In 2013, as part of an in-depth look at G4S, I compared the security and outsourcing group to the British East India Company. At the time, G4S employed more than 620,000 people, and its activities, including managing prisons and immigrant detention centres, were intertwined with some of the most controversial government policies around the world.
Whatever you think of G4S, though, even a cursory study of the EIC’s history reveals it was a lazy and unfair comparison. In its pomp in the 1750s, the EIC was far larger, economically speaking, than any private company today; it accounted for £2m of Britain’s £10m export trade. It was also, under Robert Clive, its reckless and charismatic “chief executive”, one of the bloodiest and most aggressive capitalist organisations ever seen.
Founded in 1599, in a desperate effort to match the Dutch East India Company’s trading success, the EIC was, like its Dutch rival, a chartered joint stock corporation. By the second half of the 18th century, thanks to its state monopoly and Clive’s audacious no-holds-barred military leadership, the EIC had grown to become a powerful “empire within an empire” with extensive and lucrative Indian holdings. It secured its power with a private army, and sustained it through tax revenue as much as commercial profit.