Chapter 2 details the megacorporate concept. It begins by noting that, whilst references to the idea of a megacorporation can be found in contemporary works of fiction, these references tend to be vague. The chapter’s following section thus turns to the task of differentiating the idea of a megacorporation from three other corporate types: i.e. normal corporations, multinational corporations and total corporations. After this, it is proposed that, in addition to being generally characterized by their global scale of activities and broad scope of influence, megacorporations are more specifically characterized by their monopolistic activities, their social responsibility concerns, their political-economic hybridity and by their existential impact on our lives. Given these criteria, the chapter’s penultimate section proposes that the East India Company provides a clear historical example of a megacorporation. A brief summary brings the chapter to its conclusion.

The seventh chapter argues that Lutfullah Khan’s critical views on empire went viral after he left Britain in 1844, as he garnered positive reviews in London magazines commenting on the 1857 Indian mutiny. Published in June of that year and edited by his friend and former employer, Captain Edward Backhouse Eastwick, Autobiography of Lutfullah, a Mohamedan Gentleman encodes the two men’s divergent politics: a Company conservative who campaigned against Crown rule in India and a munshi patriot perceived by the Victorian press as opposing a belligerent Company. By integrating picaresque fictions on Indian thugs, the memoir enabled periodical readers to imagine retrospectively the transition from a Mughal Empire under the Company’s inept custodianship to direct rule under Victoria. Her 1858 proclamation that the feelings of the natives of India were to be henceforth respected was felt by Lutfullah’s readers before these feelings congealed into a new ruling ideology. Autobiography shows that the nation state’s attempt to repair its intimate relationship with Asian subjects was mediated by those subjects’ struggle to claim a stake in the national body.

The first chapter examines the British East India Company’s transformation into Bengal’s territorial sovereign in 1764 as an embodied history. The British men who worked for this trading monopoly adopted Persian titles that recall the polite historical protocols of Perso-Turkic-Mongol empires since the fifteenth century. These titles personified a corporate English body as an individual nobleman who was the imperial family’s only and most powerful patriarch – the ultimate mimic men. A shared ethical and linguistic orientation inspired Asian travelers and their British hosts to imagine an ethnic kinship, as mediated by the Indo-Persian political treatises that Company lexicographers had translated into conduct books for genteel Englishmen aspiring to a career in India. This trans-imperial masculinity was what empowered Asian travelers to climb social rank and challenge the Company’s claim to Mughal sovereignty as they befriended metropolitans in public showplaces – theaters, salons, and drawing rooms. The chapter proposes that orientalism and occidentalism are inadequate paradigms for understanding these travelers’ multimedia engagements in Britain.

This chapter rethinks the emergence of Madras, which has traditionally been depicted as an imperial acquisition developed as an English colony, apart from its turbulent Asian surroundings. Instead, as Company servants appropriated authority to themselves in the face of the collapsing corporate framework, they utilised their Asian networks, partnerships and patrons to establish a new settlement from which their interests could be protected and facilitated. Relying on Indian and Indo-Portuguese capital, Indian labour and materials, and in complete defiance of Company leadership, servants politically subordinated themselves to the Vijayanagara empire in exchange for a set of rights and privileges that would create the Company’s first substantial centre of power in Asia. In the face of metropolitan opposition, Company servants deepened their dependence on their Indian partners and masters, opening up new channels of credit, capital and demographic expansion. When the sultanate of Golconda annexed the Vijayanagara empire, Company servants learned to navigate the complex and shifting state formation process in southern India, adapting to their changing environment and ingratiating themselves with a new set of sovereign rulers and governing elites from whom they continued to acquire greater privileges to develop Madras into a transcultural commercial hub.

This chapter emphasises the significance regional variations had for the Company’s development in Asia, using Sumatra as a case study to demonstrate the limits to the Company’s political and economic enfranchisement by Asian rulers and elites. While powerful states such as the Mughal empire or the sultanate of Golconda could integrate, subordinate and utilise the Company’s presence, the demand of Company servants for sweeping powers and privileges in the smaller polities of Asia proved destabilising and destructive. On the West Coast of Sumatra, Company servants were reluctant to abandon the strategies of integration and subordination which had proved so successful on the subcontinent, and therefore struggled to establish a sustainable presence at places such as Bencoolen when these rights could not be acquired or mobilised. With limited economic resources, few opportunities for transcultural networks and a shifting state formation process in which multiple imperial powers sought to claim the West Coast as part of their own jurisdiction, Company servants repeatedly failed to acquire a durable foothold on the Coast, and Bencoolen struggled to develop into a vibrant city as both Madras and Calcutta had.

As Company servants struggled to maintain their expansive presence on the West Coast of Sumatra, they gradually judged it more expedient to maintain or acquire the powers they sought by dominating the newly transitioning and emerging polities on the Coast. In the absence of wider imperial frameworks of power and legitimacy, Company servants assumed imperial authority for themselves, placing the Company at the summit of local hierarchies. Company servants sought to re-arrange the West Coast of Sumatra as their own imperial domain, controlling local pepper production, breaking with local political traditions, assuming sovereign authority over fortified settlements and directly exercising suzerain rights over Malay subordinates. And while the polities of the West Coast found themselves increasingly shaped by the ambition of individual Company servants, they proved more than successful in resisting their subjugation, heavily circumscribed as Company servants were by East India House’s demand for fiscal and military retrenchment and the need to ensure the profitability of their pepper settlements. With little human or material resources to support their imperialism, Company servants found themselves locked in a cycle of incessant conflict and violence with the surrounding Malay communities, demanding obedience but unable to enforce this for any prolonged period through armed force. Ultimately, empire on the West Coast of Sumatra in the short-term proved unprofitable and unsustainable, and in the long-term ultimately impossible.

Following its incorporation as a permanent joint-stock in 1657, and the institutional and financial stability this brought to the Company, this chapter explores the corporate leadership’s attempts to re-centralise power in the Company and regain control over its servants and settlements in Asia. As the court of committees restructured the Company’s organisation, and sought to erect new regulatory frameworks in Asia that would more effectively realise metropolitan interests by dismissing refractory servants, disrupting transcultural networks and squeezing out private interests, the powerful confederacy of Anglo-Indian elites that controlled Madras violently rebelled against these centralising impulses and seized the city. Although the Company sent a powerful force to recapture Madras, nonetheless the coup de force exposed the reconstituted dynamic of the Company, in which the success of Madras was largely due to the integration of Company servants with surrounding economic and political constituents. The subsequent legalisation of private trade and the restoration of the rebels to their positions of power demonstrated the Company’s future willingness to accommodate the expansive transcultural networks of its servants and their Asian allies. The rebellion of Madras represented the complete decentralisation of the Company by the later seventeenth century, and the critical role played by Indian elites in driving the expansion of the Company.

The Anglo-Mughal War of 1686–1690 is the focus of Chapter 5, which seeks to challenge traditional understandings of the war as the result of a more capable and belligerent Company seeking to impose its will on the Mughal empire and expand its territory and rights by force, culminating in the acquisition of Calcutta. Instead, this chapter places the war within the context of the personal tensions and conflicts produced by the transcultural ties which bound Company servants and Mughal elites together. Some servants sought to renegotiate these increasingly one-sided relationships with a limited show of force, for which they were immediately expelled from Bengal by the Mughal government. Only after ten years of complex negotiations, in which new transcultural relationships were established with an entirely new Mughal regime, could the Company return and develop Calcutta as a settlement. Even then, its expansion relied on the Company’s utility to the new Mughal regime, to which they contributed men and money to uphold the nawab’s authority against several large-scale rebellions. By the turn of the eighteenth century, the Company transformed itself into a key client of the Mughal government which could be mobilised to consolidate the empire’s control of Bengal in exchange for greater rights and privileges.

This chapter depicts the failure of the English nation state to launch and sustain overseas enterprises in Asia in the early seventeenth century. It reveals that the East India Company was conceived as a mercantilist strategy of monopoly and force by the crown to acquire new markets and sources of wealth beyond the Cape of Good Hope. But a combination of fiscal–military weakness, unrealistic policies fostered on it by the state and a general economic and constitutional crises which engulfed England by the mid-century, all combined to undermine the Company’s attempt to establish itself at Bantam, Japan and on the Coromandel Coast in India. The result was the abandonment by Company servants on the spot in Asia of metropolitan policies in favour of realising their own local private interests of trade, power and transcultural immersion. As the Company teetered on the verge of collapse in England, it left a vacuum of authority and leadership within its factories in Asia, allowing Company servants to seize new opportunities to empower themselves and appropriate Company policies to suit their own interests. As investment, shipping and specie stopped flowing from Europe, Company servants insinuated themselves into pre-existing Asian networks of commerce and influence.

This chapter shifts the focus onto Bengal, and the various strategies adopted by the Mughal empire in accommodating and subordinating the Company’s growing presence in the province of Bengal. If the integration of Company servants into surrounding communities at Madras and their subordination to the sultanate of Golconda unlocked a range of rights and privileges which allowed them to expand their presence on the Coromandel Coast, the opposite was true in Bengal. The English experience in Bengal represented the Company at its most subordinate, pliant and, indeed, weakest, utterly subservient to the communities, elites and rulers whom they relied on. This situation was compounded by the growth of interloping communities, who were even more effective than Company servants in integrating themselves socially, culturally and commercially with Indian communities and elites, assuming many of the subordinate services that Company servants had traditionally fulfilled. Skilful Mughal governors played these groups off against one another, utilising interloping and Company networks for their own benefit, without needing to concede any substantial rights or autonomy to either. In maintaining a plural commercial environment, Mughal elites ensured their place at the top of local hierarchies of wealth and power.

The final chapter returns to the Indian subcontinent to reveal the durability of the Company’s expansion within the carapace of Mughal sovereignty by the mid-eighteenth century. Although traditionally understood as a period of Mughal decline, largely facilitated by the ‘rise’ of the Company, this chapter argues that the two were not mutually exclusive, and in fact the continued expansion of the Company within a Mughal framework contributed to the empire’s continued authority on the Indian subcontinent, as the networks of Company servants helped bind the emperor in Delhi to the regional nawabs into the 1750s. For example, the imperial farman of 1716 provided the Company with its greatest set of rights yet, including customs-free trade and the territorial expansion of most of its main settlements, such as Calcutta and Madras. The Company’s negotiations to implement these rights with the empire’s various regional governments served to embed the Company even further into these regions, even as the nawabs assumed greater local powers themselves. Many of these negotiations continued to be shaped by the private transcultural networks between Company servants and Mughal elites, and despite the emergence of a powerful and more capable British nation-state in the early eighteenth century, one that made various claims on the Company in Asia, these intimate and cross-cultural ties proved remarkably resilient.