By the beginning of the 19th century, the East India Company had become, as one of its directors admitted, “an empire within an empire”, with the power to make war or peace anywhere in the east.
The EIC had created a vast and sophisticated administration and civil service in India, built much of London’s Docklands and come close to generating half of Britain’s trade. Its annual spending in Britain — around ￡8.5m — equalled about a quarter of total British government annual expenditure. No wonder the Company now referred to itself as “the grandest society of merchants in the Universe”.
Its private armies were larger than those of almost all nation-states and its power encircled the globe; indeed, its shares were a kind of global reserve currency. As the parliamentarian Edmund Burke wrote: “The Constitution of the Company began in commerce and ended in Empire.”