 Good evening everyone, welcome to the first of our really live meetings and it's going to be very lively. It's great to see everybody. Before we start the proceedings are just to the usual domestic things. The toilets are downstairs you access them from need to go out that way to the back. The fire exits there's a fire exits from the front door and at the side, and there's also one here. And for the people at the back you go down the stairs, stone stairs, and you can get out at the fire escape there but hopefully we won't need to use the fire escape. In a moment I'm going to hand over to somebody else who's going to chair this evening's meeting but I'm delighted to say that we have William Darwin for here. And this is our Minerva lecture so at the end of the lecture I'll present him with the Minerva medal. But I'm really pleased to be able to hand over to a colleague from the history department in Glasgow, who also has a background in the subject that we're going to be hearing about this evening so I'll hand over to Andrew McKillop who will chair the meeting this evening. It's an overarching urge to use the gavel but unfortunately I don't actually have much use for that. First of all let me thank the Royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow for giving me the honour of chairing tonight's proceedings. It's a great honour and privilege as someone who works, albeit far less dramatically or effectively in the field that William will be talking about is a great pleasure for me privilege, a great personal privilege for me to chair tonight's meeting. But before I start can I just also reiterate a couple of housekeeping rules. First of all, could I ask you all to turn your mobiles off, which I forgot to do until a second ago, and put your pages on silent unless of course you are required to be on call, in which case we will forgive you. Also Pat pointed out where the toilets are but could also just point out where the exits are. Probably for those of you two thirds of the way you would go out these two exits but there's also like aircraft one behind you and on the right you can use that should we have to be the exit. So if we do the gathering point is on the Otago Street of the Otago Street side of Gibson Street. I've now been asked to try and introduce the speaker and to keep it to less than five minutes so that we can get as much time as possible. I don't know how many of you have actually looked at William Del Rimpel CV, but trying to introduce him in less than five minutes is a bit of a gargantuan task. I'm not going to talk too much about the subject of the lecture because that will be his privilege, but I will point out I think are some of the personal dimensions of William Del Rimpel that I think we all want to bear in mind when listening to him. He hails from East Lothian, the other side of the country, we're not to hold that against him. But in many ways, William is a true citizen of the world, both in his lived experience and in his vast scholarly literary and cultural outputs to describe him as a polymath. A concept which was actually very important to this society as it was formed and as it developed is to underestimate it. He's a writer, columnist, cultural commentator, both of the past and of pertinent and pressing political issues. He has produced some amazing cultural and artistic exhibitions. He is a man of many talents. He's moved into the world of blogging with a fellow interested party in South Asian history and culture, and it's bringing in unheard of numbers. And so you look the medium, you'll find William there. I think it's interesting to point out that much of his early writing was interestingly travel on. It was on looking at how you can, I suppose, explore different societies by travelling through it. He has an obvious love for geography, spirituality and the relationship between them. He doesn't just write about history, he writes about economics, about language, about, in a sense, the whole holistic panoply of it all. I strongly recommend that you find much of that literary brilliance in one of the best books I've ever read because I always loved Byzantium. But Read Is Holy Mountain, A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium, it is truly a brilliant read amongst many. He is also a major, major world literary figure. Anyone with the slightest conception of the literary scene will know that along with Namista Golak, he is the co-founder of the world's largest free literary festival, the Jaipur Literary Festival, founded in 2006. It is difficult to underestimate how large and normally influential that event is. He is the co-founder and I think probably still co-director. However, mercifully, he has an abiding interest in history and even in his travelogue and in much of his other literature, history was always infused and suffused through it. He is a wonderful writer of history. Whenever I feel depressed and have imposter syndrome, I have to go and read William to make sure that it's reinforced. My ability to write history pales into insignificance against a true wordsmith. Actually, however brilliant and accessible his writing is, it's worth stressing how cutting edge his history is. He often doesn't just reflect cutting edge historical practice, he often takes a particular lead in it. And I'm thinking here particularly there's all the family life and family dynamics inside the colonial assault in India by the British. That was leading in its time and remains cutting edge. All these influences can be seen in his seminal and world influential set of studies, the company quartet, four books on Britain's massive and sustained assault on South Asia and assault, which remember will bring one in five, one in five people on earth under first a corporate and then ultimately sovereign rule. It remains and may remain and the largest act of territorial and colonial conquest by a Western imperial power. And this presumably tries to match it. And let's be quite honest, he isn't doing very well. And in other words, it is history of epochal and world changing framing we're dealing with here, and it is on the last of those four books that will you will talk tonight. This is an anarchy, the relentless rise of the East India Company, published in 2019, and the subject of tonight's first lecture will go over to you. Am I allowed to do the gavel I've never done this before. I had to do that, forgive me. Andrew, thank you very much for that introduction Andrew is too modest to say it but he's an astonishing scholar of the East India Company I've learned a huge amount from him and we'll be quoting him in this lecture. He has particularly put facts and figures and done extraordinary research on to the Scottish part of the East India Company story. We often in this country like to think of ourselves as the victims of colonialism and imperialism and aggression. But the Scots were leading the assault on India and proportionately far more Scots played a role per head and population than the English did. And Andrew's work has shown how the profits of that have trickled into every town in Scotland, many of the public buildings surrounding us here in Glasgow but also across Scotland are built on money made in India often of fairly dubious origins. And it's very important that we realise how much our prosperity came at the cost of those we colonised. And it's something that I think very few of us realise because it plays very little part in our history lessons at school. And very few people in this room will have actually come across anything I think that I will be saying tonight in the history curriculum. The older members of the audience may remember sort of studying the battle of plassi is a sort of heroic event that Clive of India did on his civilising mission in India but the, the true costs of that are one of the things I want to bring out tonight and we will start with Clive. This is the house, which his family ended up marrying into and and controlling it. It looks a long way from India and it may seem an odd place to start a lecture about India, because nothing more sort of British or English could be imagined although it's actually on the borders of Wales. You can see the Elizabethan box hedges and Tudor windows and the sort of an ASOS portico in front, but go inside the long gallery at Powis, and you'll see a very different picture room after room of Indian loot, loot incidentally being a Hindi word that was introduced into the English at this period to describe exactly the sort of objects we're looking at in this picture, Indian swords shields spears, a wonderful Indian drama and gorgeous mogul cloth on the left, tiger's heads from Tipu's throne, major objects from Indian history. This is Siraj Daula's palanquin abandoned on the battlefield of Placie sitting that we're looking through here. And if you go through the arch at the end of this picture, you arrive in Tipu Sultan's battle tent. Now what is this loot doing in a private house in the Welsh countryside because there is more loot in these galleries than you will find in the National Museum in Delhi, in the National Museum in Karachi, in the National Museum in Afghanistan or the National Museum in Bangladesh. There's more than all of them put together sitting here in a private house in the Welsh countryside, but while this is a particularly rich example of Indian loot you will find bits of Indian loot in most of the big sort of national trust houses where you can go and have a nice cup of tea in somewhere in the Highlands but you'll find the money often either if it's the 18th century house, either from the loot of India or the slave trade. And the story, the particular story of Powis is told in a picture you actually pass under to enter these, this Khazana, this treasury. It's not a very good picture, Benjamin West is not a great painter, but it's a very important scene that illustrates and one that had terrible consequences for India and which enormously enhanced the financial security of all of us in Britain. Because what you have in this picture, utterly unhistorical, which bears absolutely no resemblance to the actual events that it represents, the lack of realism is partly conveyed in the caption, Shah Alam conveying the gift of the Diwani to Lord Clive. Now, even in India, not many people will know what that means, a gift it sounds like Christmas is Diwali present, what's wonderful present is being given here. In the centre of the picture you have a mogul emperor Shah Alam and he's handing a document to a slightly portly overweight Englishman who is Lord Clive behind him is Archibald Swinton who is incidentally the direct ancestor of the actress Tilda Swinton. Another Scottish Borders dynasty which which did very well at this time, out of looting India. And what that document is doing is after the victory of the East India Company over the mogul emperor, the Nawab of Bengal and the Nawab of Avad, Shujudana, at the Battle of Buxa in 1765, the East India Company, which is a corporation. It's not the British government this didn't happen out of Downing Street didn't happen with the, with the British army, it happened with the East India Company, a corporation, a business, a for profit business. This corporation, basically at the point of abandon it forced the mogul emperor to hand over the financial administrations of the three richest provinces in India, Bengal, Bihar, Andhra, to this company and I say it is literally a company this is the headquarters. It's sitting. This is where the Lloyds building in the city of London is today. But here you are in the 18th century could be Charlotte Square or Buchanan Street lovely Georgia building five windows wide. It's not even the two buildings on either side. It's just the small building in the middle about the size of this church. Like the ladies and gentlemen in the picture here, you could walk past it past the railings without even noticing that it was there. But from this building was organized the conquest of what was then the richest country in the world. India in the 18th century controlled about 30% of the world's gross domestic product these are very rough figures and then can be much disputed. But that's the rough order of things. And at the round the time that the city company was formed in London Britain was generating about 1.7% of the world's gross domestic product. And yet by a strange quirk of history, and I'm going to talk about how this happened in a minute. A company, one company based in one building that for its first century had less than 35 employees in that building. It was the richest country in the world, and over about 50 years between the 1750s and around 1803. The East India Company piecemeal, step by step, conquered looted an asset stripped this, this extraordinary country. They also sent a great deal of the wealth here, which is why Britain which was a middle ranking European nation way behind in 16th century in 17th century, way behind Portugal and Spain which were rich with money coming from the new world, the gold of the traders and the Aztecs and all that sort of thing behind in a capital wealth Italy and France why both England and Scotland rose up the ranks until by the mid 18th century, you have enough money to which is really the seed funding for the industrial industry, which then puts the whole thing into a into an even greater velocity of growth and wealth. How on earth did they do it it was an extraordinary process. Why on earth, a ridiculous trick that is almost incomprehensible to us today they employed Indian soldiers mercenaries to conquer other Indians, and they did so at least partly with money borrowed from Indian bankers. How on earth would Indian bankers lend to, and that's the other sort of thing 250 white guys in India did this. Why would they lend to these to these people because these India company while it looted raped assets stripped and everything else, repaid its debts on time with interest, and they understood the importance of honoring financial contracts. Very different. Red coated beef eating Englishman and Scots. Managed to do a deal with homespun wearing vegetarian Jane and Hindu bankers and the bankers lend the money to the company who use it to paid top dollar to Indian see poise back twice as much. You get being a trooper of these India company than being the equivalent in the army of to push the town. And in 50 years, these armies of see poise conquer India, city by city province by province war by war. They begin partly accidentally partly defensively, but by the climax under Lord Wellesley whose brother sits with the traffic cone on his head in the street, the Duke of Wellington. These are planned wars of conquest and annexation with a very deliberate policy of seizing them for this country and ultimately, once the country has been once this company has been nationalized and it becomes increasingly the 1780s, the government gets a financial interest in it and from the 1780s onwards it becomes more and more a public private partnership, so that by the 1800s it's really an organ of state. But it begins very modestly with this man. And the year is 1599 the same year that Shakespeare is writing both Julius Caesar and Hamlet. And if you have been Shakespeare and you decided to leave the globe theater in 1599 and put down your draft of Hamlet or wherever he got to at this point in September 1599 you could have walked along the Thames crossed old London bridge and found your way to more gate fields not as it is today a grotty tube station. But as its name suggests fields on the edge of London, and in the middle of these fields was something called the founders hall founders as in metal found brass founders, rather than the founder of something. In this black and white Tudor building a meeting was called by this man Sir Thomas smith in September 1599 customer smith as he was known as in charge of the customs made a fortune on the customs and when he hears that the Dutch have successfully broken the old spice trade and sailed around the Cape of Good Hope and brought spices back not from India but from what we today would call Indonesia. In East Indies and Tudor pilots. He decides when the Dutch arrive in London trying to buy up British English ships. He says we're not going to sell them. And in a sort of in a sort of swaggery brexit sort of tone, he says we're going to do our own thing. There was a meeting in the founders hall in September 1599 on the 22nd of September and here bizarrely surviving in the British Library is the list of subscribers and you can read it on the top number one mayor of London 200 pounds. Number two, George bond is 1000 pounds and so on it goes on. So all these people are basically subscribing to what we would call a startup. So it goes on. And by the 20th page it's people who describe themselves not as lawmare of London but as vendors as leather workers as skinners ordinary people, putting in a tiny bit of money. And what they're doing is they are participating in a new Elizabethan idea, which is a joint stock company, obvious idea for us, but it's an invention. We had guilds so if all look at wool workers of Suffolk could club together and go off to Brussels and negotiate prices for their wool. But you had to be a wool worker to be part of it. What was innovative about these tutor corporations, the first one being the Muscovy company founded in the 1580s 1550s. Anyone could invest. You didn't have to be a wool worker, you didn't have to be whatever it was, you could just put your savings in and get a share of the profits. And this is the beginning of the corporation as we know it today, the same thing that exists with Microsoft or Google or Exxon mobile, or any of the massive multinational corporations, this is where it begins. And why the study of it is interesting because what you're seeing when you study these did the company is the birth of the modern multinational. And many of the things we fear most about these big corporations which now control our lives and which have turnovers larger than most nation states. And most of these frightening aspects of corporations the ability to topple governments the enormous sums of money they can use for lobbying governments and bribing politicians and the strange alchemy by which suddenly the, the needs of a company or the the aspirations of a company become the aspirations of foreign policy for government. These thin news of commerce are what, and finance are what power the East India Company the East India Company invents a lot of it. The case of known corporate corruption happens only 60 years after this in 15 in 1660 when the governor of the then governor of the East India Company ends up in the Tower of London, when he's caught handing out cash to MPs to extend the monopoly of the country. A very familiar situation, not just with our crooked government here but in other democracies how do any democratic parties anywhere in the world finance themselves largely through corporate donations. What's the pro quick quote we never quite know this begins here. They raise money and they need a captain so they go to this character Sir James Lancaster not an obvious choice you might say because he just sunk the ship in the top left hand corner of this portrait when he was appointed for the voyage but he was the only captain who'd ever been to these ships in these in Britain. And he was a tutor English captain who had sunk his ship on the way back all his crew were eaten by cannibals but he'd managed to escape and get home. And they appoint him and he goes off to Deppford and looks for a ship. He rejects a creaky old Hulk called the Mayflower which he regards as unsee worthy, and instead chooses a ship and I'm not making this up called the it's a pirate ship called the scourge of malice. It's not Johnny Depp's flagship from Paris the Caribbean but an actual historical vessel, but already showing a talent for PR that many subsequent corporations will will adopt. They renamed the scourge of malice, the red dragon as if it's a nice country pub in the Welsh countryside and off they sail. It's a sight embarrassment because they are be calmed off the coast of Dover and people come and wave at them and have picnics and laugh at these guys we thought they're getting off to the way East Indies but can't get beer even as far as Calais. But anyway the wind does pick up and they off they go into their own surprise they sail around the Cape of Good Hope and just as they're approaching the East Indies modern Jakarta but Tavia. As they head out to land they find a Portuguese ship coming in the opposite direction. And as they are a bunch of pirates or in the plight Elizabeth the New Formism privateers. They just jump on the Portuguese ship transfer its contents to their own sale home and sell it for a million pounds in London. And it's even this which is the first of their properties in in Leadenhall Street which looks rather like a nice of Tudor pub in in sort of Shropshire or York or the shambles or something. And they about all goes well for about 30 years, and then they realize that they basically can't compete with the Dutch the Dutch have got better ships better captains. Got more, much more sophisticated financial instruments and by about 1640 the East India Company comes into contact comes into conflict with the Dutch and the Dutch basically win. And a deal is done, the East India Company and the Brits hand over, I keep saying the Brits the English at this point, hand over the spice islands of Indonesia. And in a deal which turns out to be rather good in the long term they get in return a muddy island in the Hudson River called Manhattan. But at this point they have to, in other words, sort of redesign their business model and they decide they're going to forget spices and they're going to forget the East Indies. And they're going to focus primarily on textiles and on India. And in 1640 that the that the what's originally called the London Company of merchants trading with the East Indies turns into the East India Company trading with India and trading particularly in textiles and this is a very good moment because here they are they've got they build their, their first dockyard and Deptford, and all goes well until the Emperor Orangzeb dies in 1707 and the Mughal Empire which has been this huge force, controlling most of modern India, all of modern Pakistan and Bangladesh and Afghanistan, and a sliver of Persia. Orangzeb over expands the Empire, the Empire begins to collapse on his death, the Marathas and wrapped out of the Western Ghats, the Jats in the Doab, start raiding Agra the Sikhs come down from the Punjab and get as far as the outskirts of Delhi. And everyone's wondering, you know what's going to happen to Delhi, Delhi is the largest city on earth at this point is. You don't have to go to Istanbul on what are to the West or to Edo, modern Tokyo to the East to find anything even remotely comparable this is an enormous city with the wonderful Chandni Chowk in the middle. And everyone's wondering who it is it's going to get to pluck this right rotting mango. They are full of all the wealth that the matter that the moguls have mined or traded or looted themselves in their conquest of India over the previous 150 years. And it turns out it's none of them it's a wild card it's this guy. Nadir Shah, the Shah of Persia. And Nadir Shah was born the son humble son of a farrier or a shepherd who made hats. And he joins the Safavid Persian army rises to the top and executes what we would call a military coup. In 1738, he decides he needs some more cash to fight his real enemies who are not the Mongols, that's not the moguls, but are the Russians and the Ottoman Turks. And he tells his doctor who's a Frenchman who keeps a very interesting diary that he wants to pluck some golden feathers from the mogul peacocks tail. And that's what he does he goes off and he raids Kabul loots it, but no one comes to stop him so he raids for shower at the bottom of the Khyber Pass and still no opposition show. He takes the whole each stage, surprised by the ease of this. And then he decides to go and conquer Delhi. I mean, the mogul emperor wakes up and pulls an enormous army together but with the army of dancing girls and jugglers and pastry chefs and all the kind of daily society seems to turn up in Cornell, this enormous completely chaotic. And the Persians are these battle hard and tightly run small cavalry but they have the great military gizmo of the day which is something called the swivel gun, which pierces armor. And the mogul cavalry line up on the fields of canal, and they start marching forward it's a wonderful site they're all in that same elephant armor that around zeb is in here imagine 100,000 cavalry charging across the planes wearing this sort of thing. And the Persians pretend to be panicked by this and they retreat and at the last minute the light cavalry part, revealing the swivel guns beyond, and it's all over in about five minutes the cream of the mogul cavalry are massacred. Nadir Shah on the right invites Mohammed Shah Rangela on the left here in this picture to dinner. And the idiot Mohammed Shah Rangela goes just a small bodyguard and accepts the hospitality of Nadir Shah. And of course after dinner, his bodyguard is disarmed and he's told he's the guest of Nadir Shah. And the next day Nadir Shah marches him into Delhi on his own elephant. Six weeks later, he leaves with him he brings 8,000 wagons of loot, everything the moguls have gathered, including the peacock throne on top of which is the on top of the top peacock of the peacock throne is the on top of the diamond. I mentioned the blog it's actually it's a podcast, it's a podcast and if you are, if you tune into my podcast tomorrow you will hear this exact story told in some detail we are not currently doing the Cohen or it's called empire. Apple or Spotify, we'll hear the story in more detail if you haven't heard already enough tonight. But the conor diamond, the peacock throne three other mogul thrones and 8,000 wagons of loot are carted off to Afghanistan. And it's as if the fires which fired the mogul boiler are extinguished because there's no money to run it nothing to pay for all of this. And imagine you take mogul imagine mogul empire is some enormous baroque mirror and you got the top of this building you throw it off and it shatters into a thousand pieces this is what happens to the mogul empire there's no money to pay the army no money to pay the governors on the civil servants, and the whole thing shatters and fragments. And every city job for Jaipur hydra bad tan jaw becomes effectively a a self governing state and the powers which mock these up as the 18th century progresses are the two East India companies the English East India company and the company designed of Paris. And these are the troops doing the fighting it looks a bit like a sort of pride parade. These outfits that it is in fact the cutting edge military latest military gizmo of its day. They are using technology developed originally by Frederick the great oppression is a great military revolution the 18th century involving bandits and muskets and field artillery and 18th century ideas of ballistics. These small infantry armies very well drilled in the Prussian style, I'm ported to India and can defeat massive mogul cavalry armies, and they do from 1740s onwards and for about 40 or 50 years 40 years. There is no effective Indian response. And these tightly trained CPI regiments have locally recruited Indian soldiers fighting under a few imported European officers, only five or 6% European officers in an overwhelmingly Indian staffed army conquer one by one, the the different split fragmented provinces of what have been once the great mogul empire. And the big moment comes in 1756 when this man Sir Roger Dowler this incident is a is a painting recently given to the Chamber Street Museum and Edinburgh by the Swinton family remember I pointed out Archibald Swinton on that painting. This collection now it shows Sir Roger Dowler the governor of Bengal and Sir Roger Dowler was understandably irritated because the East India Company in Calcutta had started rebuilding their defenses. We thought this was to keep him out. In fact it was because a faulty intelligence the same thing which had caused the Iraq war in our time misunderstood intelligence also resulted in the seven year. And the East India Company receives a faulty piece of intelligence that the French are sailing with an enormous flotilla from their port in Port Lorrier south of Brittany, and that they're heading to Bengal and so the East India Company puts together an enormous flotilla This man, the young Robert Clive, and he sails across the world arrives in Bengal to find that there is no French flotilla that he's completely wasted his time. And in fact, the flotilla had sailed off to Canada at the beginning of what all that Daniel Day Lewis stuff in, you know jumping over waterfalls and Lake Huron and what the Americans called the French and Indian was. But his face is saved by Sir Roger down who irritated by the rebuild the rebuilding of the fortifications of Calcutta takes Calcutta and puts many of the officers, including my forebears that are rumpled into the what is known to future generations of school boys as the black hole of Calcutta. It's a much mythologized event which was much exaggerated by propagandist but which did happen, and lots of young men and women died that night. And this is used as a, as an excuse to send Clive up to. Sorry, five up to Calcutta he retakes it in 1756. And then crucially he gets a letter from a man called the jugger set. And that is means the banker of the world. And he is the kind of, you know, the, the Indian mawari equivalent of the Rothschilds. In the 18th century degenerated into into very regional anarchy. The jugger sets to find a way to send the mogul tax revenue from Bengal to Delhi, thousands of miles by a credit system in the old days you just load up a whole load of carts full of gold coins in chests and march it with the regiment of soldiers up the Ganges as far as Delhi. Now the jugger sets use these credit notes and you feed it into their office machine to ban and you can withdraw it in their office in Delhi, and they take 10% on the way. As a result of which, according to one chronicler wealth flows into the jugger sets coffers like the Ganges flows into the sea. And the jugger sets become this enormous, incredibly rich credit organization. And they are irritated with Sirajadala who's attacked the East India Company who have good clients. So they basically reach out to Clive after he's retaking Calcutta and says come up one stage further come and do what I suppose we would call regime change and get rid of Sirajadala. And I will give you personally one million pounds, and I will give the East India Company a further million pounds, and Clive says, yep, no problem at all, I'm on my way. And so what we today regard, what has always been taught traditionally is this great heroic victory of Clive the battle of Plessy with Clive charging ahead on his charger and, in fact, is a big fiddle. Not only is Clive in the pay of the jugger sets but so is Sirajadala's leading general Mia Jaffa, who helpfully walks off the field halfway through with half the army. So Sirajadala, please, knowing that there's treachery leaving his Palakwine, which we saw in the first slide, now sitting in Paris Castle on the battlefield. He's captured, murdered, paraded through Mashidabad and the next day Clive walks in and just stuffs his pockets with the jewels and the gold. And when many years later he's finally pulled before parliament and asked why when he was sent off to fight the French. He felt that he could just a fight Sirajadala and then be help himself to his treasury. He says my Lord's in a rather sort of Boris Johnsony moment. He said my Lord's I prostrate city was was waiting on my convenience the bankers were begging for my favors my Lord's I was astonished at my own moderation. And rather and rather is with party gates, you know all the Tories fall about laughing and he gets off. And he's let off. And nonetheless this transaction instantly makes him the richest self made man in Europe, because these are vast sums of money, vast sums of money, sums unheard of in Europe at this time. Clive, a year later comes home and her pet ferret has a necklace worth 5000 pounds of jewel of diamonds from the Mashidabad Treasury. And so, you know, hugely different scales of wealth that has ever been seen in these islands starts hemorrhaging its way towards Britain. And eight years later the Battle of Buxa 1765. The puppet put on the throne by by the city company mere custom by the stage joins up with the Nawab of of kind of central Ganges. And that now should your dollar and the Mughal Emperor Shaalam seen in this picture, and all three are narrowly defeated by Hector Monroe of this parish and Hector Monroe in the in the victory of Buxa manages effectively to defeat all the Mughal armies in India, leaving the entire northern half of the Mughal Empire entirely now prostrate at the East India Company's feet. And that's when this Dewani document is signed, and the East India Company takes control of the finances of Bengal, and the rest. It's rather like you know how the government can now hand over prisons to what's that company called for GS or whatever it is you know privatizing a security it's as if the entire state is taken over by Amazon, which may yet happen with quasi it hasn't quite happened yet. And it's that kind of thing a private corporation for profit takes over the entire workings of the state in the richest bit of the world. The equivalent today will be Amazon taking over the bay. Taking over Hewlett Packard and Amazon and Apple and all these other enormous rich bay area companies, because at this point Bengal is home to 1 million looms, making the best quality cotton in the world the most profitable pre industrial area on the globe, and the and the East India Company just gobbles it up. And they spend the money increasing the size of their army so you go from 6000 C poise at Battle of Placid to 30,000 by the 1780s to by 1799 the East India Company army has 200,000 Indian mercenary C poise, which is exactly double in 1799. The size of the entire British Army. So corporations still operating from that tiny building in London Hall Street has an army twice the size of the British Army at the moment when the British Army is just about to rearm and fight and fight Napoleon. So it's, it's corporate power on the scale, unparalleled not only does it have the economic means to bribe, dine, lobby, and win over most of Parliament already and by this stage, two thirds of the MPs in Parliament have East India shares. But there's also because by this stage by the 1780s, enough of these rich young men who've made their fortunes the East India Company have come home and bought rotten bars that are MPs themselves. So they have their own effective their own, not formally their own party but effectively their own group in Parliament that will vote for these India companies interests. So only does the company defeat its enemies abroad at home it's busy corrupting Parliament at home and inventing the ways that still survive by which corporations influence democratic institutions. In the meantime however the East India Company business model is changing we've seen how it moved from trading in spices in the East Indies to trading in textiles India. Now it has a different thing, because in the old days used to have to send gold out from London to buy all this stuff if you wanted to buy cotton and silk and nice embroideries, you had to fill a ship with gold and and and buy things in India but now you conquered North India. All you have to do is tax the Indians. And then you with the profits of that you buy your silk and your cotton and all and the salt Peter and all the other things you want to trade in Europe so it's a fantastic business model you didn't have to bring any money out, but you come home full of all the goodies they wonder these huge country houses are being built all over Scotland by this stage. But then they realize again there's something else they can do on the edge of the land where previously there's they all the agricultural land is already being employed with paddy fields and so on. On the marginal land, you can grow opium. So they then develop a new business model whereby they grow opium in a vast quantities in India becoming in the process, the largest narco operators in history making the medallion cartel look like child's play. Pablo Escobar's like Andy Pandey compared to these guys, they then conquer great chunks of the coast of China and take seas Hong Kong. So they're operated with lots of Scots like the Bajardines and the Mathesons piling in at this stage. And they have a fantastic second business so they, they grow opium very cheaply in India, they sell it very expensively in China illegally fighting wars to for to, for the right of what they call free trade something that the Americans are less keen to offer. Pablo Escobar, you don't hear about the, the drug department, talking about the joys of free trade when it comes to cocaine. And they buy with the proceeds of that Chinese tea which they then sell in India in London and in America and it's East India Company tea of course which is dumped in Boston Harbor at the American at the Boston tea because the, when the East India Company goes bust following the Bengal famine of 1770 part of its recovery process the company allows it to sell its tea in America. And this is what the early Patriots are worried that the East India Company is going to be let loose on them. But by now this sort of creaky Tudor startup with a bunch of pirates operating out of a couple of ships and a kind of pub in London is now very clearly got the lineaments of the first great multinational the same sort of thing that Amazon or Google or Microsoft is today. The East India Company flag becomes partly probably the model for the American flag. And this is now what the headquarters of the East India Company looks like it looks like Buckingham Palace. It's full of leaden Hall Street, because it's interest now encompass the entire globe. The director's boardroom is where from the place from where the entire interests of India Pakistan and Bangladesh and Afghanistan are in modern terms are controlled. The East India Company docks, this is taken as if from what is now canary wolf looking out down to Greenwich, and those are the East India Company docks it's still the name of the tube station, from which the East India Company unloads all its opium cotton, so Peter into warehouses. And it also has a second establishment at Brunswick where it's building 30 or 40 clippers a month to take all its goods around the world. It's a completely different scale to the to what we've seen at the beginning it's now the first multinational with tentacles in every in every country but also as Andrews work has shown. And as Andrews work has shown enriching every parish in Scotland with nice Palladian houses coming up in in county after county. Thanks to thanks to the proceeds of many, many Scots East India Company employees. It all goes on. By 1770 there's this terrible moment there's a famine in Bengal the East India Company doesn't put out a single soup kitchen, nor has it prepared like all sensible Indian rulers do stores of grain for for lean years. Maybe five of the figures have disputed three to five million possibly some people say seven million, but anyway, let's say five million Bengalis start to death. The East India Company does not blanch at this, and sends its sepoys out into the field to gather the taxes anyway, and they wreck gibbets anyone, even if they're starving who doesn't pay is hung. The shareholders at the annual general meeting in London here that the full taxes have been gathered. They vote themselves increase dividend from 10 to 12 and a half percent. It's not sustainable, because they're effectively throttling the air the goose that lays the building eggs so two years later, the company begins to go bust and the first bank to go bust is around here that's the air bank, a while. There's 30 other banks collapse when it's kind of parent East India comes about to go bankrupt. The Bank of England who hasn't had its finest day over the last couple of days, tries to intervene and as with today with quasi quieting and this trust, they find that they're overwhelmed by the scale of the chaos. They can't bail them out either. So they have to go to Parliament and eventually in 1784, the enacted past in Parliament, whereby, rather like bailing out that West after the subprime collapses 10 years or 15 years ago. The East India Company is effectively part nationalized and the government takes 50% share. So what had been a libertarian free range free market, sort of libertarian dream of a completely unregulated company, doing whatever it wants over a great chunk of the globe. Now becomes more like a public private partnership and over the course of the 19th century, the government begins to seize more and more of it and control more and more of it. First of all, individual operators are allowed to break its monopoly so you get Jardine Matheson's and other Scots companies coming and setting up their own businesses in India and in Hong Kong. And finally, in 1857, there is a huge rebellion, the largest anti colonial revolt to take place anywhere in the world, any point in the 19th century. And it's not one of the Indian princes or the marathas who rise up, it is this the sepoys of the company, it is their own security services. And it's not put out because the company has had a sudden wave of evangelical fervor and many of the officers are talking about reading the Bible to the Brahmins on parade and putting up the 10 commandments outside the collectors house, and all this sort of thing and the Lee Enfield rifle is issued, and these new cartridges are given which have pig fat and cow fat. Many people believe, probably wrongly but it is nonetheless, it is believed that the company is about to convert into Christianity. And they all rise up and there's a massive rebellion and the company nearly collapses and the, the hold of the company and Britain on India is nearly unstuck in 1857. And then the share financial muscle and organization wins out, and they're able to basically recruit a whole new army from the Punjab, and was there a star, and the same sort of people that the Americans drone bombing in, in the, in was there a stand and the territories of Pakistan were recruited and they, the Pashtun is always happy to come and loot Delhi and they did. And in the, on the 28th of September 1857, they burst into the Kashmiri gate which is the scene you see here. And they begin then to lock the gates and burn it every male over the age of 16. They then round up for months afterwards anyone that's in any way implicated in this uprising, probably the most brutal moment of the entire British Empire, maybe hundreds of thousands there are no exact figures, but the nastiest and worst war criminal, as we must call him in modern parlance is Colin Campbell who still sits on a horse on his horse or is he on his, he's on a horse or Colin Campbell is standing where is he George Square, still his statue is there. He sewed up men in pig skins and blew them from the mouths of cannon, and then made them lick up the blood of the massacred women in the BB guard all this sort of horror. And there's a very, very gruesome moment the nastiest war crimes, I think probably set in my area of study ever committed by the British individual at the end of it, not only is the company rolled up with the Mughal Empire, as well, and instead it's nationalized and turned into the Raj. And this is the punch cartoon marking this moment. Just as the company had blown these sepoys and Colin Campbell particularly enthusiastically had blown these sepoys in the mouths of cannon, so that their entrails scatter off it's a horrific way of dying and a particularly nasty site, but it was deliberately put on as a spectacle. And this is how punch imagines it with the East India Company headquarters being blown from the mouth of the cannon. And as the all the count books and the scrolls burst out of their library nepotism blundering avarice misgovernment is the comment of punch. But effectively the East India Company is rolled up as the time says at the time with less bother than a regional railway bankruptcy. And it becomes the Raj but the interesting thing is that the Raj, which is how we tend to think of the British and India we talk about the British Raj as if that's all that was. It's only 90 years long. 1857 to 1947. But the East India Company is knocking around from 1600 the time of Shakespeare until 1857 which is 250 years. So it's bad enough being colonized at all but it's much more sinister to be colonized by a multinational corporation that only exists for profit. And it makes it a particularly stark story because there's no East India Company whatever it was was not hypocritical it didn't pretend to be about a civilizing mission or building ports and and museums and libraries across India it was about making a profit. It was about the share price. It was about the annual general meeting and rewarding the shareholders and the directors and they did that very effectively and they enormously increased the wealth of Great Britain Britain and England and Scotland and Northern Ireland and Ireland and Wales in the process, immeasurably richer as a result of this. But it's not a pretty tail when you look at it in detail. And with this is the one moment that the Parliament gets its act together and begins to try and look into what's going on is the impeachment of Warren Hastings but they get the wrong guy effectively because Warren Hastings is actually one of the more important East India Company men who had an interest in Sanskrit culture founds the Royal Asiatic Society learns Bengali and Hindi and is certainly a much more attractive character than Clive who's just a brute. It's worth just recalling to end the words of the Lord Chancellor as he stands with his gavel. Here we are. At the trial of Warren Hastings he stands up and he says corporations have neither bodies to be punished nor souls to be condemned. They therefore do as they like. Thank you very much. Life Affirming lecture, I think we recall that the phrase too big to feel has just been has just been historicised in some way, but you can obviously sense both the scale. And I think some of the human character that comes out of this both in terms of the, the British corporate colonial elite, as well as many of the nameless souls in South Asia that will suffer from that corporate model. And we have probably about at least 20, 25 minutes for questions. I'm conscious that we have colleagues joining us online. So whoever is keeping an eye out for the online questions put your hand up if there are any. In the interim, William has made it more than clear he's welcoming questions from the floor so please put your hand up there are roving mics I believe. Thank you again for a wonderful wide ranging yet in many ways very sobering. Can I actually, before you asked, because can we just ask you, and you're just two minutes on what it meant for Scotland, the East India Company, and what the examples. What the exam, the most obvious examples tickling Glasgow, I could dig out my notes of East India Company loot that people will pass every day in the company. What does it mean for Scotland. Well, you've seen the scale of it and we tend to associate this city with the terrible trade slavery. And it is embedded in slavery, but at the same time Scotland is heavily involved disproportionately in that organization, and maybe the best way to put it is, if you think of Lanarkshire in the 1770s. The East India men are bringing back money that's equivalent for just Lanarkshire of 20 extra bags. In other words, Scotland moves from being a relatively poor, in fact, in European terms, very poor country to being with England and the Dutch Republic, the third richest society in the world. Now that doesn't mean we aren't still poor, don't have our, but Scotland's liquidity is great economic liftoff is disproportionately probably more than England, in fact, reliant on the mass enslavement of Africans and their descendants, and the image we've just seen of what British power does in India. So when Scotland and its society choose to think that we have a history which is that of being on the receiving end of British imperialism, which to some extent the society was, we need to be a bit more humble and a bit more grounded. And remember that we are hugely complicit in the washed aspects of British colonialism and Glasgow has both of those Eastern and Western aspects and that's all I would say because big country houses in the area, what are the big ones around about him, take a pic, there's probably 30 or 40 in the West Indian and East Indian houses within 30 miles of you, or at least they were until they were demolished in the most fortified slumped and landed power. And I'm not here. I'm not here. Questions questions questions for for William please because he has so many interesting aspects. Oh, I beg your pardon sorry questions please. Yes please. Wait for the mic please. Nowadays we hear more about setting rights, the slavery, etc. Why is it what was the wrongs done to India is not raised at all. I think that's changing. I think that is changing slavery is a huge part of the story too, but no I think I mean the thing is it's not on the curriculum. The terrible thing about the curriculum is that we get the impression from it that the Brits are always on the right side. So we go from Henry the eighth and his wives to Florence Nightingale to the emancipation of the slaves so we know we're not responsible for the slave trade but our kids are taught that we're responsible for the emancipation of it. And then we defeat the Nazis and liberate the world and bring freedom to the world and the fact that we conquered so many countries that every six days there's a celebration somewhere in the world of independence from this country. It's the most celebrated festival internationally. And it's just not part of the curriculum we learned you know our kids learn about hypercourse systems and the Roman Empire we learn about the Spanish Empire we never learned about our own. It's a bizarre bizarre situation but you're right, it isn't known and it needs to be better known. So some people up the back. I have a question online from Ronald. What other loose reference to slavery was slavery any part of the East India Company's operations. Not much. I mean the main slave organ is is the Royal Africa country company and then and then all these other different saving organization the East India Company was not so much involved wasn't completely free of it but it was not so much a part of the organization but it had many other ways of oppressing and and enriching itself at the cost of of those it governed and conquered. Anarchy it seems to me is a very appropriate title for the age in which we live, at least financial anarchy. And it's that which particularly interests me in terms of the East India Company as early as the 1690s or early 17th century and the East India Company with its monopoly was really like even more important than BP on the footsie today is a really really powerful and yet it took a very elusive influence over the British economy. And to just two things if I can very quickly say that the Darian scheme started out actually as London investors who wanted a competitor to the EC and the Scots getting together. It was Will King William who blocked the IPO. They only went to Darian as a dud idea that they sold themselves in Edinburgh. However, when you then come to the early 17th, 18th century, a Tory government was persuaded by a bunch of rascals, their friends to set up the South Sea Company, which again was a template from the East India Company to get the slave trade from the span span spaniards after the Treaty of Utrecht. They didn't know anything about slavery, and they didn't know anything about South America. What they intended to do was was to privatize the national debt. Could you, could you, could you just ask one question. What was the influence of the East India Company on all these operations and how did they react to them. I think many of them work. I mean, what depression you get in the early days is that there is a small merchant elite based in London, which often have their, their fingers in several pies. So the guys who found the East India Company also have intra influence in the invest in the Levant Company in the Muscovy Company and in the Royal Africa Company. So often you have the same group of investors, giving money in different in different pots in all these different worlds because it's a very small world. This 16th century London is a tiny place and the number of super rich people with money to invest is relatively small. So they're all interlinked by these merchant elites. And what we forget is that so much of this early Tudor and Elizabethan colonialism is corporate. So you get things like the Virginia Company, which which colonizes great chunks of Virginia and the Rhode Island Company. And then one of them still exists the Hudson Bay Company. And it's all the same group of investors investing in all of them so they're often interrelated is the squabbles and there's rivalries and and some of the most vicious corporate battles ever. One of the amazing things about Clive is that he not only shows this sort of astonishing quality of winning on a battlefield by breaking the rules coming in the rear fighting at night, attacking during thunderstorms in fog in the early morning, but he has the same capacity in boardroom fights and he takes on his great rival, Sutherland and defeats him and then he does it again in Parliament. And it's a small group with with interacting with each other sharing the same clubs, going to the same schools and parties and and nothing's changed. Doing lockdown together. I'd like to ask a question about another great kind of imperial name that came from India at that time that was Rudyard Kipling and his colonial connections and he seemed to be very much embedded in that Indian culture and what was happening, but there's no So, Roger Kipling obviously is the the Bard of the high Victorian Raj rather than the East India Company he's around in the from the 1870s, 1880s, 1890s. Still an extraordinary writer one of the great things to read on Roger Kipling is Saeed. I would say he writes an extraordinary essay on Kim he rather likes Kim. And he is both. I mean, so this is the complication of this. Kipling can be a very attractive writer and Baba black sheep the story of him being sent back to to England and being bullied as a child is an extraordinary short story and there are stories like on this on the city wall and Kim which are very sympathetic books but he is also the, the, the, the great drum beta for empire imperialism the bull war and the first world war. So he's a he's a complicated character but it's a different story. It's the story of, in a sense, it's very, very important to draw a distinction between the East India Company, which ends in 1857 and the high Raj, which is a slightly different story, no better in many ways, but, but different. Thank you. Thank you very much. I think that Adolf Hitler and Joe Stalin were any different from East India Company because Hitler started out building Volkswagen's by selling them on tick to Germans to fund his army. And he did the same with Audi and he did the same with a BMW, we built the measurements, and even after the war, we're still now by Volkswagen's BMWs, and we don't buy a message. I think both Stalin, both Stalin and Hitler are on record for admiring the British Raj for its ability to control large areas and large numbers of people with minimum cost. And for the efficiency with which in the sense they subjugated people, which is a rather chilling warning. You've got to look at all these things individually and different periods of history have different issues that they are different and you know one could go to a million ways in which they're different, but they're not different enough. And they're not as different as we've led been persuaded ourselves. And the big difference is because we won the war, and the Germans lost it, they had to do all the soul searching about the darkness of their past. But we have. We just haven't. And in the sense it's now that this moment is coming, I think, and gradually the pennies dropping that. But there's huge resistance and so you know when one group of scholars raise all these issues. This trust talks about us doing Britain down. We had an image earlier in the summer with David Olashuga, the, the wonderful historian of slavery and he, we did a signing afterwards in a bookshop. And there was this burly chap who'd been walking with us and he hadn't introduced himself to me and he was obviously with David. And I said, Oh, you a friend of David he said I'm his bodyguard, because he now gets death threats from English nationalists who don't like him talking about slavery. I mean, I did get this, because I'm white. But I know satanam sanghara gets post bags for the insults and stuff. So it's touchy. So public scholars from the minority backgrounds put up with a lot more. Thank you. Thank you. I was clearly very successful and popular member of the club. How was it the ended up in front of a committee in Parliament. One of the first things studying this history is is is what the realization that type wasn't at all popular. Nor was the East India Company at all popular people regarded the East India Company rather like people today regard hedge fund managers, with a mixture of sort of dislike and envy and, and sort of hatred. And the sensation that they're making sort of dishonest money somehow or merchant bankers 1980s crashing their porches into restaurants and all that stuff. They were regarded as brutal new very rich. And from the first time you from the Bengal famine and 1772, you get large numbers of whistleblowers producing reports of millions of starving Indians, and the image that the East India Company is making its money over the rotting corpses of people begins to proliferate and you can see market where Clive is satirized as Lord Vulture. And lots of stuff in local papers across the country talking about the brutes of the East India Company, Horace Warpole writing angrily in his diary about the, we have out done the Aztec we are the Spanish with the Aztecs ninjas are even worse with the, with the, and it's worse he says because they at least had the excuse of religion we have only profit. So, there is lots of resistance to this across the country. And Clive is so unpopular that after he's let off by parliament he's booed and hissed as he goes through the streets of London and ultimately he cuts his veins with a blunt paper knife and commits suicide and is buried in an unmarked grave. Before I come to the main point of my question I would ask a point of information. As a part of the battle of a say. Do you pronounce people who are intimately connected with the battle don't know how to pronounce say, I say and I say, I've actually been to the battle site with the current Duke of Wellington and we walked around the site and we picked up it was his first battle as a commanding general, and he called it is greatest battle the bloodiest one ever so for the numbers. Now my question is it has a local connection. It's the proudest battle on or the Highland light infantry. It was nearly wiped out at the same. But the, my interest in the question is this. It's, it's known and reported at the time as a king's regiment just by the name of the Colonel. They never had numbers and they never certainly never had names as they had later in history. So my question is what was the relation Wellington was a British general in the British Army at the time. My question is what was the relationship between British generals and commanders from the East India Company and also between the King's Regiments. Very good. And the East India Company Regiments. And I described how the company starts off very much as a company and gradually becomes a public private partnership and ends up being nationalized completely. So there's a continually changing relationship with the British government. But from the beginning, you get as well as the East India Company's army which is full of which is has a tiny white officer elite and is overwhelmingly a 90% 95% Indian in its forces you also get British Army Regiments sent out. So in all these wars there are there are British Army regiments fewer at the beginning more at the end. And by the, from the moment that the British government gets highly involved from the regulating act in 1784, you get far more British Army regiments arriving out. And it becomes such a situation such by the time that the Duke of Wellington's elder brother Lord Wellesley is the governor general. What's happened is that the, in a sense the government is using the East India Company as an arm of the British fight against the French. Warren Hastings for example is the first, the first governor general appointed under the regulating act and he is an East India Company man. But two generations later, Richard Wellesley is brought in he's a politician he's been an MP. And he is sent out very much with the view to using the East India Company's army as an arm of the global struggle against the French. First of all disarms a small French contingent in Hyderabad under Manco Remo, then he fights to put Sultan who has French officers. And finally he fights the Marathas also have French officers that battle of assay, which you referred to in 1803 is part of that fight. So you have it's almost like you have a government cuckoo in an corporate nest. Wellesley sort of uses the East India Company as part of his, his assault on the French interest in the eastern half of the globe. And the, and Napoleon regards the company as easy meat he says it's just a bunch of British shopkeepers. And he comes up with elaborate and sort of crazy schemes that he's going to march across Persia. And join up with the Russians who are going to march over to Afghanistan. And then he's going to take alternatively might take a boat down the Red Sea and he does this he takes Egypt that whole business of Egypt was meant to be the first stage of him then getting boats to the Red Sea and joining up with Tipu Sultan. I mean, there are wonderful parts of this that I tell this all in my second bit of the company quarter, the white moguls. Sadly, we have one at a time I was conscious of another question, but we've got other business. I just wanted to begin to thank William for that. Through so many different landscapes of human stories of world changing events of personalities and processes, which do you have a very ring in terms of the potentially resonating. Modern power is actually really, really central. And it's been a wonderful experience. Okay, I now have the privilege on behalf of the society to present. This isn't your medal. This is a, this is the chain of office of the president. I'm sure you'll agree it looks like it could have been looted by the company. So that was a wonderful lecture of course I couldn't help but thinking as you mentioned in the early days one of the heads of the East India Company was sent to the Tower of London for corruption. I couldn't help but think that now we send such people to the House of Lords. So, on that happy note, William. Let me present with you. I got a medal. Minerva medal which is. Thank you very much. And also as a traditional paper. Thank you very much. Keep my papers in order. Like the generation game where the cuddly toy. Well, there's no cuddly toy. But there are glasses of wine. So, please, everybody, please join us in a glass of wine. Our next meeting is on the 12th of October and that's given. This talk will be given by Gordon Dutton on what the, how the brain sees you, you'll see that in the sheet. So thank you very much everybody for coming out. And I'll see you during the wine and thanks again finally to.