Burke spent seven years in Westminster Hall trying to impeach Hastings and lost. It took Britain an additional 63 years and the largest anticolonial uprising of the 19th century, which killed hundreds of thousands of people, to show that only robust legislation can tame corporations.
This happened after the East India Company’s insensitivity provoked a bloody uprising in 1857, the war known in Britain as the Indian Mutiny and in India as the First War of Independence. The Victorian state, alerted to the dangers posed by greed and self-interest, moved to tame history’s most voracious corporation by issuing a raft of legislation that essentially abolished the company and brought its functions under the purview of the Imperial Civil Service.
The company’s navy was disbanded and its army passed to the Crown. In 1858 the governor general of India announced that the company’s Indian possessions would be nationalized and pass into the control of the British Crown. The monarch, rather than the directors of the company, would henceforth rule India. The East India Company limped on in its amputated form for an additional 15 years, when its charter expired, finally shutting down in 1874, “with less fanfare,” noted one commentator, “than a regional railway bankruptcy.”
This not only broke the company’s economic monopoly with the trade of the East; it also allowed Britain to take control of its most profitable colony, with enormous benefits for the state (though not, it should be said, for India, whose economic exploitation in the service of British interests continued much as before).
China, reverting to its traditionally Communist approach to business, recently did something similar with its big corporations. A decade ago, many believed Alibaba and Tencent were the coming corporate kings. Today, China’s economy may yet overtake America’s, but its corporations will not, because President Xi Jinping decided they would not. In October 2020, Jack Ma, a co-founder of Alibaba, criticized China’s financial regulators for their “pawnshop mentality.” Within days, the over $310 billion flotation of Mr. Ma’s financial services unit, Ant Group, which at the time would have been the largest in history, was canceled two days before trading was set to begin.
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