Speaker 1: M Hey everybody, I'm Robert Evans and this is again
Speaker 1: Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you everything
Speaker 1: you don't know about the very worst people in all
Speaker 1: of history. Now, today we have a very special guest, indeed,
Speaker 1: my former co worker and current friend slash friend worker,
Speaker 1: Michael s Wayne. How do y'all? Did I get that right?
Speaker 1: Swam here? That is correct from the cool Ranch. So
Speaker 1: tell you all about the great crunchy taste of doritos.
Speaker 1: We are eating Dorito's. That's not like a joke or
Speaker 1: anything like. It started out as an attempt to get
Speaker 1: money out of the Dorrito's people, and now we just
Speaker 1: eat a lot of derita You're pounding them down. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's delightful. It's great to be here, Robert, thank you
Speaker 1: so much. Yeah, thanks for showing up. So, Michael, you
Speaker 1: and I worked together for a while and now you
Speaker 1: are are the one of the head beans of the
Speaker 1: Small Beans Network. What true? Oh dat right? True? Dat
Speaker 1: tape fantastic. Uh So today we're talking about the age
Speaker 1: of heroic commerce. Have you ever heard of this? No?
Speaker 1: And you I asked for like a clueless so I
Speaker 1: would be talking about and you said, it's the age
Speaker 1: of heroic commerce, and I resisted so strongly there just
Speaker 1: to look it up. So I'm coming in fully cold.
Speaker 1: Do not know what you're talking about? Well, yeah, that
Speaker 1: is You've hit upon as I should have explained a
Speaker 1: few seconds earlier, the premise of the show, which is
Speaker 1: that I read a story about someone terrible or someone's
Speaker 1: who are terrible, Uh to a comedian guest who's coming
Speaker 1: in cold. So uh, we're gonna start in on that
Speaker 1: right now. Actually, first off, I'm going to open a
Speaker 1: diet coke and I'm going to do like a theatric open. So,
Speaker 1: my god, no matter who you are or what your
Speaker 1: personal stance on politics and capitalism is, you probably have
Speaker 1: a corporation at least one that you regard as evil.
Speaker 1: Maybe it's mont Santo, maybe it's a T and T.
Speaker 1: S Warner Media, the parent of CNN. If you're the president,
Speaker 1: perhaps you hate Blackwater now x E. Or perhaps you
Speaker 1: hate news Corps, or maybe you're not a fan of
Speaker 1: Twitter because they banned your favorite conspiracy theorist. Everybody hates
Speaker 1: at least one corporation these days. Who You've got a
Speaker 1: real problem. I feel like there's not just a story
Speaker 1: but like a solid two seasons of stories and the
Speaker 1: explanation for that for another day. Uh. So, yeah, we've
Speaker 1: all got a corporation we hate, and hatred of a
Speaker 1: corporation or corporations feels like a pretty modern thing, right.
Speaker 1: You have trouble imaging someone in like sixteen oh five
Speaker 1: yelling about the corporation. Yeah, but the reality is that
Speaker 1: tens of millions of people have all over the world,
Speaker 1: with very good reason, been hating on big business since
Speaker 1: the sixteen hundreds. In fact, even with all the nightmarish
Speaker 1: climactic fury of modern oil corporations, the scandals of the
Speaker 1: tobacco industry, and the vast sea of eating disorders caused
Speaker 1: by the fashion industry in Hollywood, corporate evil may have
Speaker 1: reached its peak so far more than two hundred years ago.
Speaker 1: So join me, won't you, on a magical tour of
Speaker 1: a period of time the author Stephen are Bound calls
Speaker 1: the age of Heroic Commerce. His book Merchant Kings has
Speaker 1: been one of the major sources for this episode. So. Uh.
Speaker 1: The idea of working with several other people to run
Speaker 1: a business goes back a very long time, thousands of years,
Speaker 1: right probably to the beginning of currency in cities and stuff.
Speaker 1: I think Zilgian symbols started that. Whoa oldest incorporated business
Speaker 1: still in existence? That's cool. How older they go back,
Speaker 1: I'd have to look it up, but I just know
Speaker 1: they tout that fact and I've verified it online. Well
Speaker 1: that's pretty cool. Um. So, yeah, the idea of you know,
Speaker 1: running a business with a bunch of people, that goes
Speaker 1: back a long time. But corporation is a different matter
Speaker 1: because for most of human history, there was nothing that
Speaker 1: you would want to do that it would acquire more
Speaker 1: than you know, a couple of rich people working together
Speaker 1: in order to provide the funding and the funding. I
Speaker 1: was like, there, rich people wouldn't be doing the work. No, never,
Speaker 1: never never never never, like at no point in history obviously.
Speaker 1: But you mean you're like, we don't need to put
Speaker 1: ink the paper on this. We're three rich dudes with
Speaker 1: money will do the thing. Yeah, you didn't need like
Speaker 1: if you wanted to run a factory at the very beginning,
Speaker 1: like it was, it was just a couple of rich
Speaker 1: guys could fund it, right, need it didn't take resources
Speaker 1: of huge numbers of people and like vast capital stuff,
Speaker 1: you know, anything that did that was generally the province
Speaker 1: of a state, the national government or whatever. Rome built
Speaker 1: the roads as a government, not as an of business enterprises. Right.
Speaker 1: The great granddaddy of all modern corporations was the Dutch
Speaker 1: East India Company. It was first formed in six two.
Speaker 1: It was a chartered company, so basically a bunch of
Speaker 1: people who didn't know each other all paid in so
Speaker 1: they'd get a share of the profits from this business. Uh.
Speaker 1: And in the case of the Dutch East India Company,
Speaker 1: its business was achieving a monopoly on all of the
Speaker 1: spices that came from India and Southeast Asia. So we're
Speaker 1: talking like mace. We're talking maces a cooking spice. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're related to mace, like the weapon man. I think
Speaker 1: it's probably why the spray has its name. There's also
Speaker 1: nutmeg and clothes. You don't want to get a nutmeg
Speaker 1: spray in your eyes. It's that happened all the time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and a lot of trying to sneak a cookie. Mom
Speaker 1: just goes nuts with the nut man. So yeah, now
Speaker 1: that kind of stuff you buy for like eighty nine
Speaker 1: cents from Trader Joe's in a big tube. But back
Speaker 1: in the day, it was worth enough that like, if
Speaker 1: you had a backpack of nutmeg and you like landed
Speaker 1: in London six hundreds, you were a rich man. It's
Speaker 1: crazy that like Disney or Facebook, any of the big
Speaker 1: companies you could name back then the big company that
Speaker 1: had that much money and Cloud was just like food
Speaker 1: is so fucking bland. This will fix that. Every big sucks.
Speaker 1: Thank god. Finally here's all the money. Well in, all
Speaker 1: of the spices that we've talked about so far come
Speaker 1: from our only located in a chunk of Indonesia called
Speaker 1: the Banda Islands. These are known as the Spiceries, so
Speaker 1: you get all the spy that was the only place, yeah,
Speaker 1: only place clothes grew. Um. So yeah, the Duchy c
Speaker 1: India Company is formed to try and gain a monopoly
Speaker 1: on the trade of all the spices from those delightful islands. Now,
Speaker 1: it started out with a twenty one year charter, so
Speaker 1: it was supposed to be dissolved in the money given
Speaker 1: back to its original formers after that point, but it
Speaker 1: wound up getting its chry to extend it over and
Speaker 1: over again and eventually lasted more than two centuries. So
Speaker 1: this is a company that had a long history. The
Speaker 1: Dutch East India Company was the first publicly traded corporation
Speaker 1: in the world, and the first stock market in history
Speaker 1: was created to sell its stock. Because if they were
Speaker 1: the first publicly traded they had to invent the idea
Speaker 1: that this is when people were like stock up markets.
Speaker 1: We should have this is doing so well, we should
Speaker 1: make paper that represents a portion of it and just
Speaker 1: sell that. Yeah, we don't even need the spice. People
Speaker 1: gamble on whether it'll be worth more or less at
Speaker 1: the end of the day and then let that run
Speaker 1: our entire society. So these are I mean, these are
Speaker 1: capitalist vision areas. This is the beginning of capitalism, I
Speaker 1: will say. The only maybe mild spoiler alert, I don't know.
Speaker 1: The only thing I recall about the Dutch East India
Speaker 1: Company is that I read a small plaque about it
Speaker 1: in the Slavery Museum, so that may there's some thread
Speaker 1: there possible. Oh yeah, there's some thread there, although they're
Speaker 1: not like the number one that we'll get to that later.
Speaker 1: So according to a book called The Honorable Company, which
Speaker 1: is about the British East India Company, so there's the
Speaker 1: Dutch in the British East India company to different companies
Speaker 1: almost the same name. Are they competing and how? But
Speaker 1: so the British East India Company received its Royal charter
Speaker 1: on the thirty one December in sixteen hundreds, so two
Speaker 1: years before the Dutch East India Company. Its original name
Speaker 1: was the Company of Merchants of London trading into the
Speaker 1: East Indies. Now that original name, which is not very clickable, uh,
Speaker 1: may inform you that it was not the same thing
Speaker 1: as the Dutch East India Company. To start, rather than
Speaker 1: being a modern corporation, it was basically a bunch of
Speaker 1: independent ventures under the same name. It's like a bunch
Speaker 1: of different individual boats going over to these islands, getting
Speaker 1: spices and bringing them back, all profiting independently, just sort
Speaker 1: of market under the same name. Why did they benefit.
Speaker 1: It's just like easier to all be under one name. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's what I thought at the time. Yeah, the company
Speaker 1: itself had no unlike the Dutch EA Studio Company, had
Speaker 1: no ability to invest money in new projects or decide
Speaker 1: how its funds were used across its many ventures. So
Speaker 1: the British East India Company when it starts off, is
Speaker 1: not like a modern corporation. Now a few decades later,
Speaker 1: in sixteen seventy, the Hustson Bay Company, which still exists today,
Speaker 1: is formed uh and winds up gaining control of like
Speaker 1: most of Canada. It's why we have Vancouver. Vancouver started
Speaker 1: as like a corporate outpost for this company. Imagine a
Speaker 1: meeting today for that company and you're like, well, how
Speaker 1: are we doing? Well? Were you used tell in most
Speaker 1: of Canada? This quarter we made eight hundred thousand dollars.
Speaker 1: That's quite a leg once the whole Northwest was all domain.
Speaker 1: But we're doing okay, up one and a half percent exactly.
Speaker 1: So yeah, So that's just to give you an idea
Speaker 1: of sort of this is when the idea of running
Speaker 1: corporation starts to take off and people are trying various
Speaker 1: different things. And not all of these companies are quite
Speaker 1: like modern companies. The Dutch East India Company is the
Speaker 1: one that from the start is really recognizable as a
Speaker 1: modern corporation in terms of it's it's formulation and the
Speaker 1: way that functions. Um. So, for ane idea of what
Speaker 1: made it so special, I'd like to turn to an
Speaker 1: article from the Global Trade magazine called the Violent Birth
Speaker 1: of Corporations. This is why corporations were so different from
Speaker 1: what it existed before. They were anonymous. The partners did
Speaker 1: not all have to know each other. They separated ownership
Speaker 1: from control. Elected directors made decisions, while most investors had
Speaker 1: only the choice of accepting those decisions or selling their shares.
Speaker 1: They were permanent. If one or more partners did want out,
Speaker 1: there was no need to renegotiate the whole arrangement. Finally,
Speaker 1: there were legal entities separate from any one owner, and
Speaker 1: they had unlimited life. The big trading partnerships of the
Speaker 1: sixteenth century and earlier were created with a planned date
Speaker 1: of dissolution, sometimes at the end of one voyage, sometimes
Speaker 1: after a set number of years, at which point all
Speaker 1: the firm's holdings would be liquidated and divided among the partners.
Speaker 1: The new firms, like modern corporations, did not self liquidate.
Speaker 1: They built up their capital over the years rather than
Speaker 1: distributing it back to its separate owners. So they have
Speaker 1: now created an immortal being. Yeah, has pretty wide ranging powers,
Speaker 1: as will start to get to the corporation. Corporation. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it sounds like the guild a calamitous intent from venture brothers. Right.
Speaker 1: It's because they're ahead of the curve as far as
Speaker 1: any regulation obviously, so they all get to be anonymous
Speaker 1: from even each other. They're just like Mr X has
Speaker 1: charted this mission. Yeah, it's just the company has charted exactly. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: there are some people who get into who are very
Speaker 1: critical and the big corporations of this. Yeah. So for
Speaker 1: the first two hundred years, you know, from six hundred
Speaker 1: of the corporate era, there were almost no corporations meant
Speaker 1: to service the needs of inter European trade or based
Speaker 1: solely within a single nation. So for two centuries, the
Speaker 1: job of a corporation was not operating stores or designing
Speaker 1: new products. It was plunder and conquest of the known
Speaker 1: and unknown world. Like that's why we made corporations, right.
Speaker 1: The only business that existed was exploration, and the only
Speaker 1: business enough incorporation. Yeah, yeah, exactly. You don't need a
Speaker 1: corporation to sell closed to people on the other side
Speaker 1: of the finn from you and Middle Gross England or
Speaker 1: where you just have like handshake deals with people who
Speaker 1: own carts and ships were like small businesses where it's
Speaker 1: like a shop. The shop sells the hats and you
Speaker 1: get the hats from the shop or whatever. I just
Speaker 1: wonder who managed that. Who's the first person to be like,
Speaker 1: I'm a stockbroker, I'll manage the stock of the single
Speaker 1: company and track it's ups and downs. I mean, it's
Speaker 1: sort of like evolved naturally because you start out with
Speaker 1: these things that weren't really corporations, but they had stock
Speaker 1: and they were for a limited time, and their people start,
Speaker 1: you know, once that becomes the thing. Initially it's just
Speaker 1: a way for you to get your profits from the deal.
Speaker 1: But eventually people start selling and trading the stock and
Speaker 1: there's stocks instead of just one stock. They're like, we
Speaker 1: need a building to talk about the stocks and exchange. Yes,
Speaker 1: it's snowballs or my name's not John Nasdac. So the
Speaker 1: main reason that corporations were necessary was essentially that violence
Speaker 1: was necessary in the business of international trade. Operating boats
Speaker 1: and trading stations cost a lot of money, but the
Speaker 1: real cost came because in order to force people to trade,
Speaker 1: sometimes you needed to wage war on the native peoples
Speaker 1: who had the resources you wanted. It was also necessary
Speaker 1: because these corporations all wanted monopolies on the areas they
Speaker 1: were trading in, So corporations would fight corporations. So you
Speaker 1: needed money not just to take products from one area
Speaker 1: to the other, not just to operate factories, but to
Speaker 1: operate navies and to operate land armies, and to wage
Speaker 1: war against other corporations and against the local peoples who
Speaker 1: didn't want to give you their stuff. So that's why
Speaker 1: corporations are necessary. It's staggering to imagine how profitable this
Speaker 1: must have been for the home country government for them
Speaker 1: not to give a ship like that private citizens. You know,
Speaker 1: we're amassing a navy and be like, well, just let
Speaker 1: them do it. They they'll pay millions and millions of dollars.
Speaker 1: That's how it starts. We'll cover it gets more complicated.
Speaker 1: But at the start, yeah, the Dutch in British East
Speaker 1: India companies were not just licensed to trade. They had
Speaker 1: a literal license to kill. They had a power to
Speaker 1: declare war and they did so regularly, like without governmental Yeah, none,
Speaker 1: none necessary whatsoever. Now it didn't start out violent. In
Speaker 1: late one the British East India Company was the first
Speaker 1: corporation in the spiceries. You know these islands in Indonesia
Speaker 1: that are just filled the fucking bursting with delightful spices.
Speaker 1: Spices like the delicious spices on this cool ranch Dorrito's
Speaker 1: chip that I'm going to fortify myself with before getting
Speaker 1: into the rest of this. Oh yeah, that's that Malleck
Speaker 1: acid you're tasting. We should find the island they grow
Speaker 1: that acid on, I mean, monodium cultures all day. M hmm,
Speaker 1: that's a good derrito. So in late one when the
Speaker 1: British East India Company winds up there, uh, it's actually
Speaker 1: pretty peaceful. You know, there's no other corporations around yet.
Speaker 1: The native islanders are pretty peaceful people. The vast majority
Speaker 1: of gunpowder expended by the British East India Company is
Speaker 1: used saluting, like they'll pass a poor how they'll pass
Speaker 1: another ship and they'll fire into the air. And so
Speaker 1: most of the people who die at this point die
Speaker 1: in saluting accidents. Just well, let's here's a quote from
Speaker 1: the Honorable Company. The indiscriminate firing of a few pieces,
Speaker 1: often on the flimsiest of free texts, would account for
Speaker 1: a good many lives, so much so that in London
Speaker 1: the directors would be moved to protests that it was
Speaker 1: quite unnecessary to salute every port, every passing vessel, every sailor,
Speaker 1: every imaginable anniversary. Yet, if anything, the practice grew, and
Speaker 1: there was probably more powder expended in ceremony than in bath.
Speaker 1: So it's National peach Day. Shoot those guys I forgot,
Speaker 1: which is a very male thing to do. We've got cannons,
Speaker 1: were on a boat and we're started with gunpowder. Shoots
Speaker 1: some stuff. So the Honorable Company tells the story of
Speaker 1: a captain brand of a boat named the Ascension, who
Speaker 1: quote had the unusual misfortune of being shot by the
Speaker 1: guns of his own ship in somber mood. He was
Speaker 1: rowed ashore to attend the funeral of the Red Dragon
Speaker 1: and other boat's mate. When the assumptions gunner let fly
Speaker 1: with the usual three guns salute for a deceased officer,
Speaker 1: and four Actunately, the gunner, being not so careful as
Speaker 1: you should have been, had forgotten that his guns were
Speaker 1: loaded and that the captain was within range. One ball
Speaker 1: scored a direct hit and slewed the captain and the
Speaker 1: boatswain's mate start dead, so that they went to see
Speaker 1: the funeral of another and we're both buried themselves. Oh
Speaker 1: I missed the ocean, dude. Well, they were supposed to
Speaker 1: just put powder in the cannons, so it made note.
Speaker 1: But they just left the ball and shot the captain.
Speaker 1: So it's a little bit of a slap dish operation
Speaker 1: at the start. Yeah, it sounds like it's just a
Speaker 1: pack of mercenaries with no training. Oftentimes, these corporations started
Speaker 1: off with a name like the Adventurers Association of whatever,
Speaker 1: because it's just guys with guns going out here. Rich Like,
Speaker 1: I don't think it's a coincidence that their initials are THHC.
Speaker 1: That's all I'm saying. Oh ship, Wait are they the
Speaker 1: honorable Company? Oh yeah, yeah, that's a nickname for him.
Speaker 1: But yeah, right, but that would be a nickname later.
Speaker 1: Well that's what my dealer calls himself. That's all him.
Speaker 1: So weird dude. Yeah, it's weird that you have a
Speaker 1: dealer in Los Angeles. It seems unnecessary but complicating matters.
Speaker 1: I like awkwardly hanging out with a weird dude to
Speaker 1: get my weed to give him sixty dollars for a
Speaker 1: bag of Yeah, speaking of giving people too much money
Speaker 1: for a tiny amount. Yeah. So around sixteen sixteen o nine,
Speaker 1: the Dutch East India Company makes it to the Spiceries.
Speaker 1: Right now, they had a charter to establish a monopoly
Speaker 1: on spice trading in Asia and India. Things have been
Speaker 1: peaceful up to this point, but now that the Dutch
Speaker 1: were here, they decided they didn't want any English assholes
Speaker 1: buying and selling spices from the same islands that they were.
Speaker 1: So in sixteen o nine, Admiral Peter Verhoven, I'm assuming
Speaker 1: the ancestor, took thirteen warships to the Banda Islands, the
Speaker 1: world's only source of nutmeg and mace. Here the orders
Speaker 1: his corporate masters sent him with, we draw your special
Speaker 1: attention to the islands in which grow the clothes and nutmeg,
Speaker 1: and we instruct you to strive after winning them for
Speaker 1: the company, either by treaty or by force. The precious nutmeg.
Speaker 1: Thousands will bleed for the nutmeg. Yeah, like, what are
Speaker 1: you willing to die for? Oh nutmeger? That's number one?
Speaker 1: With a bullet or a cannon shot, I guess uh.
Speaker 1: So Admiral Verhoeven took with him an army of one
Speaker 1: thousand soldiers, including Japanese mercenaries with swords meant to be
Speaker 1: used as executioners, to enforce corporate will through terror. If
Speaker 1: this isn't in the six hundreds. It sounds like a
Speaker 1: cyberpunk store. Also, had the natives in that area been
Speaker 1: rebellious or like stood up for themselves or are they
Speaker 1: going in like we're gonna need some executioners. Let's just
Speaker 1: it'll be nice to have them. They think it's it'll
Speaker 1: be nice to have him. And he's planning to funk
Speaker 1: with the British. Okay, and you want some samurai if
Speaker 1: you're really going to murder British. But then the anniversary
Speaker 1: of something comes along the accidentally just executed everybody, So
Speaker 1: Behoven's big enemies or yeah, the to Sheast India Company
Speaker 1: and the Portuguese. So he wants to expel basically everyone
Speaker 1: who's not the Dutch East India Company from the Spice
Speaker 1: Islands and have because he who controls the Spice controls
Speaker 1: the dinner day. Yeah, it's going to come in here.
Speaker 1: On April nineteen, sixteen o nine, the Admiral came ashore
Speaker 1: and the largest of the banded isles with two and
Speaker 1: fifty men and out gifts to the assembled natives and
Speaker 1: told them that they had quote broken their promise to
Speaker 1: trade only with the Dutch. As a result, he said,
Speaker 1: the company was building a fort and a permanent factory
Speaker 1: on the island to keep track of things. Then he
Speaker 1: went around to all the different tribal chiefs and had
Speaker 1: them signed agreements which none of them could read, to
Speaker 1: give his company a monopoly on the nutmeg trade from
Speaker 1: their island. The islanders did not take well to this.
Speaker 1: For one thing, he just had all the chiefs on
Speaker 1: one island sign in agreement, and then he tried to
Speaker 1: enforce it on all the islands, and they were like,
Speaker 1: we're different countries, basically, dude, like, we don't work that way.
Speaker 1: And for another thing, no one in the Banda Islands
Speaker 1: understood why they should agree to give any company a
Speaker 1: monopoly over their stuff. The goods he tried to buy
Speaker 1: them off with were basically wool in velvet, neither of
Speaker 1: which was useful for people on tropical islands. So they
Speaker 1: were like, what are we getting out of this? But yeah,
Speaker 1: Verehoven keeps taking islands. So in a little bit later
Speaker 1: he lands with seven fifty of his troops and another island, Nyara,
Speaker 1: and he starts building a big fort. The local people
Speaker 1: decided to take matters into their own hands, and we're
Speaker 1: going to get into how the local people fight back
Speaker 1: against sort of corporate encroachment. But first we have another
Speaker 1: kind of corporate encroachment that will not result in the
Speaker 1: destruction of island cultures. We'll see, we'll see probably not
Speaker 1: gut now, Actually I will I will guarantee none of
Speaker 1: the sponsors of this show are going to destroy islands
Speaker 1: in Indonesia. Robert doesn't speak from both of us. I
Speaker 1: think it's at time and we're back, and we are
Speaker 1: talking about Admiral Peter Verehoven of the Dutch East India
Speaker 1: Company and his attempts to build a monopoly in the
Speaker 1: Spice Island. So he's landing on islands, he's signing agreements
Speaker 1: with the people on islands, he's building his sulb some forces,
Speaker 1: and he's just landed on the island of Nero with
Speaker 1: seven fifty men, and he starts building a giant fortress
Speaker 1: so that he can stop anyone else from trading with
Speaker 1: the island. The local people invite the admiral to parlay
Speaker 1: in the middle of nowhere to talk to him about
Speaker 1: sort of the limitations of this agreement, and he obliged them,
Speaker 1: bringing along too chained up English prisoners as a sign
Speaker 1: of his dominance over the British East India Company to
Speaker 1: be like, check out what a boss I am. I've
Speaker 1: got these dudes and chains who aren't Dutch but probably
Speaker 1: look the same to you, because we're all Europeans, like
Speaker 1: Bob Iger's showing up to the lucasfilm negotiations with like,
Speaker 1: look at this dude from Time Warner, I got chained
Speaker 1: over here. Yeah maybe with his his lips sewn together.
Speaker 1: I imagine Bob Iger sows a lot of people's lips together.
Speaker 1: I could see that. Yeah. Uh so. Yeah. When the
Speaker 1: admiral and his men arrived at the meet up point,
Speaker 1: they found it empty. So the admiral sent out a
Speaker 1: scout who found some locals hiding and apparently terrified in
Speaker 1: the woods. Here's a quote from the book Merchant Kings.
Speaker 1: They informed him that they had become frightened at the
Speaker 1: side of so many arms. Dutchman would vere Hoof please
Speaker 1: leave his soldiers arms and guns under the tree, bringing
Speaker 1: only his senior negotiators to them so that they could
Speaker 1: talk safely without the soldiers shadowing the talks. So this
Speaker 1: is a sign of how arrogant these Europeans are. A
Speaker 1: fair Hooven's like, of course, and then his second in command,
Speaker 1: Admiral Lakbar like and he's like, shut up a bar,
Speaker 1: we're going in. Yeah. The prisoners like, oh my, I
Speaker 1: don't think it's on the up and up. Shut off,
Speaker 1: you filthy englishmen. Dutch courage shall prevail. So he goes
Speaker 1: for the meeting with a few dozen of his aids
Speaker 1: and stuff, and they're all massacred and the Admiral's decapitated
Speaker 1: and his head is mounted on a stick just like
Speaker 1: maybe it's just like, uh so, this marked the start
Speaker 1: of a general uprising against the Dutch across the islands.
Speaker 1: Luckily for the company, they had a thousand armed men
Speaker 1: and more than a dozen warships. Uh So, the next
Speaker 1: company leader, the guy who gets promoted when Vereh Hooven
Speaker 1: gets his head cut off, is a guy named Simon Hohen,
Speaker 1: and he immediately starts burning down village, those executing islanders
Speaker 1: and stealing everything that isn't nailed down is revenge for
Speaker 1: the killings. His forces were eventually beaten in battle and
Speaker 1: had to flee to their boats. And but then they
Speaker 1: just enacted a naval blockade and you know, people have
Speaker 1: been trading with the Spice Islands for a while now,
Speaker 1: so their population had grown, they've been doing very well.
Speaker 1: They were no longer self sufficient in terms of food.
Speaker 1: They required trade from other islands and from outside. So
Speaker 1: he just starts starving them. This is so star Wars.
Speaker 1: Now a trade blockade on Curissant has prevented the Spice
Speaker 1: from Is this the long long ago Lucas was talking about?
Speaker 1: This is very episode one. Yeah, So they got this
Speaker 1: naval blockade going and it works. The local surrender because
Speaker 1: they don't want to starve to death, and the entire
Speaker 1: island of Nero becomes property of the Dutch East India Corporation,
Speaker 1: in whose eyes everyone, including the people of the military
Speaker 1: conquest they surrendered. The company said, like in the agreement
Speaker 1: it was stated like this is to be kept by
Speaker 1: us forever. Wow, like we just own this island now,
Speaker 1: and this is the first time that had happened. So
Speaker 1: not a lot of average when it comes to trade
Speaker 1: back to the trade table. So look, I know you
Speaker 1: own us now, but the spices are still good right
Speaker 1: well how and sailed away from the band Islands and
Speaker 1: the islanders went right back to trading with people they pleased,
Speaker 1: albeit just kind of quietly this time, so they haven't
Speaker 1: figured out force projection yet, so the natives are still
Speaker 1: able to get away with some stuff. But the stage
Speaker 1: had been set for the Dutch East India Corporation's rise
Speaker 1: to power. By three the end of its original twenty
Speaker 1: one year charter, its forces had engaged in naval battles
Speaker 1: with every major c power on the world because they're
Speaker 1: trading all around Asia and Europe at this point, they're
Speaker 1: going up into China. They're just sending boats everywhere and
Speaker 1: they're constantly fighting with people. This Yeah, it's like the wire,
Speaker 1: like it's inherent to trade that. Well, when you get there,
Speaker 1: you're gonna have to fun some people. You have to
Speaker 1: shoot some people. Then you control the corner. Then you
Speaker 1: can start selling the products. Yeah yeah, yeah, so and
Speaker 1: this is a lot of companies will set up posts
Speaker 1: and stuff, right, you know, and they'll maybe conquer the post,
Speaker 1: but they weren't taking much land beyond that were fortresses.
Speaker 1: It sounds like, which I'm imagining as flying steampunk fortresses.
Speaker 1: And please don'ticipate that that's perfectly fun. Yeah, but the
Speaker 1: Duchy Cindia Company starts actually trying to do more than that,
Speaker 1: trying to actually rule land to an extent, and you
Speaker 1: know they're not good at it at first, but that's
Speaker 1: where their ambition starts to head. So in addition to
Speaker 1: fighting the local peoples, they're also fighting the British East
Speaker 1: India Company. At this point, you know, there are sort
Speaker 1: of fighting them in the market, but there's also like
Speaker 1: street fights in these towns and these islands between company
Speaker 1: representatives and stuff, and you know, things gradually start to escalate.
Speaker 1: And this brings us to a guy named Jan Peter
Speaker 1: Zoon Cohen. Now Cohen was born in seven He served
Speaker 1: as a junior merchant in Verhoven's fleet and distinguished himself
Speaker 1: by quite literally writing reports. Like he he wrote really
Speaker 1: good reports on how to make more money in these islands.
Speaker 1: It was that guy, See, I think a guy who
Speaker 1: just makes his living writing these law reports. A guy
Speaker 1: like that, You know what I mean? Robert, Yeah, you
Speaker 1: hate that just sits around researching and type type type
Speaker 1: and away. All right, So this guy hate already, I
Speaker 1: remember Zoonah Cohen. Yeah, but well Piaster Zoon, Piper Zoon,
Speaker 1: John piers Zo, I'm not even gonna try to Frank
Speaker 1: tider Zo. So By six fourteen, Cohen rose to become
Speaker 1: the second in command of the company's operations and the spiceries, which,
Speaker 1: to be fair, was as much about not dying of
Speaker 1: tropical disease as it was about merits. Other than that,
Speaker 1: very hard at darkness, It's like, that's a real important point.
Speaker 1: Was at the top the British guy who hasn't died
Speaker 1: of malaria yet. Yeah, he was just born immune to malaria.
Speaker 1: So he's the boss. Yeah, everyone else died in a month. Um.
Speaker 1: So Cohen starts looking over the broader economic situation in
Speaker 1: the spiceries and one thing becomes very clear to him,
Speaker 1: and this is a quote from the book Merchant Kings.
Speaker 1: Spices grew in such abundance in these regions that there
Speaker 1: was no shortage of supply. Hence competition from the English
Speaker 1: could not be tolerated because this would lower prices in
Speaker 1: your up and make the business unprofitable, which is literally
Speaker 1: like the epitome of evil because on the pole from
Speaker 1: empathy too, it's like, yeah, so there's this thing everyone
Speaker 1: in the world wants. Oh, it turns out God has
Speaker 1: left such a that everyone could just have it, and
Speaker 1: it's fine, Well, we better burn most of it, like
Speaker 1: keep it locked in this box, and they do that.
Speaker 1: Throughout this period. They will exterminate nutmeg from several of
Speaker 1: these other islands, just to make it easy for them
Speaker 1: to control. Like they'd be like, well, these islands are
Speaker 1: too far off and we don't have enough ships to
Speaker 1: so let's just kill all the nutmeg. Flamethrowers, burn the nutmeg.
Speaker 1: No one else gets nutmeg. To say they're evil, but
Speaker 1: it smells delicious around here. It's delightful, delightly scented island. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So coin solutions for the company to expand throughout the
Speaker 1: region and get a you know, a total monopoly. Um.
Speaker 1: This way they have the power to restrict the supply
Speaker 1: of spices in Europe and thus always charge really high prices,
Speaker 1: which was necessary because they were running an increasingly large
Speaker 1: navy and army and that ship don't come cheap. So
Speaker 1: in order to achieve this vision, Cohen called to the
Speaker 1: creation of an even larger corporate fleet so that he
Speaker 1: could assault the Spanish and the Portuguese and the Philippines
Speaker 1: and Macau in China. He also advocated sending Dutch colonists
Speaker 1: and slaves to colonize these newly conquered territories all throughout
Speaker 1: Southeast Asia. It was a beautiful dream. And the Council
Speaker 1: of seventeen, who were the board of directors for this,
Speaker 1: you know right, it's that's a sinister This whole story
Speaker 1: is so like it should take place in the future
Speaker 1: and this should be three years from now or maybe
Speaker 1: time is cyclical, because this really feels like what our
Speaker 1: corporate cultural we currently have is gonna return to ultimately,
Speaker 1: like people start sniping CEOs and ship. Yeah, this is
Speaker 1: gonna happen. It sounds like in twenty years this will happen.
Speaker 1: Most of the players will have robot arms exactly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it'll be cool as hell. It'll be better. Our
Speaker 1: version will be higher effects but yeah, yeah, way higher
Speaker 1: effects budget. So yeah, the Council of seventeen gets on board.
Speaker 1: But to actually achieve his goals, Cohen knew he would
Speaker 1: first have to kick the British out of the band aisles.
Speaker 1: So there's a bunch of different islands. They're concerned with
Speaker 1: a lot of other trading points. But he starts trying
Speaker 1: to really lock down the bandas so two of the
Speaker 1: islands I and Run had not signed any kind of
Speaker 1: agreement with the Dutch, they were still free and independent.
Speaker 1: Here's how a book The Honorable Company describes the political
Speaker 1: situation in those islands at this point in the best
Speaker 1: tradition of Southeast Asian adat consensus, each villager island was
Speaker 1: in fact as self governing and fairly democratic republic. They
Speaker 1: could withhold or dispose of their sovereignty as they saw fit.
Speaker 1: And whereas the inhabitants of neighboring Nearra and Lonthor had
Speaker 1: already been bullied into accepting a large measure of Dutch control,
Speaker 1: those of out lying I and Run had managed to
Speaker 1: preserve their independence intact. So, in other words, I ruined
Speaker 1: so far away. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. But why were
Speaker 1: they able to maintain that? Is that because they were
Speaker 1: militarily stronger or just remote, they were just further away.
Speaker 1: So my lack of seagulls pun scams, yes, but I
Speaker 1: hate it, and I'm not happy that you made it.
Speaker 1: And then it's on this anyway, it's happens. It can
Speaker 1: be cut. No, it's happened, all right, there's no cutting
Speaker 1: on this h So in sixteen fifteen, the company under
Speaker 1: Cohen sent a thousand soldiers to eye to subjugate the locals.
Speaker 1: The invasion was, however, defeated and repulsed because the natives
Speaker 1: had been armed with British guns and trained by British troops,
Speaker 1: not troops of the British government, for troops of the
Speaker 1: British East India Company. It begins. So, yes, multinational corporations
Speaker 1: were funding insurgent armies to fight each other four years
Speaker 1: in the past. Wow. Yeah. And the idea of governments
Speaker 1: just funneling guns to a convenient ally that you have
Speaker 1: no control over. In the long term, just give them
Speaker 1: all our weapons, they'll do it for us. The lesson
Speaker 1: of history is that no one has ever learned anything. Ever. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I always feel like learn history so that you know
Speaker 1: what the repetition is going to be noted, because you're
Speaker 1: doomed if you're going to repeat it. People only do
Speaker 1: the same thing, just with bigger and bigger guns. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So the next year Cohensen is another army to invade I.
Speaker 1: He also sent a message ahead of them to the
Speaker 1: English soldiers helping to defend the island, saying that quote,
Speaker 1: if any slaughter of men happened, they would not be culpable.
Speaker 1: So the English company runs away because they don't want
Speaker 1: to die, and I gets conquered. Uh so sci fi
Speaker 1: and sorry, like the honorable Company and Council of seventeen
Speaker 1: lay waste to eye for spice. Oh boy, it's about
Speaker 1: to get wasted. So oh no bad, Yeah, no, it's terrible.
Speaker 1: Now at this point, the English are still active and
Speaker 1: ruining other islands in Indonesia. So Cohen's you know, he's
Speaker 1: not finished kicking them out yet. He wrote a letter
Speaker 1: to the Council of seventeen around this point that inadvertently
Speaker 1: sums up the military industrial complex today. Quote your honors
Speaker 1: should know by experience that trade in Asia must be
Speaker 1: driven and maintained under the protection in favor of your
Speaker 1: honor his own weapons, and that the weapons must be
Speaker 1: paid for by the profits from the trade, so that
Speaker 1: we cannot carry on trade without war, nor war without trade.
Speaker 1: And no, I don't under everyone who lays the foundation
Speaker 1: of the military industrial complex. How do you not scan
Speaker 1: that as Oh, and that seems bad, This might end
Speaker 1: really badly Like, uh, sir, well, what's the report from
Speaker 1: the front. Well, we have chained our trade to violence,
Speaker 1: and violence to trade, and a never ending only accelerating
Speaker 1: freight train of who knows what will happen? Good good report,
Speaker 1: like an end, like anage road to more profits. Feels
Speaker 1: like it will never go badly for at the gravy
Speaker 1: train will never stop. This seems sustainable forever. So in
Speaker 1: April thirty six, eighteen, the company promotes Cohen to head
Speaker 1: of Eastern Operations and basically gives him a mandate to congrats. Yea,
Speaker 1: I know, right, he got a plaque so hard for
Speaker 1: he did? He did, Yeah, that cannon on broccoli. He
Speaker 1: missed his kids Dutch baseball games a lot, but you
Speaker 1: know it was worth it in the end, I'm sure,
Speaker 1: because his kid's gonna go to Dutch Harvard. So yeah.
Speaker 1: Once Cohen was in total command, things quickly got even
Speaker 1: more violent. The fighting in the islands were sort of
Speaker 1: the Dutch in the British are still kind of holding
Speaker 1: an uneasy piece. You know. There are more and more
Speaker 1: street fights, there are more and more naval battles between
Speaker 1: the fleets of the corporations. Soldiers start fighting in the jungle,
Speaker 1: but sort of. While Cohen is working on eliminating the
Speaker 1: last of the British from this area, the English and
Speaker 1: Dutch governments go behind his back in a range of
Speaker 1: peace treaty for the two corporations and kind of force
Speaker 1: it on them because they're like, you're going to draw
Speaker 1: our countries into war, and like England doesn't need to
Speaker 1: be at war with the Netherlands for spices that there's
Speaker 1: plenty of thousand miles away. We don't want this, so
Speaker 1: the governments make peace. Cohen is furious about this because
Speaker 1: if there's one thing he loves, it's fighting the British
Speaker 1: East India Corporation. And I love that. This is like
Speaker 1: to be the first time in history a human had
Speaker 1: the impulse how dare the government regulate my corporation? My
Speaker 1: corporation is more important than the government. I think this
Speaker 1: is where that begins, because this is the first time
Speaker 1: that I'm aware of that a government really stepped into
Speaker 1: a multinational corporation and was like, what the fuck? Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's so much nutmeg? Why are people dying here? So Cohen, yeah,
Speaker 1: has to deal with the fact that the British East
Speaker 1: India Company is now his friend and ally he grumbles
Speaker 1: about this, but he turns his attention to fucking over
Speaker 1: a completely different group of people. The remaining unconquered Banda Islands,
Speaker 1: so he symbols an invasion force and he subjugates the
Speaker 1: remaining free indigenous people of the island chain. He burns
Speaker 1: their mosques. Uh, he requires them to pay taxes and
Speaker 1: sweet sweet spices. Uh. And when certain people among the
Speaker 1: islanders fight back and start massacring his patrols and basically
Speaker 1: draw the company into a guerrilla war, Jeanne piders and
Speaker 1: Cohen goes scorched earth on their asses. Uh. He captures
Speaker 1: forty five tribesmen, behead eight tribal elders in public, and
Speaker 1: then quarters the rest, which means he just cuts them
Speaker 1: for One officer working for Cohen at the time stated
Speaker 1: that quote things are carried on in such a criminal
Speaker 1: and murderous way that the blood of the poor people
Speaker 1: cries to Heaven for revenge. So that's one of his employees, Like,
Speaker 1: we're the bad guys. This is really clear to me.
Speaker 1: He's like quarter that man. He's quartering everybody us. He's
Speaker 1: fucking I'll tell you one thing about jan Petrizon Cohen.
Speaker 1: He's always able to fucking clean his laundry because he's
Speaker 1: got quarters coming out. That you nailed his name, That
Speaker 1: time to thank you, well play thank you? Uh so,
Speaker 1: Subjugation was not the only thing Jan Cohen was out for.
Speaker 1: His plan for the islands was, in essence, genocide. Here's
Speaker 1: how Merchant Kings describes it quote. He wanted to depopulate
Speaker 1: the islands to replace their inhabitants with imported slaves and
Speaker 1: indentured labor under company control. He proceeded with the ethnic
Speaker 1: cleansing of the band Islands over the next several months.
Speaker 1: Company troops burned and destroyed dwellings, rounded up entire villages,
Speaker 1: and hurting captives into ships so that they could be
Speaker 1: transported to Batavia and sold as slaves. Thousands of men,
Speaker 1: women and children died of disease and starvation during the voyage.
Speaker 1: Out of a total population of perhaps thirteen to fifteen thousand.
Speaker 1: Barely a thousand of the original residents remain in the
Speaker 1: Banda Islands. Holy shit, how much right can you think
Speaker 1: you have to reform the earth? That's crazy, Like showing
Speaker 1: up in a place and being like, yeah, let's move
Speaker 1: that over there, build these buildings, kill all these people,
Speaker 1: just all of them. Would it change your opinion? Though?
Speaker 1: You know that there's a nutmeg? Yeah? What do they
Speaker 1: don't you dare forget clothes at home? Are people outraged
Speaker 1: or are they just like I love heart and they're building,
Speaker 1: like the government gets taxes out of this duties and
Speaker 1: they're building nice new buildings and or what have you.
Speaker 1: If you're just a dude in the Netherlands, you're like,
Speaker 1: shipload of money is coming in from over here, and
Speaker 1: I'm sure your average person on the street in the
Speaker 1: sixte doesn't have their going like, oh, all this ship
Speaker 1: is evil. And by the height of the Dutch East
Speaker 1: India Corporation, it's responsible for something like half of all
Speaker 1: of the trade in Europe. So they become huge to
Speaker 1: the point where people just take it for granted, like well,
Speaker 1: they're just always there there McDonald's going to do. They're
Speaker 1: even it would be fair to say they're even bigger
Speaker 1: in this society as a force for like the life
Speaker 1: in commerce than Amazon is today, like half of the
Speaker 1: trade like that. They are enormous. They're like Googles. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and they just had to genocide some people. So you
Speaker 1: might think that for any rational man, or even a
Speaker 1: moderately crazy genocidal man, this would have been enough. But
Speaker 1: it was not enough for Jan Peterson Cohen. He decided
Speaker 1: unilaterally to reneg on the peace treaty with the British
Speaker 1: East India Company that his government had negotiated. He arrested
Speaker 1: all of the English people on the islands, tortured and
Speaker 1: executed a huge number of them, took all their goods
Speaker 1: and destroyed everything that they've built. Wow. So he's not
Speaker 1: even because a lot of times evil bastards will have
Speaker 1: the ability to dehumanize foreign or exotic people's but he's
Speaker 1: he'll kill anyone. No one is a human to Jan.
Speaker 1: That's what I mean, is like he doesn't. It's not
Speaker 1: a thing where he has any justification. He's like, I'll
Speaker 1: kill anyone who opposes me. He doesn't. Just not clear.
Speaker 1: He has fox, but he took half of his fox
Speaker 1: and he executed them in front of the other half
Speaker 1: of his fox to keep them quiet. Like that's the
Speaker 1: man here. So we're gonna talk more about Jan fucking Cohen,
Speaker 1: and then we're gonna talk about a motherfucking or named
Speaker 1: Robert Clive and a little subcontinent called India. But first,
Speaker 1: do you love products and services and using currency to
Speaker 1: purchase those things? You know it? That's how I'm here,
Speaker 1: it's the best off. We go and we're back. We're back.
Speaker 1: When we're talking about Jan Piastres and Cohen Jan Pizza ship,
Speaker 1: it's a real piece of shit, real the piece of
Speaker 1: shittiest Cohen there's ever been. What are if the Cohen Brothers,
Speaker 1: it would be weird piece of ship. It would be
Speaker 1: weird if we've been talking about ancestors to both Paul
Speaker 1: Verehoven and the Cohen Brothers, the three greatest directors of
Speaker 1: all history, and they hear this and have a bare
Speaker 1: chested fist fight to resolve the conflict or make this
Speaker 1: into a sweetass movie. There you go, Because I think
Speaker 1: if you're gonna have the Cohen Brothers and Paul Verehoven
Speaker 1: came up on a movie, you need Verehoven for how
Speaker 1: bloody this story is. You have the Cohen Brothers direct
Speaker 1: like the peaceful native people in their their plight, and
Speaker 1: I think you have Paul Verehoven direct the Dutch after
Speaker 1: the landing. So yeah, Jan's corporate masters were angry that
Speaker 1: he had disobeyed them and massacred the British company, but
Speaker 1: he'd also guaranteed them soul World monopoly over nutmeg and
Speaker 1: mace two of the most valuable things on the planet.
Speaker 1: Um So, they gave him histories first slap on the
Speaker 1: wrist corporate punishment, and also gave it to him with
Speaker 1: a gigantic bonus uh so literal golden parachute. Well, he
Speaker 1: stays on. No, they're not going to kick it out.
Speaker 1: He's really good at this. Uh so. One of the
Speaker 1: company's directors, looking out at the burnt farms and slave
Speaker 1: run plantations that had replaced a once thriving society and
Speaker 1: the band aisles, said, quote, this is fine, this seems
Speaker 1: good to me. Oh no, he said, there is no
Speaker 1: profit at all in an empty sea, empty countries and
Speaker 1: dead people. That's I agree. Like, what at some point
Speaker 1: if you burn everything the funk down, where are you
Speaker 1: getting the nutmeg? Dude? Well he was right eventually, because
Speaker 1: this all does collapse for the Dutch India Company, but
Speaker 1: for a while it's super profitable and the Dutch East
Speaker 1: India Company becomes most powerful corporation on the planet. Cohen
Speaker 1: died of a horrible tropical disease in age at age
Speaker 1: forty two, so he didn't last that long, but the
Speaker 1: company lived on. By the end of the century, it
Speaker 1: had a private fleet of more than a hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty merchant ships and forty warships and employed fifty thousand
Speaker 1: people across the world, including a ten thousand man private army.
Speaker 1: Uh it eventually sank into decline in irrelevance and by
Speaker 1: seventeen ninety nine it was dissolved under a tremendous amount
Speaker 1: of debt. Uh so. Yeah, the Netherlands continued to govern
Speaker 1: much of Indonesian till but the Dutch East India Company
Speaker 1: was not the most successful or the most notable East
Speaker 1: India Company and all of history that title goes to
Speaker 1: the people they defeated in the Battle for the spiceries,
Speaker 1: the British East India Company, so after Cohen massacred a
Speaker 1: bunch of their people in the band Aisles back in
Speaker 1: sixteen twenty three, the British East India Company hit had
Speaker 1: a wee bit of a rough patch. The company took
Speaker 1: on more and more debt and had to sell most
Speaker 1: of its assets in order to stay alive. The only
Speaker 1: reason it didn't get dissolved and go out of business
Speaker 1: is that it maintained a small trading post on India's
Speaker 1: northwest coast. Now, the company limped along through the sixteen
Speaker 1: thirties and sixteen forties, when Oliver Cromwell took away its
Speaker 1: royal monopoly over Indian trade at the same time as
Speaker 1: he took off the King's head. By early sixteen fifty seven,
Speaker 1: the British East India Company was near death and its
Speaker 1: governor suggested ending it all together. But all Oliver Cromwell
Speaker 1: was like, what about it? Maybe this thing just needs
Speaker 1: a little tune up, and he issued the company a
Speaker 1: new charter. It would again have a monopoly on trade
Speaker 1: within the Indies, but it would also have to organize
Speaker 1: itself differently. So, as I said before, the Dutch corporation
Speaker 1: had been similar in organization to today's corporations. You know,
Speaker 1: it accumulated wealth, invested on projects and was able to,
Speaker 1: you know, operate the way a company operates. The British
Speaker 1: East India Company had not functioned that way. The new
Speaker 1: charter was basically a rip off of the Dutch East
Speaker 1: India companies organizing principle, so that it could compete with
Speaker 1: a company like that and develop an effective navy and army.
Speaker 1: The government even seeded the reformed British East India Company
Speaker 1: with seven and fifty thousand pounds of capital. But is
Speaker 1: this after the Dutch East India company had already collapsed? No? No, no,
Speaker 1: this is when when it's the biggest thing in because
Speaker 1: I thought it was like they saw a train crash
Speaker 1: and they're like, let's do that. This is like the
Speaker 1: sixteen fifties when they're they're making a shipload of money
Speaker 1: and over fist. So they're emulating success exactly, much like
Speaker 1: Coke has to payalely imitate PepsiCo's delicious brand umbrella. Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: and much like all other tortilla chips are a pale
Speaker 1: imitation of der ritos. Did they taste like ashes in
Speaker 1: my mouth? I would rather boil my tongue hard now.
Speaker 1: Oliver Cromwell died two years after reforming the company when
Speaker 1: a new king took over Britain. That king issued a
Speaker 1: royal decree that granted the company even wider powers to quote,
Speaker 1: wage war, administer justice, engage in diplomacy with foreign princes,
Speaker 1: acquired territories, raise in command armies, and capture and plunder ships,
Speaker 1: violating its monopoly. So the King's like, you're basically a government,
Speaker 1: but just to make money. Yeah, get out of jail free,
Speaker 1: instruct the laser cannons. Yeah, well, funny that you bring
Speaker 1: up laser camps. Because this company's new focus was not spices.
Speaker 1: The British dec India Company was not stealings the the
Speaker 1: six hundreds equivalent, because India just happened to be the
Speaker 1: world's largest reservoir of saltpeter. Now, saltpeter forms from animal
Speaker 1: droppings after they've been left to sit and calcify for
Speaker 1: a while, and he was the indispensable ingredient in gunpowder.
Speaker 1: Whoever controlled India assault Peter supply would basically control Europe's
Speaker 1: ability to shoot people. If you know Europe in the
Speaker 1: six shooting people's kind of their thing. So the British
Speaker 1: Company focused on India and spread. By the seventeen hundreds,
Speaker 1: they had established control over three separate presidencies along the subcontinent.
Speaker 1: And these are fairly small areas. They're still just setting
Speaker 1: up trade. Sometimes they control like a city and a
Speaker 1: little bit of the surrounding territory, but they're not capturing territories, right,
Speaker 1: you know, they're starting trading posts. Some of those turn
Speaker 1: into cities, some of them are based around cities, but
Speaker 1: they don't control vast swaths of land yet, and they're
Speaker 1: not saying, here are our soldiers, we own this whole city.
Speaker 1: Here's our little building, here's our little building. We're here
Speaker 1: to trade for now. For now. Yes, we'll give us
Speaker 1: the give us the gunpowder. We'll just see what happens later.
Speaker 1: It'll probably go great for everybody. Well, we love is
Speaker 1: mutual product. Now. The fact that Indian saltpeter was behind
Speaker 1: most of the gunpowder used in Europe's many, many, many, many, many,
Speaker 1: many many many, pretty much constant and unending wars meant
Speaker 1: that the British East India Company was not the only
Speaker 1: corporate power of buying for control of the subcontinent's resources.
Speaker 1: Their old enemies that Dutch were there, as well as French, Danish,
Speaker 1: Swedish and Australian corporations, all fighting over the Indian saltpeter.
Speaker 1: Do these places not have animals that ship? Like, if
Speaker 1: you've been to India, it's a beautiful country, fascinating culture. Yes,
Speaker 1: absolutely it will not like when I read like, oh,
Speaker 1: saltpeter comes from poop and India had the most it
Speaker 1: was because I spent a lot of time and he's like, oh,
Speaker 1: of course, yeah, that's the place where there would be
Speaker 1: all the saltpeter. Interesting. Yeah, and they've been you know,
Speaker 1: India has been developed for a very long time, so
Speaker 1: long history of animal husbandry, a long history of of cultivation,
Speaker 1: and so they were just huge reserves of this stuff
Speaker 1: sitting around um and it just so happened that the
Speaker 1: Mughal Empire. I don't know why, I said, nice, they
Speaker 1: have a lot of po good it's not about to
Speaker 1: be good for them. Uh So, the Mughal Empire, who
Speaker 1: ruled most of India, was in decline at this point UM.
Speaker 1: And as it declined, the French and British corporations particularly
Speaker 1: grew more powerful. So these corporations all had armies on
Speaker 1: the subcontinent, usually a mix of regular government troops and
Speaker 1: corporate soldiers basically mercenaries, along with cadres of local troops
Speaker 1: trained to a rough approximation of European standards. These armies
Speaker 1: were there to defend against other corporations, but they'd sometimes
Speaker 1: make military alliances with like local princes and stuff, who
Speaker 1: were more or less independent because again, sort of the
Speaker 1: centralized nature of the Mughal government's breaking down at these points.
Speaker 1: So you've got local princes and whatnot. Nawab's kind of
Speaker 1: vying for more and more control. And I'm sure the
Speaker 1: local forces they trained were just as effective as the
Speaker 1: local forces we trained nowadays. You know, it's easy to
Speaker 1: transmit that kind of knowledge. It really is. Uh So,
Speaker 1: this is the world that one Robert Clive is born
Speaker 1: into in ninety five. Now, have you ever heard of
Speaker 1: Robert Clive. He's one of the most important people who's
Speaker 1: ever lived. Um yeah, I mean yes, I know everything
Speaker 1: about him. You can skip it. Like Jan Cohen, he
Speaker 1: is a monster, but at least to me, he's also
Speaker 1: kind of a likable monster. I kind of want to
Speaker 1: see a movie about this guy. And I credit that
Speaker 1: to the decades I spent reading adventure novels set during
Speaker 1: the colonial era, like King Solomon's Minds. Clive is an
Speaker 1: objectively bad person, but holy god, he had hotspah. So
Speaker 1: he was born into the aristocracy, but like the poor aristocracy.
Speaker 1: So you would think this guy is like lower middle class.
Speaker 1: They get a nice house, but his dad's working all
Speaker 1: the time, and like he doesn't have a lot of
Speaker 1: prospects for the future. You know, while he's a kid,
Speaker 1: he keeps getting expelled from schools because he can't stop
Speaker 1: pulling pranks. Um. At one point a bunch of his
Speaker 1: friends get together and they form a protection racket to
Speaker 1: extort money from local business owners. So he's like a
Speaker 1: thug from Oh yeah, that old prank of beating the
Speaker 1: ship out of people if they don't pay you. Classic
Speaker 1: Clooney on set all the time, all the time. This
Speaker 1: is just a prank, This is give me your money.
Speaker 1: So Clive eventually grows up and decides to take a
Speaker 1: job in India with a company because again he doesn't
Speaker 1: have any prospects in England. And if you want to
Speaker 1: get fucking rich in this period, you roll the fucking
Speaker 1: die of a tropical disease dice and get a job
Speaker 1: with one of these Death of a salesman and you
Speaker 1: just go into the jungle and come out a millionaire.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah that's the or die of malaria. Yeah a
Speaker 1: lot of people did both. Uh So yeah, he gets
Speaker 1: a and he's he's he's not the stuff that he's
Speaker 1: gonna sound like an action here. I want to get
Speaker 1: through with this. He is a small man, he's not
Speaker 1: good looking, he's sick all the time, and he is
Speaker 1: manic depressive, Okay, Yeah, I also like to think he's
Speaker 1: just a mesa Halic. He needs that that's further south,
Speaker 1: although he's probably loving the curry. Yeah. So, in Clive
Speaker 1: gets a job working as a clerk at an outpost
Speaker 1: in Madras. He's twenty. Uh, they're only about three hundred
Speaker 1: guys there from the East India Corporation when a force
Speaker 1: of French Company soldiers shows up and tries to conquer
Speaker 1: the place. Now, the company men a hole up inside
Speaker 1: the fort, but rather than fight, they just drink all
Speaker 1: of the liquor and the fort and then once the
Speaker 1: liquor runs out, they surrender, which is I can respect that.
Speaker 1: That means they probably knew they were going to surrender
Speaker 1: the whole time, but they're like, wait, wait, give us
Speaker 1: a minute, give us a minute, They're probably gonna take
Speaker 1: the liquor. If first, I should say, They all surrender
Speaker 1: except for Robert Clive. He dresses up in a the
Speaker 1: traditional outfit of a local interpreter, paints himself in black face,
Speaker 1: and escapes with a few of his colleagues. Nice They
Speaker 1: hike a hundred and fifty kilometers to the company's last
Speaker 1: intact coastal fort and get there just in time to
Speaker 1: warn them that the French army is on its way.
Speaker 1: This gives the British company men enough time to get
Speaker 1: the local ruler, the Nawab, to raise up an army
Speaker 1: of ten thousand men to defend them. So the French
Speaker 1: show up with twelve hundred men and they easily beat
Speaker 1: this army. Because we could know if he was man
Speaker 1: or depressive at each time. This is a manic fucking
Speaker 1: is that diagnosable in the six we know, but people
Speaker 1: since then because he wrote a lot and he had
Speaker 1: a biographer who hung out with him all the time,
Speaker 1: so there's enough info that people are like, it seems
Speaker 1: like he was manic depressive. Yeah, it seems like it,
Speaker 1: you know. So, yeah, the French beat the army that's
Speaker 1: raised up to defend the last sort of British Company
Speaker 1: port on the coast, but the delay in fighting them
Speaker 1: gives the Royal Navy enough time to show up and
Speaker 1: save the day. Uh So, in seventeen forty eight, that
Speaker 1: little trade war ends and Robert Clive realizes that he
Speaker 1: kind of loves being in terrifying danger, so he volunteers. Definitely, man, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I feel like I could kill him million French guys,
Speaker 1: so he volunteers for service in the militant wing of
Speaker 1: the East India Company. He basically transfers over to the
Speaker 1: armed Division request to be in the fighting section, and
Speaker 1: his his request is granted because he's did a really
Speaker 1: good job the last time, so he immediately gets a
Speaker 1: promotion and he winds up in a pretty sweet position
Speaker 1: where he basically gets a cut of all of the
Speaker 1: trade within a certain small area. So he starts making
Speaker 1: good money. And the thing that the trade war had
Speaker 1: driven home to Clive is that Europeans were just way
Speaker 1: better at fighting than everybody else. Um. Again, that was
Speaker 1: like a French army versus ten thousand Indian soldiers and
Speaker 1: it wasn't even a hard fight. Um. There's a lot
Speaker 1: of reasons for this, you know. It's not that these
Speaker 1: guys are superhuman or genius. It's that number one, they
Speaker 1: have guns and fairly modern and number two, none of
Speaker 1: these soldiers usually want to be fighting for the side
Speaker 1: therewith they're kind of press getting into it. These aren't
Speaker 1: large professional armies that are motivated. They're just like guys
Speaker 1: this local rulers forcing to fight and they run pretty easy,
Speaker 1: right come to fight another day whenever they want. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: if they want, but they don't really want to fight
Speaker 1: because they're farmers. They're not. And that's the other thing
Speaker 1: is that all of the European soldiers in here are
Speaker 1: soldiers usually for decades. If they live long enough, they'll
Speaker 1: have twenty years of fighting experience. As it almost all
Speaker 1: spent overseas. Yeah. Yeah, it's not like now where they
Speaker 1: have regular like go home for you, because it takes
Speaker 1: like two years to get home. It's just crazy to
Speaker 1: imagine that you sign up for my life is just
Speaker 1: totally detached from my home now forever going into the void.
Speaker 1: Amount of violent, kind of off balance people. So Europe
Speaker 1: trains them really well, harms them and sends them away
Speaker 1: from Europe. Like, yeah, it's like the beginning of the
Speaker 1: space program. This is just a bunch of asshole astronauts
Speaker 1: being sent out. We're just like, we gotta get Neil
Speaker 1: Armstrong at a planet such a prick, send him away,
Speaker 1: send him to the moon. Yes, this this show has
Speaker 1: always had a strong anti astronaut five and I'm glad
Speaker 1: that you caught onto that. Yeah, he's gottast or not.
Speaker 1: Their bastards Kadafi would agree with you. Yeah, this suits.
Speaker 1: They should all commit suicide. Yes, the hollow life of
Speaker 1: the astronaut, the existence of an astronaut. Yeah, so yeah.
Speaker 1: Robert Clive realizes that European armies are just unbelievably good
Speaker 1: compared to anything that particularly that the Indian rulers can
Speaker 1: put together. Um, and he realizes that with enough soldiers,
Speaker 1: there's basically no native force in India who could stop
Speaker 1: him from doing whatever he wanted. Now, he did not
Speaker 1: turn straight to conquest. He just saw this as a
Speaker 1: service he could offer the local rulers. Basically, I want
Speaker 1: trade in a certain reason. You're the guy in charge.
Speaker 1: I can help you beat whatever local enemies you have,
Speaker 1: and it won't it's not even hard for me. I
Speaker 1: send my guys up for a couple of weeks, it's done,
Speaker 1: and then you let me get your ship at a
Speaker 1: lower price or whatever. We set up a deal, right,
Speaker 1: So that's kind of that's his first idea is just
Speaker 1: to set rent his mercenaries out in order to get
Speaker 1: better trading deals. Pumps that guy in the face and
Speaker 1: we'll give you a Costco club card. I get it
Speaker 1: so and that that that's when all this is happening.
Speaker 1: The empire is dying, regional leaders are getting more and
Speaker 1: more power, and he's just renting his army out. And
Speaker 1: basically the different European companies to start sort of backing
Speaker 1: puppet rulers in the regions where they're active, because it's
Speaker 1: easy for them to prop up a government, and it
Speaker 1: makes it easier if they can know the government's going
Speaker 1: to be supportive of their company. And they've learned from
Speaker 1: the mistake of like, don't have your mercenaries try to
Speaker 1: turn into judges and magistrates and lawmakers and ship. Yeah
Speaker 1: that the company building here, like it's not worth the investment. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So they're leaving the state intact. They're just making sure
Speaker 1: the ruler won't do anything they don't want or knows
Speaker 1: that they'll be killed if they do. Yeah, And it's
Speaker 1: a it's a pretty sweet position because they don't really
Speaker 1: have any responsibility over anything, like other than fighting every
Speaker 1: now and then. Yeah, robbing gunpoint is usually a pretty
Speaker 1: advantageous position to be in. Yeah. So at one, you know,
Speaker 1: at various points, the puppets of these corporations go to
Speaker 1: war with each other, and during one of these little
Speaker 1: trade wars between the puppets of the French and the
Speaker 1: puppets of the English, like the different puppet rulers they
Speaker 1: put up. Robert Clive talks his way into a major
Speaker 1: military command. Uh. He takes a force of English Company
Speaker 1: soldiers and three hundred mercenaries on a daring jungle march.
Speaker 1: They go a hundred kilometers in six days and they
Speaker 1: capture the enemy capital, a town called our Cot, with
Speaker 1: a hundred thousand citizens. They don't even have to fire
Speaker 1: a shot, so Clive takes command of the town's fort.
Speaker 1: He orders his men not to loot or take bribes
Speaker 1: um because he doesn't want any trouble with the locals,
Speaker 1: because he knows that there's going to be a big
Speaker 1: counter attack to quarter only only cut him in four. No,
Speaker 1: but he's really he's not that kind of guy. He
Speaker 1: really is trying to He's just trying not to lose
Speaker 1: them because he knows the people they don't care about
Speaker 1: the local ruler either. They're just piste off that everything
Speaker 1: is chaos, they exactly, and he just like, don't give
Speaker 1: them a reason to hate us, Like there's there's no
Speaker 1: benefit to that to us in that So yeah, Clive
Speaker 1: took takes command of the fort. He and his men
Speaker 1: start to like fortify it for the counter attack, and
Speaker 1: the counter attack comes um Clive and has men wind
Speaker 1: up surviving like a fifty day long siege from this
Speaker 1: like massive Indian army, ten thousand men who have been
Speaker 1: partly trained by French soldiers, so they're a little bit
Speaker 1: better than the Indian armies usually are. And they have
Speaker 1: several dozen war elephants that are covered in metal plates
Speaker 1: on their heads that are basically meant to batter down
Speaker 1: this fort. We've reached that three of the movie. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we've reached at three of the movie. But being a
Speaker 1: military genius, Robert Clive realized that elephants don't like being
Speaker 1: shot by rifles. Uh so he just had his men
Speaker 1: do that repeatedly. He's a brilliant man, wiley son of
Speaker 1: a bit. So the muskets of that era weren't really
Speaker 1: good at killing elephants, but they scared the ship out
Speaker 1: of them, and the elephants stampeded and trampled the guys
Speaker 1: on side. It's like, you don't have to kill the elephant,
Speaker 1: you just have to make the elephant be like this.
Speaker 1: So the army retreats and a few hours later Clive
Speaker 1: and his men are relieved by reinforcements. So at this point,
Speaker 1: Robert Clive twenties something dude had seen more adventure than
Speaker 1: most people in two lifetimes. But he was still like,
Speaker 1: fuck it, I want more action. So he takes charge
Speaker 1: of the reinforcements and he leads an attack on the
Speaker 1: guy who'd just been laying siege to him. Clive bribes
Speaker 1: hundreds of the enemy's best soldiers to defect and adds
Speaker 1: them to his army, and he spends the next few
Speaker 1: months just winning a series of skirmishes and slowly demolishing
Speaker 1: this Indian king's army. Uh. He everywhere he conquered. He
Speaker 1: took bribes and cuts of all of the riches in
Speaker 1: the region and just took it. Some of them went
Speaker 1: to the company, some of it just went to Robert Clive.
Speaker 1: So by the time this whole war is over, Clive
Speaker 1: has fuck you money. Um, So he goes back to
Speaker 1: England for a while. Once yeah he's he's one of
Speaker 1: the guy's manifort. We'll be trying to burnish the image
Speaker 1: of like, yeah he was, he's a real inspiration. So
Speaker 1: he goes back to England for a while once his
Speaker 1: trade war ends, and he does the fancy rich British
Speaker 1: gentleman stick for a spell, he gets married. He's sort
Speaker 1: of famous at this point. Um Prime Minister William Pitt
Speaker 1: the Elder called him quote the heaven born general Wealth,
Speaker 1: and politics quickly grew boring for him, though, So when
Speaker 1: Clive heard the company was having more trouble with the French,
Speaker 1: he took the opportunity to go back to India and
Speaker 1: do more war stuff. So this time he winds up
Speaker 1: in Bengal, a super productive and agriculturally rich region of
Speaker 1: the country. A local nawab his soldiers, by the French,
Speaker 1: had just conquered the city of Calcutta, which had been
Speaker 1: sort of a British trading city, and he captured the
Speaker 1: English sport there. Now, the area around Calcutta had both
Speaker 1: a lot of cotton and also the world's largest reserves
Speaker 1: of high quality saltpeter, so the British can't really afford
Speaker 1: to lose this area. So Clive takes a fleet and
Speaker 1: two hundred soldiers and he sails back to India to
Speaker 1: function up. Okay, I thought you're saying Clive took it
Speaker 1: like they like, the British East India Company defend its
Speaker 1: like fucking over England. He's going in to get it back.
Speaker 1: It gets conquered by a an Indian army that's backed
Speaker 1: by the French, and the British decided to take it.
Speaker 1: They go easier on the ratio of elephants to soldiers,
Speaker 1: they're able to win this time. Well, there's just not
Speaker 1: that many guys, like a couple of hundred dudes, right,
Speaker 1: and they're not really well organized. So yeah, they get
Speaker 1: they get so they call the sociopaths and sociopath real
Speaker 1: fucking hard. So Clive winds up back there and he's
Speaker 1: he's he's great. You know. He wins a bunch of battles,
Speaker 1: He scares a bunch of elephants and makes them run
Speaker 1: through enemy ranks. Happens a number of times. It's like
Speaker 1: the classic Clive move uh and the British East India
Speaker 1: Company stock raises off of his victories. Everything culminates in
Speaker 1: the Battle of Plassy. Now, this is one of those battles,
Speaker 1: like the Battle of Hastings, that everybody should know about.
Speaker 1: It's one of the most important moments in the history
Speaker 1: of both India and of the British Empire. So Clive,
Speaker 1: with three thousand soldiers only a thousand of whom are European,
Speaker 1: fights a local army of fifty thousand men and he
Speaker 1: just wipes the floor with them. They're basically charging cannons
Speaker 1: and gun lines with swords and it just doesn't work.
Speaker 1: Clive is not a military genius, although he gets that
Speaker 1: reputation at the time, the consensus now more seems to
Speaker 1: be that he was just competent and didn't fun anything
Speaker 1: up and was very brave and it wasn't hard to
Speaker 1: win a war like this, because again, you've got disciplined
Speaker 1: soldiers with muskets and cannons, and the natives are charging
Speaker 1: you with swords across an open field. As long as
Speaker 1: you're able to just barely keep them in line and
Speaker 1: be like don't run, yeah, we'll win. And these guys,
Speaker 1: they're all hard sons of bitches who have been killing
Speaker 1: people for decades there, for years, and they are rough
Speaker 1: sons of I can't run my head around the mercenary
Speaker 1: concept because I just it's so crazy to be like, hey,
Speaker 1: here's money, kill that guy, and then someone else comes along.
Speaker 1: They're like here's more money. I don't kill that guy,
Speaker 1: and you're like, okay, shoot this guy. Money is good
Speaker 1: and I'm good at shooting people a guy who paid
Speaker 1: you before. Because here's more money. Can I stay drunken
Speaker 1: on opium for forever? Of course, it's that seemed to
Speaker 1: be like part and parcel of being a mercenary at
Speaker 1: this time, just shipping your pants, taking opium, killing people. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's these guests. So uh. With the victory at Plassy,
Speaker 1: Clive instantly rockets from having fuck you money to funk
Speaker 1: the world. He's one of the richest humans on the planet.
Speaker 1: After this, Uh, he places a new guy on the
Speaker 1: throne of Bengal, which is a huge chunk of India,
Speaker 1: and is given a cut of all of the wealth
Speaker 1: and like the wealthiest part of the Indian subcontinent. So
Speaker 1: he's given three hundred thousand pounds and not pounds in
Speaker 1: terms of British currency, three hundred thousand pounds in golden
Speaker 1: jewels just for him. Like he just gets that loot
Speaker 1: pounds of ship a hundred and fifty thousand tons. There's
Speaker 1: only one reason to accrue that in physical gold. He's
Speaker 1: Scrooge mcducking that ship need as physical golden jewels. Now
Speaker 1: his men get another huge chunk of money, like half
Speaker 1: a million pounds of well, so they all get rich too,
Speaker 1: but not nearly as rich as Clive, and the company
Speaker 1: gets also huge huge amounts of money. Uh. And also
Speaker 1: the British heat Stindia company winds up with a total
Speaker 1: monopoly pretty much on high quality saltpeter. So the British
Speaker 1: government from this point on basically has the power to
Speaker 1: cut every nation on Earth off from gunpowder. Doesn't that
Speaker 1: play a key role in the American Revolution? In every
Speaker 1: war that happens, that's the Seven Years War, the French
Speaker 1: and Indian law. Big part of why the British win
Speaker 1: is because they own the gunpowder. Thomas Jefferson tells his
Speaker 1: wife how to yeah, self saltpeter. Yeah. So Clive is
Speaker 1: appointed governor of Bengal, but Bengal is still technically ruled
Speaker 1: by a local dude. But for the first time, the
Speaker 1: company finds itself in control of more than just a
Speaker 1: few ports. They're more or less in control of this
Speaker 1: whole region. They're not officially because they don't want to be,
Speaker 1: because they don't want to be, but they really are
Speaker 1: running this now because they think there's a lot of
Speaker 1: money in it. For one, they just get as soon
Speaker 1: as they conquered, the guy they put on the throne
Speaker 1: gives them huge amounts of money, so they start to
Speaker 1: get a taste for eating big chunks of land. Right.
Speaker 1: That's kind of where the East India companies and Nation
Speaker 1: Building are just owning them and sitting up. They don't
Speaker 1: give a shit about nation They just want to take
Speaker 1: the money. Um. But back at home in England, this
Speaker 1: starts to scare people both the company having this big
Speaker 1: chunk of land that's larger than England and contains more
Speaker 1: people in it, which is weird for everybody, and it
Speaker 1: even scares Clive a little bit. In seventeen fifty nine,
Speaker 1: he writes this to a company officer. So large a
Speaker 1: sovereignty may possibly be an object too expensive for a
Speaker 1: mercantile company, and it is feared that they are not
Speaker 1: of themselves able without the nation's assistance to maintain so
Speaker 1: wide a dominion. Um, it took that long. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: might start a business and then you're like, we an
Speaker 1: most of Canada, parts of Texas, and like, have we
Speaker 1: gone too far? Is this is this not what a
Speaker 1: company should Nobody asked this till now. But should we
Speaker 1: own the moon here? I mean we just make build
Speaker 1: a bears. This has gone maybe too far for build
Speaker 1: a Bear. So the sheer amount of wealth Clive acquired
Speaker 1: in one fell swoop after the Battle of Plassy also
Speaker 1: terrifies everybody in Britain. This is a semi modern state.
Speaker 1: We're not talking the Roman Empire where generals are meant
Speaker 1: to plunder things. This is a place with press and
Speaker 1: like civil rights rules and like limitations on the power
Speaker 1: of government and stuff. Nothing like clearly not or within
Speaker 1: within England. They do right, obviously not compared to what
Speaker 1: we'd consider, but like, this is still weird for them.
Speaker 1: We're not just doing crimes. This is a officer of
Speaker 1: a corporation. And under Clive is not just company troops
Speaker 1: but Royal British soldiers and the Royal British Navy. So
Speaker 1: the British government soldiers are fighting under the command of
Speaker 1: a corporate officer who just took hundreds of thousands of
Speaker 1: pounds in plunder. This is weird for everybody. And I
Speaker 1: kept as much as he wanted. Yeah, yeah, So people
Speaker 1: start to speak up and be like this might not
Speaker 1: be okay with England. We need to talk about this.
Speaker 1: And Bengal is not at this point the only chunk
Speaker 1: of land that's been taken over by corporations. We just
Speaker 1: talked about the Dutch. But obviously, like in Canada, the
Speaker 1: American Northwest was like the Hudson Bay Company by this
Speaker 1: point controls a million square kilometers of North America. So
Speaker 1: it's starting to be a thing, and it's starting to
Speaker 1: get weird to people. And also it's probably worth noting
Speaker 1: that in sixteen sixty the British government issued a charter
Speaker 1: to the Company of Royal advent Sers trading to Africa.
Speaker 1: This would become the Royal African Company. By nine the
Speaker 1: Royal African Company had shipped roughly one thousand slaves out
Speaker 1: of Africa and into the New World. So the Duchy
Speaker 1: India Company, the guys from the beginning, also founded the
Speaker 1: New Amsterdam Colony. Their mismanagement gave it over to the
Speaker 1: English and it eventually became New York. So like, this
Speaker 1: is what else is happening at this time. Robert Clive
Speaker 1: is back in England with all of the money in
Speaker 1: the world and starting to fend off some like legal
Speaker 1: challenge as a result of how much he's taken. Um.
Speaker 1: So maybe your education was different than mine, Michael and
Speaker 1: people listening, Maybe you all learned about this stuff when
Speaker 1: you were a kid. But part of my research here,
Speaker 1: the only thing I knew about the British East India
Speaker 1: Company was something to do with the Boston Tea Party,
Speaker 1: and that they were bad guys and at least one
Speaker 1: of the pirates of the Caribbean movies. Right. I knew
Speaker 1: that in in narratives of this time period they're seen
Speaker 1: as like an evil empire, so I was ready for
Speaker 1: that to be true, and it is. It's super true,
Speaker 1: and it's true that their actions built the modern world.
Speaker 1: In very many ways. They embody what's possible when a
Speaker 1: gigantic business enterprise is completely unencumbered by the rule of
Speaker 1: law or conscience. But what we've seen happen here isn't
Speaker 1: just the birth of free enterprise utterly devoid of regulation,
Speaker 1: international corporations that cannot be regulated. It's not just that
Speaker 1: this is the birth of colonialism, because this is now
Speaker 1: when these companies start thinking about colonies, not just as
Speaker 1: a place for like people to move or whatever, for
Speaker 1: whatever but like this is part of a trading empire
Speaker 1: that we've set up and like a planned community, and so,
Speaker 1: I mean there's several movies where the evil plan is
Speaker 1: to like just reshape people on a genetic level until
Speaker 1: you have the perfect worker or whatever, and this is
Speaker 1: almost that, like, let's just change the whole world, do
Speaker 1: whatever the funk we want now. In the eighteen fifties,
Speaker 1: the British annexed Mandalay in modern day Burma. Ruyard Kipling
Speaker 1: wrote a poem about life as a colonial soldier there
Speaker 1: that I think sums up very well the attitude many
Speaker 1: of these corrupt corporate officers had towards the vast domains
Speaker 1: now under their charge. I'm surprise the government is not
Speaker 1: already pushing back harder, Like they don't see this as
Speaker 1: an existential threat, I guess because it enriches them so much, right, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: And we'll be getting to that in the next part
Speaker 1: of this. But I want to read you this quote
Speaker 1: from Kipling's poem Mandalay. That's sort of I think it
Speaker 1: helps me get into the head of these people, and
Speaker 1: I'm gonna do it in a British accent ship me
Speaker 1: Someway as east of Suez, where the best is like
Speaker 1: the Wist, where there ain't no tin commandments and a
Speaker 1: man can raise a fist. That's that's the attitude here. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's no god out here. Let's go to international waters
Speaker 1: and get drunk do whatever we think next. So if
Speaker 1: you want to see what it looks like when a
Speaker 1: bunch of cash hungry corporate types winds up in charge
Speaker 1: of one of the most populous nations on the planet
Speaker 1: and realizes that there are no fucking rules about what
Speaker 1: they can do, you'll have to tune into the next
Speaker 1: episode of Behind the Bastards because this is again a
Speaker 1: two parter. We will be dropping the next part on Thursday,
Speaker 1: and it's going to get ugly. Not just as ugly
Speaker 1: as it's been, but as ugly as in anything lest
Speaker 1: century was this so far compared to other episodes I've
Speaker 1: heard his tame in terms of detailed graphic detail about
Speaker 1: see like, now you have the overview, we'll get to
Speaker 1: the blood and guts. So Michael, yeah, Mikhail as you
Speaker 1: have never gone by, and Miguelito sometimes yeah, So you
Speaker 1: got any pluggables before we close this episode, Well, my
Speaker 1: Twitter handle is at swam Underscore Corp. But now I
Speaker 1: want nothing to do. I thought it'd be cute. I'm
Speaker 1: a corporation, I'm a brand, you know. Um, But now
Speaker 1: I realized that I'm destined to colonize the earth and
Speaker 1: crush people under my boot heel. Yes, and it doesn't
Speaker 1: feel good. But if you want to follow my progress
Speaker 1: on conquering the Earth, that would be its swam Underscore Corp.
Speaker 1: And as you mentioned at the top, very graciously, our
Speaker 1: own podcast and sketch network is called small Beans. You
Speaker 1: can find us on Patreon, Instagram, iTunes, and etcetera. All right,
Speaker 1: and I'm Robert Evans. You can find me on Twitter
Speaker 1: at I right, okay, just two letters, and you can
Speaker 1: find this podcast on the internet at behind the Bastards
Speaker 1: dot com. Well, we'll have all of the sources for
Speaker 1: this episode and next episode. You can also find us
Speaker 1: on Twitter at at Bastards pod. You can find us
Speaker 1: on Instagram in the same way. So thank you for listening,
Speaker 1: and we'll be back next Thursday with part two of
Speaker 1: the Age of Heroic Commerce. M