East India Company Quotes

“If God did not exist it would be necessary to invent Him. But all nature cries aloud that He does exist."

(Voltaire)”
― Elizabeth Kales

“March 1774 by declaring the port of Boston closed until the East India Company had been compensated for its losses. This was the first of the so-called Coercive Acts—a series of laws passed in 1774 in which the British attempted to assert their authority over the colonies but instead succeeded only in enraging the colonists further and ultimately prompted the outbreak of the Revolutionary War in 1775. It is tempting to wonder whether a government less influenced by the interests of the company might have simply shrugged off the tea parties or come to some compromise with the colonists.”
― Tom Standage

“Perhaps I myself am a pompous and conceited old fool. And perhaps if these fools I complain of were French or Dutch or German I would not mind so much, because then I could say 'What else can you expect?' and feel superior. It is because they are men of my own race that I would have them all good.”
― M.M. Kaye, The Far Pavilions

“Up until the end of the 16th century, even global trading outfits like the Levant Company were guilds or partnerships, whose members pooled their resources that none could accomplish in isolation. But then, on the September 24, 1599, in a half-timbered building off Moorgate Fields, not far from where Shakespeare was struggling to complete Hamlet, something momentous happened. A company was founded whose ownership was cut up into tiny pieces to be bought and sold freely and anonymously, like pieces of silver. Once could own a piece of the company without being involved of it, indeed without even telling anyone. The first global joint-stock company was thus born, undoubtly Tudor England’s most revolutionary invention. Its name? The East India Company.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present

“The right to issue unlimited quantities of anonymously tradable shares, along with the institution of a liquid market for them, created something new: corporations with power so immense, it dwarfed that of their countries of origin, and could be deployed in faraway places assiduously to exploit people and resources. Shareholding and well-governed share markets fired up history, separating ownership from the rest of the East India Company’s activities unleashed a fluid, irresistible force. Unchecked, the East India Company grew more powerful than the British state, answerable only to its shareholders. At home, its bureaucracy corrupted and largely controlled Her majesty’s government. Abroad, its 200,000-strong private army oversaw the destruction of well-functioning economies in Asia and a number of Pacific islands and ensured the systematic exploitation of their peoples.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present

“The heinous misdeeds committed by the empire are no longer privy to debate. It's a known fact, at least to people with some basic brains... Imagine me coming to your home and then declaring myself the guardian of the house while helping myself with all your resources and keeping you as underling - you know, like the pilgrims did to the native Americans. Sucks right! Exactly my point!”
― Abhijit Naskar, Making Britain Civilized: How to Gain Readmission to The Human Race

“One of the reasons for this cataclysmic change of destinies was the inherent weakness of a decaying agricultural empire of the Mughals which after more than two hundred years of rule over vast areas of India, was at its terminal stage and needed a small push to crumble like a house of cards.That push was given by six East India Companies of different European countries which had extracted rights to trade with India from the Mughals but transformed themselves as the arbiters and protectors of several Indian states. In this process they not only became rich but also militarily strong because in the twilight years of the Mughal empire, deteriorating security environment necessitated to arm themselves to protect their economic interests. Because of their inherent superiority as representatives of rising industrial powers, they had access to modern techniques and technology of warfare, which turned out to be the decisive factor in capturing vast territories in India.”
― Shahid Hussain Raja, 1857 Indian War of Independence:1857 Indian Sepoys' Mutiny

“Writing fiction is a respectable way of fibbing for a living—and enjoying it!
-Anne George”
― Anne George, Love and Mutiny: Tales from British India

“No one was planning to travel light. One brigadier claimed that he needed fifty camels to carry his kit, while General Cotton took 260 for his. Three hundred camels were earmarked to carry the military wine cellar. Even junior officers travelled with as many as forty servants—ranging from cooks and sweepers to bearers and water carriers. According to Major General Nott, who had to work his way up through his career without the benefit of connections, patronage or money and who looked with a jaundiced eye on the rich young officers of the Queen's Regiments, it was already clear that the army was not enforcing proper military austerity. Many of the junior officers were already treating the war as though it were as light-hearted as a hunting trip—indeed one regiment had actually brought its own foxhounds with it to the front.”
― William Dalrymple, Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan

“The East India Company was no apparition though; it was the template for many subsequent corporations […] Liberals betray themselves […] the moment they turn a blind eye to this kind of hyper-concentrated power. […] This is why trading in apples does not come even close to trading in shares. Large quantities may produce, at worse, lots of bad cider, but large amounts of money invested in liquid shares can release demonic forces that no market or state can control.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present

“People didn’t matter to the Company. They were commodities like everything else: free to produce and cheap to replace. Only what they dug out of the ground had value.”
― Stuart Turton, The Devil and the Dark Water

“The Dutch West India Company and the Dutch East India Company, which were the biggest slave trading companies in history, enjoyed monopolies over the shipment and sale of African slaves.”
― Mawuena Addo, Roses in the Rainbow

“A contemporary commentator drew an analogy between the East India Company’s ownership structure and the River Thames’ splendid flux, which leaves it ‘still the same river, though the parts which compose it are changing every instance.’ Once the property rights over a firm become detached from the people that set it up and work in it, it becomes a corpus in flux. It acquires a liquid life of its own, it can grow out of any human proportion. Indeed, like a river, it becomes potentially immortal.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present

“When a bunch of morons goes about robbing, killing and terrorizing, it doesn't make them great and glorious, it only makes them a second-rate lifeform.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Making Britain Civilized: How to Gain Readmission to The Human Race

“It's not british empire, it's brutish empire.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Making Britain Civilized: How to Gain Readmission to The Human Race

“British intellectual idiots often glorify the Empire by drawing example of India. They say, before the British came to India, it was a land of warring tribes. To them I say, the Indus valley civilization has quite literally provided the world with more thinkers, philosophers and reformers than any other nation in the world.

Indians were making jaw-dropping advancements in mathematics, astronomy, medicine and philosophy, when the Brits were just beginning to learn farming. The list will never end if we start recording the involvement of India, Arabia and China in the course of humankind's progress, just like the entire electrified and connected world will fall into chaos, if we went back in history and erased one Serbian scientist from the timeline, Nikola Tesla.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Making Britain Civilized: How to Gain Readmission to The Human Race

“Thank You Hitler (The Sonnet)

Thank you Hitler for showing the worst of humanity,
I am sorry that we couldn't place you on a pedestal.
Things would've been different if you were not a nobody,
Particularly if you had a background royally honorable.
Apparently if you have an empire to your name,
You can get away with the most heinous of atrocities.
If you have that blue blood running through your veins,
Tyranny, oppression, are deemed as acts of great dignity.
The common notion is, everything nazi is sick and sinister,
At the same time, everything british is great and glorious,
Despite the fact that it was the british empire that was,
An international force of evil unlike the nazi bastards.
Nazism is an enemy of humanity, there is no doubt.
Only if we felt so for the empire as we do for the krauts!”
― Abhijit Naskar, Making Britain Civilized: How to Gain Readmission to The Human Race

“Barbarism, thy name is Britain. In this day and age, if any societal structure is a revolting blot on the fabric of the democratic world, it's not Russia or North Korea, but the not-so-great Britain.

The queen might have been a nice person, I don't know. But when a person is declared the supreme authority (head of state) of an entire people by birth, it's not something to take pride in, rather it's something to be ashamed of.

Britain may mourn the death of the queen as a person, but no land deserves to be called civilized while mourning the death of a monarch. Let me put this into perspective. Almost every week a country celebrates independence from britain - if this doesn't tell you why the monarchy is the antithesis of everything that is civilized, nothing can.

I wonder, they can throw a homeless man in jail for lifting a bread out of hunger, yet the empire walks free, even after raping, pillaging and looting from 90% of the world's countries!

Where is the ICC (International Criminal Court) now, when one monarch after another sits on the throne, wielding the crown jewels encrusted with national treasures stolen from all over the globe!”
― Abhijit Naskar, Corazon Calamidad: Obedient to None, Oppressive to None

“When the descendants of a brutish empire continue to represent and maintain the authority of that empire, such descendants do not deserve even an ounce of respect from civilized humans, any more than their ancestors do, let alone be declared head of state. It'd be like respecting a neonazi for advocating for a new confederate America.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Corazon Calamidad: Obedient to None, Oppressive to None

“Subhas Chandra Bose not died in a plane crash at the front, had Bhagat Singh not been hanged by the British, and had Gandhi not been killed by a Hindu extremist moron, Bharat, Pakistan and Bangladesh together would be shining as the brightest beacon of multiculturalism on the face of earth.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Bulletproof Backbone: Injustice Not Allowed on My Watch

“Vandana Shiva: We know what free trade means. The first free trade agreement written was by the East India Company. It means asymmetric trade. It means extraction. It means transfer of wealth.
[As quoted by DW Gibson.]”
― DW Gibson, One Week to Change the World: An Oral History of the 1999 WTO Protests