine performance of the text, marred only by poor pronunciation of Chinese place names, which bugged me.

Overall I highly recommend this to students of Indian and British history, historians of business, and those in a position to influence government policy around corporations.

a great review

a very good take of corporate and imperial practices over the almost 300 year life of "John Company". Something that any student of business or ethics should read. the authors claim to remember the actions of those centuries and showcase them to the world rings true.

i drink liberal tears

I just wanted some historical knowledge about the first corporation. this book filled most of that need, although there was quite a bit left out. but hey, we can't cover 250+ years in any one book. the author obviously has a problem with capitalism, and the last hour is him spewing what he thinks needs to be done to make the world a better place. i can only humbly suggest he start a company, make it successful, then he can do as he wishes with his wealth, instead of preaching about what others should do with what they built.

WOW

This was an amazing book that compiled the deep and intricate history of the EIC. The amount of effort that was required to put this together had to have been immense and time-consuming. I applaud and thank Mr. Robins for writing this book. it truly was a pleasure to listen to it.

Awful

One of the worst books I have ever read. I do not think I know anymore about the East India Company now then when I started. I do not recommend this book.

Seems a bit unbalanced and not fully informed

I'm no expert on the subject matter, but this seems unbalanced to me - when the author quotes Adam Smith, I listen carefully - much of the rest of the book seems to be entirely negative on the company and colonialism - I suspect that although there were plenty of evils associated with each, based on what I've heard from economists, there may be more to the story, none of which is presented in this book.

Not what I expect from a history book

I found the tone and approach of this book to be out of sync with what it promised. It is more journalistic than historical in its approach. It suffers from anachronisms at every turn. The company is compared to Enron, but only in the vaguest of moral equivalencies. The narrative is constantly disrupted by asides on the contemporary opinion of the EIC in Indian politics. The author's goal is to expose the EIC, and to make the British public take more responsibility and feel a greater sense of shame. That is not the same goal as "Tell the story of the East India Company", the book I thought I was buying.

I would have preferred if the author had delivered coherent narrative up front, perhaps adding a conclusion that connected the company with modern Indian politics, contemporary British misperceptions of the company or whatever other contemporary social issues the author felt were important.

Alternatively, the author could have saved me a credit and just titled it: "Why I hate the East India Company and why you should, too!"

an axe to grind

the author has an axe to grind and is violently anti capitalist. a socialist diatribe