[exBarrelSpoiler]

The article does provide interesting, educational details, but it also engages in a lot of gratuitous cheerleading of the BEIC and makes comparisons to modern day startups. Wonks celebrating imperialism for business lessons. It’s ghoulish and absurdly tasteless. You can expect something like that from say the War Nerd, but the style and framing of this article is just wildly inappropriate.

[rayiner]

> Wonks celebrating imperialism for business lessons

First, the article does plenty of throat clearing about those issues.

Second, empires are impressive. Can the French or British find things to admire about the Romans?

[exBarrelSpoiler]

> Can the French or British find things to admire about the Romans?

The statute of limitations have passed on those crimes since they took place in Antiquity.

> First, the article does plenty of throat clearing about those issues.

Please, he's practically drooling:

> While not quite Google cafeteria, the lunches and dinners served were exquisite! Free breakfasts in London, and on-site cooks (English, Portuguese and Indian) in factories, with plenty of alcohol to go around.

> If that’s not enough, if you were a senior officer you got a pretty great stipend to spend on entertaining others.

> Also, they had an incredibly sexy headquarter to work in (marble bas-reliefs, pipe organ of a tiger devouring a European and jewel-encrusted gold throne of the Sultan of Mysore Tipu). Even the warehouses were elegant and stylish in the City.

[rayiner]

> The statute of limitations have passed on those crimes since they took place in Antiquity.

Europeans got over it even way back in antiquity. The Franks adopted the Roman language, religion (by then Christianity), and civil law and institutions. They didn’t seek to distance themselves from Roman empirical history.

[exBarrelSpoiler]

Then perhaps it is different in that South Asian nations don’t seem themselves as successors to Britain, whereas many peoples the Romans conquered claimed their imperial mantle as legitimacy.

[rayiner]

That’s a choice.

[marquisdepolis]

Fwiw I wrote right upfront that it's of course terrible. But the assumption was that now that we've acknowledged that we can also look at other aspects. I get the revulsion though, sorry!

[exBarrelSpoiler]

It’s interesting history and good analysis but the whole framing just seems ill-conceived. “Business operational lessons from the great bloodthirsty marauders of history” works as a parody or when you’re intentionally edgy (as with War Nerd), here it’s reads as tone-deaf.

[hnbad]

To satisfy Godwin's law: Nazi concentration camps had amenities like swimming pools for the guards. I'm sure plenty of thought went into how to make the job comfortable given its gruesome reality. That doesn't mean we should be writing salivating opeds about management lessons to take away from that.