> [The Queen] granted her charter to their corporation named Governor and Company of Merchants of London trading into the East Indies.[15] For a period of fifteen years, the charter awarded the company a monopoly[26] on English trade with all countries east of the Cape of Good Hope and west of the Straits of Magellan.[27] Any traders there without a licence from the company were liable to forfeiture of their ships and cargo (half of which would go to the Crown and half to the company), as well as imprisonment at the "royal pleasure".[28]
The government didn't tell them to kill or enslave people, they did that on their own since that was more profitable than not doing it. The government then stepped in and forced them to stop killing and enslaving, which made the world a better place, today we don't have many companies that kill or enslave thanks to governments.
Do you want someone to add up the gov’t direct death tolls so we can compare?
Just off the top of my head; holodomir, the Great Leap Forward, the holocaust, the Khmer Rouge are at least 10x the East India companies death toll. We should probably add in war casualties too - at a minimum WW1 and WW2. I think I could list off probably 10 more with about 5 more minutes of work.
People can be terrible. More direct power usually means more terrible.
Gov’ts usually have the most direct power.
East India company was an odd case because they were granted defacto delegated gov’t power over a region that was full of ‘others’.
Slavery isn't profitable, people do it for emotional or ideological reasons, or because they're not competent enough to run a business that has to actually trade.
This is literally why economics is called "the dismal science". Slaveowners called economists that when the economists told them to stop doing slavery.
No, it is very much the other way around. Government is itself a monopoly, and has historically been justified by the intention to mitigate the "war of all against all" that emerges from chaotic competition between divergent factions in a raw state of nature.
But the modern status quo is so massively skewed toward government that the benefits from mitigating the worst cases of competition are vastly eclipsed by the detriments of monopolistic centralization.
Modern governments are a democratic monopoly. Corporations aren't democratic, if a corporation gets powerful enough to overthrow the government and replace them you will be in much worse hands than if the current democratic government could remain in power.
So we shouldn't cheer on private corporations that developers technology that could allow them to replace the government, that is really really scary if they actually succeeds in doing it.
The fact that governments used contrived symbolic rituals to get arbitrary subsets of arbitrary aggregations of people to express nominal approval of their behavior does nothing whatsoever to alter either the empirical nature or the ethical implicatoins of its monopoly.
> Corporations aren't democratic
Good -- this means that it's harder for them to appeal to vague symbolism to convince people that their actions are inherently legitimate, which in turn means that they are under greater scrutiny to justify their actions, each on its own merits.
> if a corporation gets powerful enough to overthrow the government and replace them you will be in much worse hands than if the current democratic government could remain in power.
Large vested interests are already extremely adept at co-opting nominally "democratic" government and using the very monopoly you're trying to justify as a way of obtaining top-down power that they'd never be able to acquire on their own -- they have zero interest in overthrowing anything.
Regulatory capture is the principal mechanism of corruption in the modern world, and it's astonishing to me that people keep arguing for expanding the reach of the regulatory state in order to reduce the dominance of large corporations, when the actual effect is always to amplify it.
Monopoly is the byproduct of allowing centralized power, not the natural state. I'm not actually sure how we could narrow down the natural state of humans at this point, but I strongly suspect it wouldn't be based on an assumption that people are willing to give up a growing list of individual freedoms in the name of fear.
Stopping the accumulation of power requires aggressive sacrifice from the less powerful.
This isn’t a feature of humans, but basic system dynamics / economics / etc.
A group gets more power and leverage that power to gain more power. Inevitable. Coordinated action is the only way to prevent it. And coordinated action is government.
Well except that it definitely has. From more than 50 million people in pre-colonial times to less than 3 million in the 90s. USA has done genocide on a scale similar any other ethnic cleansing or to any communist regime.
USA didn't exist pre-colonial times, it started as a colony. Do you mean the British Empire? That one did way worse, yeah, but USA isn't the British Empire.
Individual behavior doesn't really exist, you don't have choices outside the ones provided by society. It's also a bit silly to mention it in the context of a literally physically addictive drug.
Interestingly schizophrenic people almost universally smoke, and it's thought this is because it's a better treatment than the actual drugs we give them, though that's not proven.
> Individual behavior doesn't really exist, you don't have choices outside the ones provided by society.
No, that's quite backwards. Individual behavior is effectively the only thing that objectively exists, as "society" is just an emergent pattern of aggregated individual behavior. Individuals' choices are limited by their own particular capacities, and "society" factors into that only in the sense that the choices of other individuals in the same bounded context, in aggregate, can function as environmental constraints. So a more accurate statement is "every individual has full freedom of choice, but external constraints including the behavior of others may limit one's ability to fully execute the choices one has made".
Given that the act of smoking entails deliberately choosing to purchase a product, light it on fire, and actively inhale the fumes -- all behaviors which are necessarily the result of purposeful intention -- and given that within any social context one will find some people who smoke but a great many who do not, along with many who have chosen to quit (despite the external influences and incentives being largely constant), it seems impossible to attribute smoking to anything other than conscious individual choice.
I once asked family member why they smoke, and the response was "because I love it". I had, and could have, no retort to that -- if another person consciously chooses to make the risk/reward tradeoff in favor of short-term pleasure rather than longer-term health, then there's no further argument to be had, and the only demand that any other party could make is that they not be exposed to negative externalities resulting from that choice.
Off the top of my head, dutch and british corporation colonize a lot of lands for hundreds of years. I don't think they left the place much better than when they came.
Ask the people in Bhopal how DOW Chemical has made their lives better, or the workers in Shenzhen Apple factories, or the people making your clothes in the third world, or the people picking through trash mountains for a living, how much corporations have made their lives better.
Why don't you ask the people who were slaving in United Fruit plantations how much corporations improved their lives? Or East India Company colony subjects?
Corporations benefit those who benefit from them, often at the expense of everyone else/extraction of the commons.
The company was only nationalised in 1858 and until then effectively colonised india until then