A boardful of company directors are summoned to explain themselves to a Whitehall select committee. The Bank of England has already had to bail out the company, the British economy has taken a hit in the fallout and parliament has now been recalled to discuss the company’s massive debts. In the committee room, the corporate directors face allegations of embezzlement, bribe-taking and corruption. This includes the handing out of £210 million of ‘presents’ over an eight-year period.
The scene is depressingly familiar, so is this Lehman’s? Facebook? Some of the stars of subprime? BAE? None of the above. The year is December 1772 and the directors, in charge of what was then the world’s largest trading company, have just requested ‘one of history’s first mega-bailouts’. All part of the rise of the East India Company, the ‘world’s first aggressive multinational corporation’, as told in William Dalrymple’s latest work.
In three of his previous books he brought us the gloriously detailed stories of Britons who fell for Indians or India, of the last King of Delhi and the Indian War of Independence, and of the First Afghan War.
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