East India Company: A Stolen Portuguese Rudder, the Diwani and the Tea Act

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In 1592 English privateers captured the Portuguese carrack Madre de Deus off the Azores, and among its jewels and spices was a rutter, a navigation handbook holding Portugal's secret routes to Asia. Armed with that stolen knowledge, more than 200 London merchants formed a joint stock company, and on December 31, 1600, Elizabeth I granted it a 15-year monopoly on English trade east of the Cape of Good Hope. The company lost the Spice Islands to the better funded Dutch, a rivalry that peaked with the Amboyna Massacre of 1623, and pivoted to Mughal India, where for a century it traded European silver for textiles and saltpeter from fortified factories at Surat and Madras.

The death of Aurangzeb in 1707 broke Mughal authority, and the company raised sepoy armies drilled in European tactics. At Plassey in 1757 Robert Clive won by bribing Mir Jafar, and in 1765 the Treaty of Allahabad gave the company the Diwani, the right to collect revenue in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. It then bought Bengali goods with Bengali taxes, enforced collection through the famine of 1770 in which an estimated 10 million died, and trafficked enslaved people across the Indian Ocean until 1834. Borrowed dividends inflated a bubble that burst in 1772, leaving the company with 18 million pounds of unsold tea. The bailout's Tea Act provoked the Boston Tea Party, and after the 1857 rebellion the Crown took over in 1858, dissolving the company in 1874.

• Letters of marque let captains such as Francis Drake legally rob Spanish and Portuguese ships for Elizabeth I.
• Unlicensed English traders sailing to Asia could have their ships and cargo seized by the company.
• At its peak the company fielded about 260,000 soldiers, twice the size of Britain's own army.
• During the 1770 famine the company pushed indigo and opium poppies over rice because they sold better in Europe.
• Returning officials, mocked as nabobs, used their fortunes to buy country estates and seats in Parliament.