Speaker 1: Mmm, hello friends, I'm Robert Evans, and this is once
Speaker 1: again Behind the Bastards, the show we tell you everything
Speaker 1: you don't know about the very worst people in all
Speaker 1: of history. Now, this is part two of our episode
Speaker 1: on the age of Heroic Commerce. Uh and my my
Speaker 1: guest with me, as with the last episode, is the imminent,
Speaker 1: the tenerant, the excellent Michael Swain. Thank you, the auspicious
Speaker 1: Robert Evans for having me. Yeah, you know what's fun good?
Speaker 1: Poor tense, abound adjective. Yeah, I love them. That little
Speaker 1: blue triangle and adverbs, little orange circle. I think did
Speaker 1: you do that what we're talking about? I learned with
Speaker 1: the system where you put symbols for every part of
Speaker 1: speech that sounds exhaust So to me, a conjunction will
Speaker 1: always be a little pink rainbow. Oh okay, that's good
Speaker 1: to know. Actually, I think that's preposition. Let's talk about
Speaker 1: some speaking of prepositions. I'm gonna make a preposition. I
Speaker 1: don't think you are. I think prosition that one. That
Speaker 1: one didn't come out. I was going to try to
Speaker 1: tie that in more smoothly, but then you caught me
Speaker 1: scripted apart. So where we are in the story. We
Speaker 1: got we got this guy, Robert Clive, and Robert Clive
Speaker 1: has conquered Bengal like a big chunk of India and
Speaker 1: he's rich as ship. And the East India Company has
Speaker 1: got like tens of millions of people that they don't
Speaker 1: really have to take care of, but they kind of control.
Speaker 1: And it's getting weird. And everybody back in England is like,
Speaker 1: this is getting weird. And also corporations are spreading throughout
Speaker 1: the world and starting colonies all over the place and
Speaker 1: extending European domination and center the globe. They're collecting rents,
Speaker 1: they are starting to do that, and yeah, they are
Speaker 1: starting to to carry out taxes and stuff that that
Speaker 1: that is beginning in this period of time. But mostly
Speaker 1: what's happening, mostly the thing that the company is doing
Speaker 1: in this big area they now control is being corrupt
Speaker 1: as ship. Corruption had always been indemic among the East
Speaker 1: India Company's foreign officers. That's why you did it, is
Speaker 1: so that you could take a bunch of stuff and
Speaker 1: come back home and be rich if you survived the
Speaker 1: tropical diseases. So everybody skimmed a little bit off the
Speaker 1: top that was kind of built into the system. Clive
Speaker 1: had just done what everybody else had been doing when
Speaker 1: he took the three thousand pounds of gold and jewels
Speaker 1: and stuff. But the cup that he'd been skimming from
Speaker 1: was the biggest cup anyone had ever stumbled across. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: so that's that's the situation. And it was unprecedented, and
Speaker 1: people started to ask the question do we want it
Speaker 1: to be okay for our corporate officers in foreign countries
Speaker 1: to be this corrupt? And that's something we as British
Speaker 1: people are fine with. It's not like he's a brilliant innovator,
Speaker 1: it's just the most Yeah, he's Yeah, no one has
Speaker 1: ever had that. This seems like it could go bad places.
Speaker 1: And some of that is people who like have a
Speaker 1: human sense of like it's wrong, we're plundering the world.
Speaker 1: A lot of it is other rich guys who are
Speaker 1: old money and are just don't like just like this
Speaker 1: is a threat to our fortresses of the money that
Speaker 1: we have built in our places. Exactly. Now this gross
Speaker 1: guy is rich and yeah, this uncouth guy who joined
Speaker 1: because he likes beating people up, Yeah, it's too wealthy. Exactly.
Speaker 1: So Clive leaves India after conquering and Bengal and governing
Speaker 1: it for a while, and he goes back to England,
Speaker 1: and to give you an idea of how modern this
Speaker 1: period is, he takes all this lute that he earned
Speaker 1: from conquering Bengal and he deposits it with the Dutch
Speaker 1: East India Company and then when he gets back to London,
Speaker 1: he withdraws it from them as cash or as cash okay,
Speaker 1: So they didn't like transport his jewels and because he
Speaker 1: he was like, there's no way, this is way too
Speaker 1: much ship to syd I'll give it to them, They'll
Speaker 1: give me the cash value and I'll take it out
Speaker 1: in London. Boom, it was done. Just upload it to
Speaker 1: the cloud. You're good to go. Yeah. This is like
Speaker 1: the first time people were figuring out how to do
Speaker 1: that sort of ship. So yeah, again this is becoming
Speaker 1: a very modern time period. Uh So Cloud gets back
Speaker 1: to England and he's rich and he's popular for a while.
Speaker 1: He buys his shipload of mansions, but all is not
Speaker 1: well because his boss, Laurence Sullivan does not like him. Now,
Speaker 1: Laurence Sullivan is the chairman of the company, so Clive
Speaker 1: in addition to all of them, and he had gotten
Speaker 1: was guaranteed a giant yearly payment from all of ben Goal.
Speaker 1: So basically the prints that he put in power was like,
Speaker 1: we'll give you a huge a fortune every single year.
Speaker 1: Because you put me in power, He's just free to
Speaker 1: write up that contract. And that's why the company challenges
Speaker 1: it because I just don't understand how people take pure
Speaker 1: will yeah and make it reality because people to go along,
Speaker 1: they're not they don't want to. His own company takes
Speaker 1: him to court the like, you're not allowed to make
Speaker 1: that deal. Yeah, they you're not allowed to make that deal.
Speaker 1: We never voted to confirm this giant annual payment for you.
Speaker 1: You know, you worked it out directly with the prince,
Speaker 1: but you were working with the company at the time
Speaker 1: and this is our area. So and they're not saying
Speaker 1: this money should go back to the Indian people. They're
Speaker 1: saying that we should this should get us, not you. Um.
Speaker 1: So they go to quarter over and they fight in
Speaker 1: court for a while. So they're battling in court while
Speaker 1: things in India are kind of starting to go sour
Speaker 1: for the company. They're making a lot of money because
Speaker 1: they found a bunch of different ways to tax and
Speaker 1: sell and suck being gold Eye, but they start being
Speaker 1: rebellions as a result of this, So now the company
Speaker 1: is spending more and more money putting down rebellions, and
Speaker 1: eventually they agree to confirm Clive's big annual payment in
Speaker 1: exchange for him going back to India and fixing the
Speaker 1: ship that's gone wrong since he left the last time.
Speaker 1: But that makes it sound like it's arm again, like
Speaker 1: he's the only man in the world who can do this,
Speaker 1: don't they have other trustworthy mercenaries they do. They think
Speaker 1: he's special, but as he's traveling back to India, they
Speaker 1: learned that he's really not because some other guy puts
Speaker 1: the rebellion down. First. Yeah, first, British guns are just
Speaker 1: so much better than everything they face. So they agree
Speaker 1: to give him his money and he leaves over there
Speaker 1: because they're worried they're going to lose control of the
Speaker 1: region because of these rebellions. And then when he's in transit,
Speaker 1: some other guy beats. You can tell like, you don't
Speaker 1: need this guy. Yeah, you don't need any guy. You've
Speaker 1: got canav guns. It's the guns that you need. And
Speaker 1: in fact, actually Clive's big contribution winds up being that
Speaker 1: when he gets there, things are going so well that
Speaker 1: the company has almost invaded Delhi, the capital of India,
Speaker 1: and conquered the whole Mughal Empire, and he stops them.
Speaker 1: Like Robert Clive is like, this is this has gone unessential. Also,
Speaker 1: it seems like he may have just actually gotten scared
Speaker 1: at how much thinks have escalated. This is this could
Speaker 1: be bad. Yeah, yeah, you launch a new Starbucks franchise
Speaker 1: and somehow you accidentally now took over city hall. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So he writes a letter when he's justifying his corporate
Speaker 1: bosses why he stopped the army, he writes a letter
Speaker 1: that says, quote to go further, it is, in my opinion,
Speaker 1: a scheme so extravagantly ambitious and absurd that no governor
Speaker 1: and counsel in their senses can adopt it unless the
Speaker 1: whole system of the company's interests be first entirely new modeled.
Speaker 1: Said the guy who's like, but acquiring three hundred thousand
Speaker 1: pounds of gold, that is not overly ambsual. I think
Speaker 1: he would say that was never his goal. He found
Speaker 1: himself in a war and he won, and then they
Speaker 1: handed him all this stuff. What am I gonna do
Speaker 1: say no, that is yeah, yeah, but he didn't, and
Speaker 1: I don't think most people would to be fair, I
Speaker 1: think most people who are the kind of people who
Speaker 1: could be in Clive's position, I was gonna say most
Speaker 1: people would never get in that position. There's no way
Speaker 1: to get to there. But anyone who's capable of being
Speaker 1: in that position is probably gonna be like, yeah, hit
Speaker 1: me the uh so. Clive basically thought that the company
Speaker 1: already had a sweet deal. They weren't officially in charge
Speaker 1: of anything. They were in control because guns, but they
Speaker 1: didn't have to do anything aside from occasionally fighting cash checks.
Speaker 1: The Indians were still nominally at least leaders of their
Speaker 1: own land, and they were outside of Bengal. They were
Speaker 1: still in control, so the East Indian Company didn't have
Speaker 1: to worry about this giant subcontinent that they had no
Speaker 1: business interests in. Most of this changed on August twelfth,
Speaker 1: seventeen sixty five, when Robert Clive, with worry and his gut,
Speaker 1: signed a deal on behalf of the East India Trading
Speaker 1: Company with the Mughal Emperor that guaranteed the British East
Speaker 1: India Company formal control over three big chunks of India
Speaker 1: and the lives of almost thirty million people. So we'll
Speaker 1: have the graphic up on the site, but you can
Speaker 1: see outline there this is what the East India Company
Speaker 1: after this agreement now controls. That's land they own and govern.
Speaker 1: So now, okay, it's about a fifth about a fifth
Speaker 1: of India, the largest country in existence, I believe, one
Speaker 1: of them and Russia. Yeah wow. So but what I
Speaker 1: don't understand is to what level did they control people's
Speaker 1: lives because I assume they have no interest in going
Speaker 1: in and being like we're going to make laws and
Speaker 1: moral codes. They just want to loot the place. That
Speaker 1: is the point of today's episode. But now they are
Speaker 1: in charge of it. So they are now the government
Speaker 1: in a big chunk of India. Right, So that's the
Speaker 1: situation after this. It's weird that they'd even want to
Speaker 1: be what's the prophet Clive did not want to be,
Speaker 1: but I think they got greedy and so well Clive
Speaker 1: is in charge, he tries to cut back on the
Speaker 1: shocking amount of corruption and graph that he sees amongst
Speaker 1: the company officers. He banns his officers from taking gifts
Speaker 1: or bribes, although he doesn't give up his own bribes
Speaker 1: so people don't take it super seriously. He increases salaries
Speaker 1: to try to make people want to steal less. Uh.
Speaker 1: And he restricts the company's monopoly so that some sort
Speaker 1: of local economy can exists, so that the East India
Speaker 1: Company is not the only people who are allowed to
Speaker 1: sell products to Indians, so that they can have a
Speaker 1: functioning society. So he tries to pump the brakes, just
Speaker 1: let them do what they do. Um. He also does
Speaker 1: nice stuff, like he gives a shipload of money to
Speaker 1: the pension fund for the company army. Again, he's one
Speaker 1: of these people. He starts this road, but he does
Speaker 1: not seem to be running unchecked in that direction. It's
Speaker 1: not like jan Coon or new money is evolving into
Speaker 1: old money like you talked about on the Brothers episode
Speaker 1: where it's time to get philanthropic now and resuscitate my image,
Speaker 1: gloss over all that ship. It's possible. I don't know
Speaker 1: the man, but eventually he like his health isn't great.
Speaker 1: At this point, he winds up heading back to England
Speaker 1: and other people take over for for India, and he
Speaker 1: winds up in court again fighting a company for access
Speaker 1: to his yearly bribe basically because they can't get him hired.
Speaker 1: Can't they fire him? Well, he when he leaves every time,
Speaker 1: he stops working for them, essentially, and so then there's
Speaker 1: like big legal fights in the court because they don't
Speaker 1: want him to just forever get a fortune every year.
Speaker 1: They want that fortunate. But it seems like they keep
Speaker 1: coming back and being like, Okay, we'll give you your
Speaker 1: old job back, sign this deal. Well, they thought they
Speaker 1: needed him, and now they know they really don't um
Speaker 1: and he's starting to try to we should steal slightly less. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this guy's served his purpose getting out here. So the
Speaker 1: East India Company now after Clive leaves, is essentially, yeah,
Speaker 1: the government of a big chunk of India. And if
Speaker 1: you're a government, need to provide things for people, right
Speaker 1: and then just take tax money like you take tax money,
Speaker 1: but you provide roads and libraries and e m t
Speaker 1: s and firefighters and the FDA and ship. The company
Speaker 1: doesn't provide anything. They just take pretty much. And so
Speaker 1: that's the situation in seventeen seventy when a famine hits
Speaker 1: and it's a bad one, and we will get into
Speaker 1: the famine in a little bit. Right now, we're talking
Speaker 1: about Clive because this famine is a disaster for his image.
Speaker 1: He's not in charge when it happens, but it goes
Speaker 1: big in the press and it looks bad for him,
Speaker 1: and he's basically portrayed aid by a lot of the
Speaker 1: media as a greedy idiot who had ruined India, even
Speaker 1: though a lot of other people had ruined India as
Speaker 1: well as Robert Clive. And here you are throwing him
Speaker 1: under the bus. A full two hundred years later, we
Speaker 1: leave Clive alone. I mean, he had tried to clamp
Speaker 1: down on the shameless left. He did see the problem. Um.
Speaker 1: So he winds up in court and you know, has
Speaker 1: a big legal case where he tries to essentially defend
Speaker 1: his legacy. And during the court proceedings he delivers a
Speaker 1: famous speech. So it's it's like one of those really
Speaker 1: like movie ready moments from history. So he's being cross
Speaker 1: examined about robbing Bengal blind and accused of plundering India,
Speaker 1: and he says, quote, consider the situation in which the
Speaker 1: victory of Plassy placed me a great prince was dependent
Speaker 1: on my pleasure. An opulent city lay at my mercy.
Speaker 1: It's richest bankers bid against each other for my smiles.
Speaker 1: I walked through vaults which were thrown open to me alone,
Speaker 1: piled on either hand with gold and jewels. Mr Chairman.
Speaker 1: At this moment, I stand astonished at my own moderation.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's literally just the same as you want
Speaker 1: the truth, you can't handle the truth when you're out there.
Speaker 1: Can you think I stole a lot? I could have
Speaker 1: stolen a lot more? Mother? Why does the loophole exist
Speaker 1: if I'm not supposed to exploit it? That classic justification
Speaker 1: we hear all the time to this day. So he
Speaker 1: was acquitted, Uh, yeah, but he didn't last that much longer.
Speaker 1: He was very sick from all of the tropical diseases
Speaker 1: he'd picked up overseas, and he also might have been
Speaker 1: suffering terrible regret for his actions and the famine. He
Speaker 1: has described as having had a nervous disorder. It's also
Speaker 1: possibly he had severe PTSD. There are numerous times where
Speaker 1: people exploded next to him, Like would be shot by
Speaker 1: cannons and just the guy next to him would burst.
Speaker 1: Like So if you don't mean got mad at him,
Speaker 1: you mean physically exploded? Yeah, yeah, Like was burst by
Speaker 1: a cannon, so he lived through horrible commas, so it's
Speaker 1: possible he was just a broken mentally at this point.
Speaker 1: Then he drowned on gold. No. In seventeen seventy four,
Speaker 1: he stabbed himself to death in the throat with a
Speaker 1: pocket knife. Yeah, at home alone, a suicide with no explanation.
Speaker 1: That's a crazy math. People knew he was depressed, it
Speaker 1: has always been depressed. But he cut his own throat
Speaker 1: with a tiny knife, so he was gone. This is
Speaker 1: the end of Robert Clive. But the British were still
Speaker 1: in India, and they would stay there from nearly two
Speaker 1: centuries now. Merchant Kings mentioned the famine in passing but
Speaker 1: didn't get into much detail on the matter. It was
Speaker 1: a famine, it was very, very bad. So I decided
Speaker 1: to do a little bit of extra digging and I
Speaker 1: ran into a college textbook called The East India Company
Speaker 1: and the Natural World. It had a whole chapter on
Speaker 1: the famine, and thanks to the bountiful Goddess of Capitalism,
Speaker 1: Springer allowed me to buy just that chapter for thirty dollars.
Speaker 1: What a deal, right, for a single single chapter exercised
Speaker 1: from the book Capitalism it's different from the stuff we're
Speaker 1: talking about today because reasons. Anyway, I read the chapter
Speaker 1: and it's really good. I'm gonna I'm gonna quote from
Speaker 1: it now. According to the report from the Famine Commission,
Speaker 1: in a period of ninety years from seventeen sixty five
Speaker 1: when the British East India Company took over the Dwani
Speaker 1: of Bengal to eighteen fifty eight Bengal experience, it's twelve
Speaker 1: famines and four severe scarcities. Now, some of those famines
Speaker 1: would have occurred with or without the British East India Company,
Speaker 1: because famines are a thing. They've always been a thing, right,
Speaker 1: But once you delve into it, their whole period of
Speaker 1: rule is basically a master class and had a funk
Speaker 1: over an entire subcontinent. In essence, in order to compensate
Speaker 1: for the minimal amount of actual government work the company
Speaker 1: needed to do in order to turn a profit, they
Speaker 1: just started jacking up taxes on rural workers and on farmers,
Speaker 1: and usually these taxes were in kind, so you'd pay
Speaker 1: with whatever it is you were growing at the time.
Speaker 1: So the company commercialized agriculture in India and tried to
Speaker 1: turn it into an almost industrial operation to maximize output.
Speaker 1: So there's been a bunch of small independent farms and
Speaker 1: villages and whatnot, And now the whole countryside was basically
Speaker 1: one giant, big food production plan and made a lot
Speaker 1: of money. But it also made it impossible for the
Speaker 1: farmers themselves to handle bad years. Everything was sold every year,
Speaker 1: nothing was set aside for the bad times. There wasn't
Speaker 1: enough left over after the taxes for the individual farmers. Anyway,
Speaker 1: the dis East India Company had disrupted the intricate cultural
Speaker 1: systems that had formed during and before the Mughal Empire.
Speaker 1: In the past, when there was a bad year and
Speaker 1: the rains didn't come, villages had standing arrangements with other
Speaker 1: villages to help each other out with food. These were
Speaker 1: local insurance plans that were present all across India and
Speaker 1: particularly in the farming regions have been gal was very
Speaker 1: common way to stop people from dying horribly when a famine.
Speaker 1: Presumably have been working for a thousand years exactly. Now, No,
Speaker 1: now you all work one giant farm together. Yeah, this
Speaker 1: will be better for us. So now when famine hit,
Speaker 1: everybody worked for the company. Nobody had anything extra. There
Speaker 1: were no more insurance policies. They'd all been taken in
Speaker 1: taxes and sold. Quote from that same chapter. Bengali society
Speaker 1: was divided between the Zamindars, the hereditary revenue collectors of
Speaker 1: the Mughal Empire, and a broad base consisting of some
Speaker 1: landless laborers and a large number of poor cultivators. Most
Speaker 1: of them were sharecroppers, so taxes started to ratch it
Speaker 1: up on these people in the late seventeen hundreds. The
Speaker 1: company started jacking up to acts is really hard in
Speaker 1: the seventeen fifties, and by the mid seventeen sixties they
Speaker 1: were like doubling every couple of years. The agricultural reforms
Speaker 1: the Corporation put in place didn't really work out. Yields
Speaker 1: started to fall, so they're actually growing feware crops because
Speaker 1: it turns out a bunch of British guys ideas on
Speaker 1: how to farm Indian land did not work as well
Speaker 1: as what the Indians that are going to a totally
Speaker 1: different culture with different land and just telling them do this,
Speaker 1: I think this would work for you for farming. You
Speaker 1: have to do it or will shoot you try it out? Yeah,
Speaker 1: give it a shot, let us know it works, but
Speaker 1: don't tell us if it doesn't, we're not really interested
Speaker 1: in that. So would they ration food back because it
Speaker 1: is in their interests to keep people alive? And that
Speaker 1: right now, you would think that, right, you think it's
Speaker 1: it's in your interest that, yeah, you you would think
Speaker 1: that other people did not. So the price of grains
Speaker 1: started to rise right as the company takes over UM.
Speaker 1: And the company has no less in interest in selling
Speaker 1: cheap grain to the people growing grain to pay them
Speaker 1: grain taxes. So when the famine hit, the company just
Speaker 1: reacted with a kind of sociopathy. I think we're coming
Speaker 1: to expect from the British East India Company. Oh, because
Speaker 1: they're not even paying a portion of their income they
Speaker 1: pay in grain anyway. Yeah, exactly. So they're like, well,
Speaker 1: you're going to give us all your grain anyway, why
Speaker 1: should we even give you some back when we just
Speaker 1: get it all anywhere. We're just going to get it
Speaker 1: all like um, so that I continue living and they're
Speaker 1: already gone, they're already walking off with the grain. Yea.
Speaker 1: So here's another quote from that chapter. The effect of
Speaker 1: the famine was to enshrine free market economics as part
Speaker 1: of the colonial policy all over the Empire, periodic famines
Speaker 1: were seen as a check to population growth. As Mike
Speaker 1: Davis notes, by the nineteenth century, these Malthusian ideas, which
Speaker 1: were voiced all throughout the colonial period, resulted in the
Speaker 1: pursuit of free market economics and quote, India, like Ireland,
Speaker 1: became a utilitarian laboratory where millions of lives were wagered
Speaker 1: against a dogmatic faith in omnipotent markets, overcoming the convenience
Speaker 1: of dearth. This was a policy that was to become
Speaker 1: quote a mask for colonial genocide. So you want to
Speaker 1: talk about colonial genocide, first, let's talk about some ads,
Speaker 1: because it is time. I need something the gird myself.
Speaker 1: I need some time heared yourself with these products and
Speaker 1: or services that support the shades, and we're back. Fabulous ads.
Speaker 1: They like wrapped me in such a cozy feeling that
Speaker 1: I feel like I have the buffer I need for
Speaker 1: what's gonna come now. But what's gonna come now is
Speaker 1: we're gonna talk about how free market economics became a
Speaker 1: mask for colonial genocide. We're getting to the genocide part
Speaker 1: of that. Again, to Charles Cooke Bonner, he would have
Speaker 1: loved this period. Just a pig in plot, just stealing money,
Speaker 1: watch selling people into slips, defying it with bizarre, nonsensical statements.
Speaker 1: It would have been great. He would have been super
Speaker 1: good at this. Really was born in the wrong time,
Speaker 1: although making this time, that time, doing his best. It's
Speaker 1: just business. This is like the beginning of that ethos.
Speaker 1: It's just business, just business. So it's worth getting into
Speaker 1: exactly how different the famines caused by the East India
Speaker 1: Company's management were from the famines that had come before
Speaker 1: in India and in every society in human history. There
Speaker 1: had been famines in India shortly before the company's period
Speaker 1: of dominance, including one that lasted from sixteen seventy to
Speaker 1: sixteen seventy one. Thousands of people had died one to
Speaker 1: three hundred every day during the months that the famine
Speaker 1: was active. It was a terrible time, but the Mughal government,
Speaker 1: shitty as it was by that point, had taken action
Speaker 1: to mitigate it. The government had repaired and built new
Speaker 1: irrigation works. They'd created reservoirs to make sure they'd be
Speaker 1: able to grow crops during the next dry season. They
Speaker 1: cut taxes so farmers would be able to keep more
Speaker 1: of the food they'd grown, they'd set up free kitchens
Speaker 1: and given out grain to try and reduce the number
Speaker 1: of people who start to death. In other words, they
Speaker 1: were a fucking government. The East India Company was not so.
Speaker 1: Starting in the seventeen seventies, all of India started to
Speaker 1: learn the difference between the two. The Great Bengal Famine
Speaker 1: of seventeen seventy lasted from seventeen sixty nine to seventeen
Speaker 1: seventy three. See a media I'm like, a famine supposed
Speaker 1: to last a season, Yeah right, that four years? Supposed
Speaker 1: for four years? Yeah. So the last famine had lasted
Speaker 1: less than a year and killed thousands. This famine lasted
Speaker 1: four years, it would kill millions. The Great Bengal Famine
Speaker 1: was made a lot worse by the fact that in
Speaker 1: the years leading up to it, the company had kind
Speaker 1: of sort of gutt of the local economy and shipped
Speaker 1: all of their silver away to marry Old England or
Speaker 1: rather China. Uh see economics isn't my strong suit. But
Speaker 1: I did manage to find a very detailed article on
Speaker 1: the Wire, an independent journalism website that publishes in Hindi
Speaker 1: and Urdu, and it focuses a lot on historical economic
Speaker 1: stuff in that region of the world. The article is
Speaker 1: called the role that currency played in the Great Bengal
Speaker 1: Famine of seventeen seventy. It breaks down how the company
Speaker 1: spent its tax revenue. This is talking about one district
Speaker 1: in berb Home District. Out of ninety thousand pounds connected
Speaker 1: through taxs and duties and net surplus of some sixty
Speaker 1: pounds was employed for the purchase of silks, Muslims, cotton
Speaker 1: cloths and other articles to be sold in Leadenhall Street,
Speaker 1: the headquarters of the company. In short, the revenues have
Speaker 1: been goal supplied the means of providing the expenditure for
Speaker 1: purchases in Bengal, reducing the net annual influx of specie,
Speaker 1: which is hard currency, to a pittance. So the company
Speaker 1: was taking taxes, making a shipload of money, using it
Speaker 1: to buy products Indian people needed, and then it would
Speaker 1: sell those products back to them for a profit and
Speaker 1: ship the hard currency the silver and gold back to
Speaker 1: England and out of India. The two primary impacts of
Speaker 1: this on England were Number one, A few people got
Speaker 1: very very very very very rich, and it's always a
Speaker 1: few people. What's crazy to me is countries will swallow
Speaker 1: up and destroy whole other countries and only eighteen people
Speaker 1: were involved. It's like the country that crushed the other
Speaker 1: country doesn't even benefit from us. Well, England does in
Speaker 1: one way. This is how the tax. But know this
Speaker 1: is how gets ta okay this, yeah, I've heard this.
Speaker 1: So the Chinese were the only place to get tea,
Speaker 1: you know, China was the only place where it grew
Speaker 1: at this point, not anymore. And China only wanted silver.
Speaker 1: They wanted the specie, the hard currency. Now sounding like
Speaker 1: a Sidmyer civilization, Yeah, that's exactly what's happening. Here's another quote.
Speaker 1: The relatively undervalued silver and Bengal proved a profitable source
Speaker 1: to finance the growing tea trade with China. Within a
Speaker 1: span of just three years, some seven d and twenty
Speaker 1: thousand pounds of specie was sent out of Bengal to China.
Speaker 1: The widespread corruption and plunder by the servants of the
Speaker 1: company not only transferred the wealth of the country to
Speaker 1: these individuals, but was also sent out of the country
Speaker 1: through ingenious means. Now this meant that very quickly, being
Speaker 1: Golf's hard currency, ran out the parts of India the
Speaker 1: company owned only had so much silver and gold and whatever.
Speaker 1: The sheer lack of currency meant that Indians could no
Speaker 1: longer buy and sell things. The local economy collapsed, and
Speaker 1: this also meant that suddenly the company had no money
Speaker 1: since they weren't willing to send silver over from India
Speaker 1: so they could just buy things. The company sort of
Speaker 1: twiddle it's them and failed to import grain from outside
Speaker 1: to avert the millions of deaths. In fact, they banned
Speaker 1: the importation of grain between different regions of India and
Speaker 1: seized boats to prevent it. Jesus, here's what one comes
Speaker 1: them products down at the company's store. Well, they're not
Speaker 1: buying those anymore because the company doesn't have the money
Speaker 1: to stop the famine. Vicious circle. No one's at fault, right,
Speaker 1: How could it possibly ever have been prevented? This is
Speaker 1: just what had to happen. No one could have foreseen.
Speaker 1: This is the Irish potato famines. Sorry, like quiz you
Speaker 1: on stuff even research? But was that also corporate ization?
Speaker 1: That not in the same way, but it involved a
Speaker 1: lot of very rich landown story. Yeah, that's it. We
Speaker 1: will be talking about that. I'm talking about Victoria at
Speaker 1: some point. Yeah, here is a quote from a company
Speaker 1: worker at the time about what Bingal was like during
Speaker 1: this famine. This is a guy who who's watching it
Speaker 1: as a white dude who has enough food. Quote. All
Speaker 1: through the stifling summer of seventeen seventy, the people went
Speaker 1: on dying. The husbandmen sold their cattle, they sold their
Speaker 1: implements of agriculture. They devoured their seed grain. They sold
Speaker 1: their sons and daughters, till at length no buyer of
Speaker 1: children could be found. They ate the leaves of trees
Speaker 1: and the grass on the field. And in June seventeen seventy,
Speaker 1: the resident at the Durbar affirmed that the living were
Speaker 1: feeding on the dead day and night. A torrent of
Speaker 1: famished and disease stricken wretches poured into the great cities.
Speaker 1: At an early period of the year. Pestilence had broken out.
Speaker 1: In March, we find smallpox at the Morschetta Bad. The
Speaker 1: streets were blocked up with promiscuous heaps of the dying
Speaker 1: and dead. In Terment cannot do its work quick enough.
Speaker 1: Even the dogs and jackals, the public scavengers of the East,
Speaker 1: became unable to accomplish their revolting work, and the multitude
Speaker 1: of mangled in festering corpses at length threatened the existence
Speaker 1: of the citizens. And even through all this, the East
Speaker 1: India Company keeps increasing taxes on the farmers, which must
Speaker 1: not even mean anything anymore, Like fine, no, they're still
Speaker 1: growing food, it's just being taken from them while they're starving.
Speaker 1: So why don't they just eat the food that they're harvesting?
Speaker 1: Right then there's guys with guns there, but yeah, and
Speaker 1: they've got to like, bad things will happen if you
Speaker 1: don't pay your time. What's crazy is they treat it
Speaker 1: like it's business, like they have some god given right
Speaker 1: to do this because they created this abstract thing we
Speaker 1: call like a business plan structure. But really it boils
Speaker 1: down to robbery because at the end of the day,
Speaker 1: it's always just like, well, why couldn't China come trade
Speaker 1: directly for silver with India? Well, because we'd kill them
Speaker 1: all and we'd shoot it. You, that's what it comes
Speaker 1: down to, you the guns. Yeah, yeah, yeah, So the
Speaker 1: taxes on the Bengalese people are higher in seventeen seventy
Speaker 1: and seventy one, the year the famine starts. Then in
Speaker 1: seventeen sixty nine to seventy, the year that preceded the famine.
Speaker 1: I mean, you work on a grain farm and you
Speaker 1: go home and eat your dead sibling, your children you
Speaker 1: sold a long time ago. Yeah, So in April of
Speaker 1: seventeen seventy quote astoundingly, the Council, acting on the advice
Speaker 1: of the Muslim Minister of Finance Mohammed Rezakan, added ten
Speaker 1: percent to the land acts of the ensuing year, but
Speaker 1: the distress continued to increase at a rate that baffled
Speaker 1: official calculation. In the second week of May, the central
Speaker 1: government awoke to find itself in the midst of universal
Speaker 1: and irredeemable starvation. So some company officers advised basically cutting
Speaker 1: taxes and giving back some of what they'd taken so
Speaker 1: the people wouldn't starve to death. But that just didn't happen.
Speaker 1: I can't because they want some were living people to
Speaker 1: work the field. I really thought their response would be
Speaker 1: give them all a pittance of food. They're even like,
Speaker 1: I don't know if we shouldn't even give them that.
Speaker 1: It's not the company is a big force. Make like,
Speaker 1: the company is a big force of making some of
Speaker 1: these calls. But a lot of it's just individuals being like, Yeah,
Speaker 1: but if we give some of it back, then I'll
Speaker 1: be able to steal less. And I want to be
Speaker 1: home in a year with a pile of money, so
Speaker 1: I'll just keep stealing for another year. Still totally reliance
Speaker 1: on most of the people being like and that's worth
Speaker 1: watching everyone starved to death around me while I'm here.
Speaker 1: If we've learned one thing about corporations from the last
Speaker 1: four hundred years, it's that they have a great deal
Speaker 1: of foresight. Yeah, and never murder in poison themselves out
Speaker 1: of like sci fi movies where there's a desert planet,
Speaker 1: but so but the evil corporate lady lives in like
Speaker 1: a glass pyramid filled with water. Always seems so over
Speaker 1: the top, but it's real. It's reality. Boy, howdy has
Speaker 1: it happened? So yeah. By May seventeen, seventy one third
Speaker 1: of the Bengalese population six out of every seventeen people
Speaker 1: was dead. Company officials estimated one half of the cultivators
Speaker 1: and pairs of revenue will perish with hunger. The sheer
Speaker 1: scale of the devastation was terrible for the company's bank statement.
Speaker 1: By October, the company started to notice that an awful
Speaker 1: lot of the workers they relied on had been quote
Speaker 1: destroyed by the famine. Oh so we're already using business
Speaker 1: devil speak. They're already euphemizing it. Um, some of our
Speaker 1: bipedal product was destroyed a transaction. Yeah. Quote the failure
Speaker 1: of a single up following a year of scarcity had
Speaker 1: wiped out an estimated ten million human beings. God, so
Speaker 1: that's the death toll of this first famine, ten million.
Speaker 1: The famines continued though, off and on through the seventeen seventies.
Speaker 1: In seventeen eighty, another big famine hit and again one
Speaker 1: third of Bengal just died. Revenue plummeted. The British government
Speaker 1: started to get involved. Even to people at the time,
Speaker 1: what was happening was seen as horrific, and the press
Speaker 1: attack the East India Company. By seventeen eighty four, the
Speaker 1: British government started to pass the first regulations limiting the
Speaker 1: company's powers, really limiting any company's powers. This is the
Speaker 1: birth of regulation and corporations. It's because the corporation killed
Speaker 1: ten million people, probably more like twelve to fifteen at
Speaker 1: that point. It's roughly a holocaust to a holocaust and
Speaker 1: a half worth of human beings. You hear me slowing
Speaker 1: down because my brains just grappling with actually trying to
Speaker 1: absorb in. Oh, and there's another that's real that we
Speaker 1: were like, this way of organizing humans seems to be
Speaker 1: making money. Oh, it also kills people. Well, that's fine,
Speaker 1: unless goes too far. When did it go too far?
Speaker 1: When did we go like, maybe it has gone too far?
Speaker 1: When ten million people were dead, Well, ten million people died,
Speaker 1: and then ten years later, maybe we should do another
Speaker 1: probably five or six million people died. And then in
Speaker 1: eighteen hundred ten percent of all of India died. There's
Speaker 1: not even a death count for that. It's just roughly
Speaker 1: one billion people in India today. But probably if we're
Speaker 1: trying to take the whole East India Company's death toll
Speaker 1: from famine, it wouldn't be outrageous to assume somewhere in
Speaker 1: the million deaths by this whole over the whole course
Speaker 1: of this whole period. So it's good to know that
Speaker 1: humanity does have a point where you're like, is this
Speaker 1: too many people that you can for me to have
Speaker 1: slightly bigger houses? Yeah? Uh so, Yeah. In seventeen eighty four,
Speaker 1: they start regulating the Company. In seventeen eighty eight, Edmund
Speaker 1: or someone Burke, I forget which Burke gives a speech
Speaker 1: at the impeachment trial of India's Governor General. Because they're like,
Speaker 1: you've killed like twenty million people, you should probably not
Speaker 1: have this job. So Burke called the company quote a
Speaker 1: rogue state, waging war, administering justice, minting coin and collecting
Speaker 1: revenue over Indian territory. He didn't exaggerate. Horace Walpole, a
Speaker 1: Whig member of Parliament, said at the time that quote,
Speaker 1: the oppressions of India, and even of the English settled
Speaker 1: there under the rape and cruelties of the servants of
Speaker 1: the company have now reached England and created a general
Speaker 1: clamor here to such monopolies were imputed the late famine
Speaker 1: of Bengal and the loss of three million they didn't
Speaker 1: know the whole total of its inhabitants. A tithe of
Speaker 1: these crimes was sufficient to inspire horror. So the famine
Speaker 1: of seventeen seventy, seventeen eighty and seventeen ninety nine. It
Speaker 1: is likely, and these are other historians to me saying this,
Speaker 1: that the famines the East India Company brought onto India
Speaker 1: where the single greatest atrocity, the single worst disaster of
Speaker 1: the entire seventeen hundreds of that whole century. It was
Speaker 1: the beginning of the end for the East India Company too,
Speaker 1: although businessmen would continue to trade and profit off of
Speaker 1: her for nearly a tree. India continued to suffer famines,
Speaker 1: which led to unrest in war, which led to uprisings
Speaker 1: and crackdowns. This led the East India Company's army to expand,
Speaker 1: which led them to take over more and more of India,
Speaker 1: until pretty soon they controlled basically all of India and
Speaker 1: had an army of two hundred thousand soldiers. A guy
Speaker 1: named Lord Wellesley eventually wound up in charge, and he
Speaker 1: became the company's most successful general. He's the guy who
Speaker 1: expanded them from sort of the eastern coast of India
Speaker 1: all the way into what's now Pakistan and eventually Afghanistan.
Speaker 1: According to the wonderful book Return of a King. By
Speaker 1: seventeen ninety six, quote the company was expanding rapidly out
Speaker 1: from its coastal factories to conquer much of the interior.
Speaker 1: Wellesley's Indian campaigns would ultimately annex more territory than all
Speaker 1: of Napoleon's conquests in Europe. Yeah. This eventually brought the
Speaker 1: East India Company to the doorstep of Afghanistan. In eighteen sixteen,
Speaker 1: the British East India Company extended an offer of asylum
Speaker 1: to Shah Shuja, the exiled king of Afghanistan. In eighteen
Speaker 1: thirty nine, due to a basically minor dispute with the
Speaker 1: Afghan from it, the East India Company invaded Afghanistan, conquered
Speaker 1: the country and placed Shah Shuja on a throne as
Speaker 1: a puppet Lord Auckland, who was the guy who had
Speaker 1: ordered the invasion, and the company quickly lost interest in
Speaker 1: their conquest of Afghanistan and immediately invaded China next because
Speaker 1: it feels it seems like they feel that, well, you
Speaker 1: got to invade something that's not mandatory, you're allowed to stop.
Speaker 1: Let me explain it to you, Michael. They've been selling
Speaker 1: opium to China and it had created a horrific endemic
Speaker 1: drug problem that was crippling the local economy and killing
Speaker 1: people in huge So the Chinese government band opium sales,
Speaker 1: and so they had to invade China to keep selling
Speaker 1: them deadly just like it's like, yeah, we funked up
Speaker 1: India until it's stopped bleeding money, so we have to
Speaker 1: move on to a new place and funk that place up,
Speaker 1: So let's stop the bleeding. I'm of the opinion that
Speaker 1: this is all fine. Well know that the great heroes
Speaker 1: in history are probably the afghan people, because the East
Speaker 1: India Company is on a tear killing people by the millions,
Speaker 1: conquering land, and then they take over Afghanistan and they
Speaker 1: find themselves the rulers of Afghanistan, a country that has
Speaker 1: nothing of value for the East India Company. It's not profitable.
Speaker 1: So they have this huge army in Afghanistan that they
Speaker 1: start needing to cut back on. And they can't cut
Speaker 1: back on the army because Afghanistan is big and hard
Speaker 1: to control, so they stopped paying bribes to all of
Speaker 1: these local war lords, which means the local warlords start
Speaker 1: attacking the army, which means there's eventually a gigantic revolution
Speaker 1: in Afghanistan that ousts the garrison, the Company's giant army
Speaker 1: in Kabul and wipes it out in the mountain passes
Speaker 1: of Afghanistan. And there, you know, these are British soldiers
Speaker 1: with muskets, unrifled guns that aren't good at very long range.
Speaker 1: The Afghans have these weapons called Jezail Cheese, which are
Speaker 1: basically sniper rifles. So they're hiding in the mountains murdering
Speaker 1: huge numbers of British soldiers and their Indian sepoys, and
Speaker 1: they just massacre this entire British army. It's a huge,
Speaker 1: huge disaster. Uh. And this disaster comes after years of
Speaker 1: declining revenues for the East India Company and ballooning expenses. Finally,
Speaker 1: all of this helps kill the East India Company as
Speaker 1: a global power. In eighteen fifty eight, the British government
Speaker 1: finally decided that letting a for profit enterprise governed the
Speaker 1: lives of tens of millions of people and like a
Speaker 1: fifth of the world was a really bad idea. Instead
Speaker 1: they give it to a queen. Yeah, there's there's if.
Speaker 1: I feel like the Afghan uprising just delayed what we're
Speaker 1: already So it was it was like there was this
Speaker 1: weird chance at the very beginning of corporate history that
Speaker 1: corporations and governments could have merged then become one and
Speaker 1: the same. In the East India Company could have been
Speaker 1: like literally the empire and just own the world, and
Speaker 1: they stop that from happening for five years. It's still
Speaker 1: gonna happen, but it could have happened really fast. There's
Speaker 1: news today that President Donald Trump is considering a plan
Speaker 1: by Eric Prince, the founder of Blackwater, to basically put
Speaker 1: private mercenaries in charge of the war of An Afghanistan
Speaker 1: and have a guy who Erik Prince is described as
Speaker 1: a viceroy run Afghanistan for the Western Powers. So there's
Speaker 1: a chance the Afghans might get to stop the next
Speaker 1: stage ship. Of course, Trump has named six to the
Speaker 1: Council of Operance. Yeah, like everything's becoming So I will
Speaker 1: tell you one thing about Afghanistan. Nobody wins when they
Speaker 1: fight there, other than not even after the Afghan people
Speaker 1: don't even win. Everybody loses, but you don't win. And
Speaker 1: usually when you quote unquote win or are are holding
Speaker 1: it for a while, you're just they're being hot standing
Speaker 1: around and it It's worth noting that when we invaded Afghanistan,
Speaker 1: the guy we put in charge of the country was
Speaker 1: a dude named Hamid Karzai who was an ascendant of
Speaker 1: Shah Shuja. The people the East India company put in
Speaker 1: charge of Afghanistan, who was then massacred after the revolution.
Speaker 1: It's a small, small, awful world, dumb, dumb world. So yeah.
Speaker 1: In eighteen fifty eight, India becomes the property of Queen Victoria,
Speaker 1: who we will almost certainly discuss in a subsequent episode.
Speaker 1: The East India Company survives for another few years, but
Speaker 1: it is dissolved for good in eighteen seventy four by
Speaker 1: the East India Stock Redemption Act. This ever, shall we
Speaker 1: get our tea? Who's to say at this point, I'm
Speaker 1: sure there's competitors. So that's that's the era of heroic
Speaker 1: commerce slog. What does that have to do with the
Speaker 1: Boston Tea party? They just brought the tea that yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: It's really just like the militarization aspect, and that's crazy
Speaker 1: that we're going down that road again. And I left
Speaker 1: out there's so because we didn't really talk about North America.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of the story of these companies, and
Speaker 1: we didn't even because there's just so much totally because
Speaker 1: I don't know about that, but the things I do know.
Speaker 1: It's so this is like the template for like ouran
Speaker 1: contra all kinds of ship that I do know about
Speaker 1: the I'm like, oh, this is the first time people
Speaker 1: were like, let's do this particular kind of It's a
Speaker 1: template for Iran, it's a template for all these ideas.
Speaker 1: It's a template for colonialism, and thus all these colonial
Speaker 1: wars have their start here. This is a big part
Speaker 1: of the origin of our problems with race in the
Speaker 1: United States, because these corporations really jump start the slave
Speaker 1: trade because they're depopulating these islands of the natives, and
Speaker 1: then they need to move slaves in to work the
Speaker 1: spice plantations. It seems like it's almost and it's inevitable
Speaker 1: because you're reaching this technological threshold where we now we
Speaker 1: have compasses and sextant so we can get further away.
Speaker 1: It's just like in any community, there's going to be
Speaker 1: some bastards. You have job security for sure, and this
Speaker 1: is the first time that you're like, oh, the bastards
Speaker 1: operate on a global level now, because it's the first
Speaker 1: time this clive motherfucker can go all the way over
Speaker 1: there and funck everything up and come all the way back.
Speaker 1: It's remarkable. It's the birth of something horrible, some Cathulu
Speaker 1: type monster. Yeah, that is destined to destroy us all
Speaker 1: I firmly believe, and this is the to get and
Speaker 1: I think the tiniest bit to political just to explain
Speaker 1: somet of my own beliefs, because I've received some negative
Speaker 1: feedback from people over a few episodes for anti capitalist
Speaker 1: rants and stuff. Ill on what the internet? That's not
Speaker 1: the Internet. I know I'm not anti capitalist. I'm enjoying
Speaker 1: a delightful bag of Darrino's right now. I understand that,
Speaker 1: God damn it is good. I think they'd have to
Speaker 1: eventually pay you for it to be considered capitalism though, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's fair. But me buying the products, me enjoying a good, clean,
Speaker 1: fancy new phone is capitalism. It's not that I'm saying, Oh,
Speaker 1: this system all needs to be torn down tomorrow and
Speaker 1: I have a solution. It's that I'm saying when we
Speaker 1: start talking about how like all the deaths from communism
Speaker 1: and stuff like you hear on the right people be
Speaker 1: like communisms killed ninety million People's man, there's a lot
Speaker 1: tens and millions of people have died under communist governments.
Speaker 1: I will never argue that with you, But if you
Speaker 1: think capitalism's death toll isn't as higher for much even
Speaker 1: much higher, because it's been going on for four hundred years.
Speaker 1: You are not paying attention to the actual facts, in
Speaker 1: the actual history. Everything we do that we elevate to
Speaker 1: an ideology kills buckets of people. That's what people do.
Speaker 1: So don't get on your high horse. If you like capitalism.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to argue with you about the right
Speaker 1: way to run the world because I don't know what
Speaker 1: it is. But don't get on your high horse because
Speaker 1: whatever you believe, there's blood on your hands, or there's
Speaker 1: blood on the hands of the thing that you believe in.
Speaker 1: You don't like this show, now, I couldn't agree more
Speaker 1: as Jack Johnson saying about so long he's a wise man,
Speaker 1: my friend, we've all got the blood on our hands. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think this is I was really happy to be
Speaker 1: on this episode because it ectoes something I do. Definitely believe.
Speaker 1: There's no bigger bastard than the abstract system that develops
Speaker 1: its own momentum. Yeah, because Robert Clive, if you told
Speaker 1: him when he came to India, your actions will kill
Speaker 1: tens of millions of people. I think the guy might
Speaker 1: have killed himself. And like we don't think of him
Speaker 1: as hitler, Yeah, because he never never exactly. So it's
Speaker 1: just there's nothing. Nothing will funk you up, like a
Speaker 1: group of self interested people who none of them think
Speaker 1: of themselves as guiding the thing. The thing just it's
Speaker 1: too late now, the things rolling. Yeah, And they don't
Speaker 1: think about the larger system. They're just like, how can
Speaker 1: we get money out of this place? They don't think
Speaker 1: about what allows a region this large and densely populated
Speaker 1: to not get wiped out by famine constantly? Is it
Speaker 1: maybe that they've built systems over the course of millennia
Speaker 1: that you should pay attention. It's now your job to
Speaker 1: think that you're in sub Block C six of s
Speaker 1: District nine and you're supposed to make this number number
Speaker 1: increased tax revenues by four and that's all you're supposed
Speaker 1: and you kind of trust that someone well, if there
Speaker 1: was going to be a famine that would kill everyone,
Speaker 1: someone up the chain exactly. Damn dude. Yeah, anyway, anytally
Speaker 1: you want to plug your stuff, No, I'm want to
Speaker 1: be associated with UM. You can buy all our wonderful
Speaker 1: products on now. We are opening a merging store soon.
Speaker 1: But you can find the content that might inspire. What
Speaker 1: island is your merch store up? The only island with
Speaker 1: the right cotton for us are Yeah, our baseball caps
Speaker 1: are currently being freightered over from the Cayman Islands. Already
Speaker 1: sketchy money wise, but over at small Beans. Small Beans
Speaker 1: is the name of my outfit and you can find
Speaker 1: all of our content there. We do podcasts, sketches, occasional songs,
Speaker 1: all kinds of stuff. And I am personally on Twitter
Speaker 1: at Swain Underscore Corp. You can find me on Twitter
Speaker 1: at I right, okay. I have a book on Amazon
Speaker 1: call a Brief History Advice. Uh. And you can find
Speaker 1: this website on the internet at Behind the Bastards dot com.
Speaker 1: And you can also find us on Twitter at at
Speaker 1: Bastard's Pod. You can find us on Instagram same way. Uh.
Speaker 1: And that's that's the episode. So check back in UM
Speaker 1: next Tuesday and there will be another episode and probably
Speaker 1: something just as depressing and frightening. That's my goal. I
Speaker 1: hope it is. I hope it really is. UM. So
Speaker 1: have a good week and I love you about h