Part One: The Most Evil Company In History

No matter who you are, or what personal stance you happen to have on capitalism, there is probably a corporation you regard as “evil”. In Episode 20 Robert is joined by the hilarious Michael Swaim to discuss one of the most terrible companies to ever exist. 

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
M Hey everybody, I'm Robert Evans and this is again
Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you everything
you don't know about the very worst people in all
of history. Now, today we have a very special guest, indeed,
my former co worker and current friend slash friend worker,

(00:20):
Michael s Wayne. How do y'all? Did I get that right?
Swam here? That is correct from the cool Ranch. So
tell you all about the great crunchy taste of doritos.
We are eating Dorito's. That's not like a joke or
anything like. It started out as an attempt to get
money out of the Dorrito's people, and now we just
eat a lot of derita You're pounding them down. Yeah,

(00:42):
it's delightful. It's great to be here, Robert, thank you
so much. Yeah, thanks for showing up. So, Michael, you
and I worked together for a while and now you
are are the one of the head beans of the
Small Beans Network. What true? Oh dat right? True? Dat
tape fantastic. Uh So today we're talking about the age
of heroic commerce. Have you ever heard of this? No?

(01:04):
And you I asked for like a clueless so I
would be talking about and you said, it's the age
of heroic commerce, and I resisted so strongly there just
to look it up. So I'm coming in fully cold.
Do not know what you're talking about? Well, yeah, that
is You've hit upon as I should have explained a
few seconds earlier, the premise of the show, which is
that I read a story about someone terrible or someone's

(01:24):
who are terrible, Uh to a comedian guest who's coming
in cold. So uh, we're gonna start in on that
right now. Actually, first off, I'm going to open a
diet coke and I'm going to do like a theatric open. So,
my god, no matter who you are or what your
personal stance on politics and capitalism is, you probably have

(01:45):
a corporation at least one that you regard as evil.
Maybe it's mont Santo, maybe it's a T and T.
S Warner Media, the parent of CNN. If you're the president,
perhaps you hate Blackwater now x E. Or perhaps you
hate news Corps, or maybe you're not a fan of
Twitter because they banned your favorite conspiracy theorist. Everybody hates
at least one corporation these days. Who You've got a

(02:07):
real problem. I feel like there's not just a story
but like a solid two seasons of stories and the
explanation for that for another day. Uh. So, yeah, we've
all got a corporation we hate, and hatred of a
corporation or corporations feels like a pretty modern thing, right.
You have trouble imaging someone in like sixteen oh five

(02:28):
yelling about the corporation. Yeah, but the reality is that
tens of millions of people have all over the world,
with very good reason, been hating on big business since
the sixteen hundreds. In fact, even with all the nightmarish
climactic fury of modern oil corporations, the scandals of the
tobacco industry, and the vast sea of eating disorders caused
by the fashion industry in Hollywood, corporate evil may have

(02:49):
reached its peak so far more than two hundred years ago.
So join me, won't you, on a magical tour of
a period of time the author Stephen are Bound calls
the age of Heroic Commerce. His book Merchant Kings has
been one of the major sources for this episode. So. Uh.
The idea of working with several other people to run
a business goes back a very long time, thousands of years,

(03:09):
right probably to the beginning of currency in cities and stuff.
I think Zilgian symbols started that. Whoa oldest incorporated business
still in existence? That's cool. How older they go back,
I'd have to look it up, but I just know
they tout that fact and I've verified it online. Well
that's pretty cool. Um. So, yeah, the idea of you know,

(03:29):
running a business with a bunch of people, that goes
back a long time. But corporation is a different matter
because for most of human history, there was nothing that
you would want to do that it would acquire more
than you know, a couple of rich people working together
in order to provide the funding and the funding. I
was like, there, rich people wouldn't be doing the work. No, never,
never never never never, like at no point in history obviously.
But you mean you're like, we don't need to put

(03:50):
ink the paper on this. We're three rich dudes with
money will do the thing. Yeah, you didn't need like
if you wanted to run a factory at the very beginning,
like it was, it was just a couple of rich
guys could fund it, right, need it didn't take resources
of huge numbers of people and like vast capital stuff,
you know, anything that did that was generally the province
of a state, the national government or whatever. Rome built
the roads as a government, not as an of business enterprises. Right.

(04:14):
The great granddaddy of all modern corporations was the Dutch
East India Company. It was first formed in six two.
It was a chartered company, so basically a bunch of
people who didn't know each other all paid in so
they'd get a share of the profits from this business. Uh.
And in the case of the Dutch East India Company,
its business was achieving a monopoly on all of the
spices that came from India and Southeast Asia. So we're

(04:36):
talking like mace. We're talking maces a cooking spice. Yeah,
they're related to mace, like the weapon man. I think
it's probably why the spray has its name. There's also
nutmeg and clothes. You don't want to get a nutmeg
spray in your eyes. It's that happened all the time. Yeah,
and a lot of trying to sneak a cookie. Mom

(04:58):
just goes nuts with the nut man. So yeah, now
that kind of stuff you buy for like eighty nine
cents from Trader Joe's in a big tube. But back
in the day, it was worth enough that like, if
you had a backpack of nutmeg and you like landed
in London six hundreds, you were a rich man. It's
crazy that like Disney or Facebook, any of the big

(05:18):
companies you could name back then the big company that
had that much money and Cloud was just like food
is so fucking bland. This will fix that. Every big sucks.
Thank god. Finally here's all the money. Well in, all
of the spices that we've talked about so far come
from our only located in a chunk of Indonesia called
the Banda Islands. These are known as the Spiceries, so

(05:42):
you get all the spy that was the only place, yeah,
only place clothes grew. Um. So yeah, the Duchy c
India Company is formed to try and gain a monopoly
on the trade of all the spices from those delightful islands. Now,
it started out with a twenty one year charter, so
it was supposed to be dissolved in the money given
back to its original formers after that point, but it
wound up getting its chry to extend it over and

(06:04):
over again and eventually lasted more than two centuries. So
this is a company that had a long history. The
Dutch East India Company was the first publicly traded corporation
in the world, and the first stock market in history
was created to sell its stock. Because if they were
the first publicly traded they had to invent the idea
that this is when people were like stock up markets.
We should have this is doing so well, we should

(06:25):
make paper that represents a portion of it and just
sell that. Yeah, we don't even need the spice. People
gamble on whether it'll be worth more or less at
the end of the day and then let that run
our entire society. So these are I mean, these are
capitalist vision areas. This is the beginning of capitalism, I
will say. The only maybe mild spoiler alert, I don't know.
The only thing I recall about the Dutch East India

(06:47):
Company is that I read a small plaque about it
in the Slavery Museum, so that may there's some thread
there possible. Oh yeah, there's some thread there, although they're
not like the number one that we'll get to that later.
So according to a book called The Honorable Company, which
is about the British East India Company, so there's the
Dutch in the British East India company to different companies

(07:07):
almost the same name. Are they competing and how? But
so the British East India Company received its Royal charter
on the thirty one December in sixteen hundreds, so two
years before the Dutch East India Company. Its original name
was the Company of Merchants of London trading into the
East Indies. Now that original name, which is not very clickable, uh,

(07:28):
may inform you that it was not the same thing
as the Dutch East India Company. To start, rather than
being a modern corporation, it was basically a bunch of
independent ventures under the same name. It's like a bunch
of different individual boats going over to these islands, getting
spices and bringing them back, all profiting independently, just sort
of market under the same name. Why did they benefit.
It's just like easier to all be under one name. Yeah,

(07:49):
that's what I thought at the time. Yeah, the company
itself had no unlike the Dutch EA Studio Company, had
no ability to invest money in new projects or decide
how its funds were used across its many ventures. So
the British East India Company when it starts off, is
not like a modern corporation. Now a few decades later,
in sixteen seventy, the Hustson Bay Company, which still exists today,
is formed uh and winds up gaining control of like

(08:11):
most of Canada. It's why we have Vancouver. Vancouver started
as like a corporate outpost for this company. Imagine a
meeting today for that company and you're like, well, how
are we doing? Well? Were you used tell in most
of Canada? This quarter we made eight hundred thousand dollars.
That's quite a leg once the whole Northwest was all domain.

(08:32):
But we're doing okay, up one and a half percent exactly.
So yeah, So that's just to give you an idea
of sort of this is when the idea of running
corporation starts to take off and people are trying various
different things. And not all of these companies are quite
like modern companies. The Dutch East India Company is the
one that from the start is really recognizable as a

(08:54):
modern corporation in terms of it's it's formulation and the
way that functions. Um. So, for ane idea of what
made it so special, I'd like to turn to an
article from the Global Trade magazine called the Violent Birth
of Corporations. This is why corporations were so different from
what it existed before. They were anonymous. The partners did
not all have to know each other. They separated ownership

(09:15):
from control. Elected directors made decisions, while most investors had
only the choice of accepting those decisions or selling their shares.
They were permanent. If one or more partners did want out,
there was no need to renegotiate the whole arrangement. Finally,
there were legal entities separate from any one owner, and
they had unlimited life. The big trading partnerships of the
sixteenth century and earlier were created with a planned date
of dissolution, sometimes at the end of one voyage, sometimes

(09:37):
after a set number of years, at which point all
the firm's holdings would be liquidated and divided among the partners.
The new firms, like modern corporations, did not self liquidate.
They built up their capital over the years rather than
distributing it back to its separate owners. So they have
now created an immortal being. Yeah, has pretty wide ranging powers,

(09:59):
as will start to get to the corporation. Corporation. Yeah,
it sounds like the guild a calamitous intent from venture brothers. Right.
It's because they're ahead of the curve as far as
any regulation obviously, so they all get to be anonymous
from even each other. They're just like Mr X has
charted this mission. Yeah, it's just the company has charted exactly. So, yeah,

(10:21):
there are some people who get into who are very
critical and the big corporations of this. Yeah. So for
the first two hundred years, you know, from six hundred
of the corporate era, there were almost no corporations meant
to service the needs of inter European trade or based
solely within a single nation. So for two centuries, the
job of a corporation was not operating stores or designing
new products. It was plunder and conquest of the known

(10:42):
and unknown world. Like that's why we made corporations, right.
The only business that existed was exploration, and the only
business enough incorporation. Yeah, yeah, exactly. You don't need a
corporation to sell closed to people on the other side
of the finn from you and Middle Gross England or
where you just have like handshake deals with people who

(11:03):
own carts and ships were like small businesses where it's
like a shop. The shop sells the hats and you
get the hats from the shop or whatever. I just
wonder who managed that. Who's the first person to be like,
I'm a stockbroker, I'll manage the stock of the single
company and track it's ups and downs. I mean, it's
sort of like evolved naturally because you start out with
these things that weren't really corporations, but they had stock

(11:24):
and they were for a limited time, and their people start,
you know, once that becomes the thing. Initially it's just
a way for you to get your profits from the deal.
But eventually people start selling and trading the stock and
there's stocks instead of just one stock. They're like, we
need a building to talk about the stocks and exchange. Yes,
it's snowballs or my name's not John Nasdac. So the

(11:48):
main reason that corporations were necessary was essentially that violence
was necessary in the business of international trade. Operating boats
and trading stations cost a lot of money, but the
real cost came because in order to force people to trade,
sometimes you needed to wage war on the native peoples
who had the resources you wanted. It was also necessary
because these corporations all wanted monopolies on the areas they

(12:10):
were trading in, So corporations would fight corporations. So you
needed money not just to take products from one area
to the other, not just to operate factories, but to
operate navies and to operate land armies, and to wage
war against other corporations and against the local peoples who
didn't want to give you their stuff. So that's why
corporations are necessary. It's staggering to imagine how profitable this

(12:33):
must have been for the home country government for them
not to give a ship like that private citizens. You know,
we're amassing a navy and be like, well, just let
them do it. They they'll pay millions and millions of dollars.
That's how it starts. We'll cover it gets more complicated.
But at the start, yeah, the Dutch in British East
India companies were not just licensed to trade. They had
a literal license to kill. They had a power to

(12:56):
declare war and they did so regularly, like without governmental Yeah, none,
none necessary whatsoever. Now it didn't start out violent. In
late one the British East India Company was the first
corporation in the spiceries. You know these islands in Indonesia
that are just filled the fucking bursting with delightful spices.
Spices like the delicious spices on this cool ranch Dorrito's

(13:18):
chip that I'm going to fortify myself with before getting
into the rest of this. Oh yeah, that's that Malleck
acid you're tasting. We should find the island they grow
that acid on, I mean, monodium cultures all day. M hmm,
that's a good derrito. So in late one when the
British East India Company winds up there, uh, it's actually

(13:40):
pretty peaceful. You know, there's no other corporations around yet.
The native islanders are pretty peaceful people. The vast majority
of gunpowder expended by the British East India Company is
used saluting, like they'll pass a poor how they'll pass
another ship and they'll fire into the air. And so
most of the people who die at this point die
in saluting accidents. Just well, let's here's a quote from

(14:02):
the Honorable Company. The indiscriminate firing of a few pieces,
often on the flimsiest of free texts, would account for
a good many lives, so much so that in London
the directors would be moved to protests that it was
quite unnecessary to salute every port, every passing vessel, every sailor,
every imaginable anniversary. Yet, if anything, the practice grew, and
there was probably more powder expended in ceremony than in bath.

(14:25):
So it's National peach Day. Shoot those guys I forgot,
which is a very male thing to do. We've got cannons,
were on a boat and we're started with gunpowder. Shoots
some stuff. So the Honorable Company tells the story of
a captain brand of a boat named the Ascension, who

(14:46):
quote had the unusual misfortune of being shot by the
guns of his own ship in somber mood. He was
rowed ashore to attend the funeral of the Red Dragon
and other boat's mate. When the assumptions gunner let fly
with the usual three guns salute for a deceased officer,
and four Actunately, the gunner, being not so careful as
you should have been, had forgotten that his guns were
loaded and that the captain was within range. One ball

(15:06):
scored a direct hit and slewed the captain and the
boatswain's mate start dead, so that they went to see
the funeral of another and we're both buried themselves. Oh
I missed the ocean, dude. Well, they were supposed to
just put powder in the cannons, so it made note.
But they just left the ball and shot the captain.
So it's a little bit of a slap dish operation

(15:27):
at the start. Yeah, it sounds like it's just a
pack of mercenaries with no training. Oftentimes, these corporations started
off with a name like the Adventurers Association of whatever,
because it's just guys with guns going out here. Rich Like,
I don't think it's a coincidence that their initials are THHC.
That's all I'm saying. Oh ship, Wait are they the

(15:50):
honorable Company? Oh yeah, yeah, that's a nickname for him.
But yeah, right, but that would be a nickname later.
Well that's what my dealer calls himself. That's all him.
So weird dude. Yeah, it's weird that you have a
dealer in Los Angeles. It seems unnecessary but complicating matters.
I like awkwardly hanging out with a weird dude to

(16:10):
get my weed to give him sixty dollars for a
bag of Yeah, speaking of giving people too much money
for a tiny amount. Yeah. So around sixteen sixteen o nine,
the Dutch East India Company makes it to the Spiceries.
Right now, they had a charter to establish a monopoly
on spice trading in Asia and India. Things have been
peaceful up to this point, but now that the Dutch

(16:31):
were here, they decided they didn't want any English assholes
buying and selling spices from the same islands that they were.
So in sixteen o nine, Admiral Peter Verhoven, I'm assuming
the ancestor, took thirteen warships to the Banda Islands, the
world's only source of nutmeg and mace. Here the orders
his corporate masters sent him with, we draw your special

(16:52):
attention to the islands in which grow the clothes and nutmeg,
and we instruct you to strive after winning them for
the company, either by treaty or by force. The precious nutmeg.
Thousands will bleed for the nutmeg. Yeah, like, what are
you willing to die for? Oh nutmeger? That's number one?

(17:13):
With a bullet or a cannon shot, I guess uh.
So Admiral Verhoeven took with him an army of one
thousand soldiers, including Japanese mercenaries with swords meant to be
used as executioners, to enforce corporate will through terror. If
this isn't in the six hundreds. It sounds like a
cyberpunk store. Also, had the natives in that area been

(17:34):
rebellious or like stood up for themselves or are they
going in like we're gonna need some executioners. Let's just
it'll be nice to have them. They think it's it'll
be nice to have him. And he's planning to funk
with the British. Okay, and you want some samurai if
you're really going to murder British. But then the anniversary
of something comes along the accidentally just executed everybody, So

(17:58):
Behoven's big enemies or yeah, the to Sheast India Company
and the Portuguese. So he wants to expel basically everyone
who's not the Dutch East India Company from the Spice
Islands and have because he who controls the Spice controls
the dinner day. Yeah, it's going to come in here.
On April nineteen, sixteen o nine, the Admiral came ashore
and the largest of the banded isles with two and

(18:19):
fifty men and out gifts to the assembled natives and
told them that they had quote broken their promise to
trade only with the Dutch. As a result, he said,
the company was building a fort and a permanent factory
on the island to keep track of things. Then he
went around to all the different tribal chiefs and had
them signed agreements which none of them could read, to
give his company a monopoly on the nutmeg trade from
their island. The islanders did not take well to this.

(18:39):
For one thing, he just had all the chiefs on
one island sign in agreement, and then he tried to
enforce it on all the islands, and they were like,
we're different countries, basically, dude, like, we don't work that way.
And for another thing, no one in the Banda Islands
understood why they should agree to give any company a
monopoly over their stuff. The goods he tried to buy
them off with were basically wool in velvet, neither of
which was useful for people on tropical islands. So they

(19:00):
were like, what are we getting out of this? But yeah,
Verehoven keeps taking islands. So in a little bit later
he lands with seven fifty of his troops and another island, Nyara,
and he starts building a big fort. The local people
decided to take matters into their own hands, and we're
going to get into how the local people fight back
against sort of corporate encroachment. But first we have another

(19:22):
kind of corporate encroachment that will not result in the
destruction of island cultures. We'll see, we'll see probably not
gut now, Actually I will I will guarantee none of
the sponsors of this show are going to destroy islands
in Indonesia. Robert doesn't speak from both of us. I
think it's at time and we're back, and we are

(19:47):
talking about Admiral Peter Verehoven of the Dutch East India
Company and his attempts to build a monopoly in the
Spice Island. So he's landing on islands, he's signing agreements
with the people on islands, he's building his sulb some forces,
and he's just landed on the island of Nero with
seven fifty men, and he starts building a giant fortress
so that he can stop anyone else from trading with
the island. The local people invite the admiral to parlay

(20:10):
in the middle of nowhere to talk to him about
sort of the limitations of this agreement, and he obliged them,
bringing along too chained up English prisoners as a sign
of his dominance over the British East India Company to
be like, check out what a boss I am. I've
got these dudes and chains who aren't Dutch but probably
look the same to you, because we're all Europeans, like
Bob Iger's showing up to the lucasfilm negotiations with like,

(20:33):
look at this dude from Time Warner, I got chained
over here. Yeah maybe with his his lips sewn together.
I imagine Bob Iger sows a lot of people's lips together.
I could see that. Yeah. Uh so. Yeah. When the
admiral and his men arrived at the meet up point,
they found it empty. So the admiral sent out a
scout who found some locals hiding and apparently terrified in

(20:53):
the woods. Here's a quote from the book Merchant Kings.
They informed him that they had become frightened at the
side of so many arms. Dutchman would vere Hoof please
leave his soldiers arms and guns under the tree, bringing
only his senior negotiators to them so that they could
talk safely without the soldiers shadowing the talks. So this
is a sign of how arrogant these Europeans are. A
fair Hooven's like, of course, and then his second in command,

(21:15):
Admiral Lakbar like and he's like, shut up a bar,
we're going in. Yeah. The prisoners like, oh my, I
don't think it's on the up and up. Shut off,
you filthy englishmen. Dutch courage shall prevail. So he goes
for the meeting with a few dozen of his aids
and stuff, and they're all massacred and the Admiral's decapitated

(21:38):
and his head is mounted on a stick just like
maybe it's just like, uh so, this marked the start
of a general uprising against the Dutch across the islands.
Luckily for the company, they had a thousand armed men
and more than a dozen warships. Uh So, the next
company leader, the guy who gets promoted when Vereh Hooven
gets his head cut off, is a guy named Simon Hohen,
and he immediately starts burning down village, those executing islanders

(22:01):
and stealing everything that isn't nailed down is revenge for
the killings. His forces were eventually beaten in battle and
had to flee to their boats. And but then they
just enacted a naval blockade and you know, people have
been trading with the Spice Islands for a while now,
so their population had grown, they've been doing very well.
They were no longer self sufficient in terms of food.
They required trade from other islands and from outside. So

(22:22):
he just starts starving them. This is so star Wars.
Now a trade blockade on Curissant has prevented the Spice
from Is this the long long ago Lucas was talking about?
This is very episode one. Yeah, So they got this
naval blockade going and it works. The local surrender because
they don't want to starve to death, and the entire

(22:42):
island of Nero becomes property of the Dutch East India Corporation,
in whose eyes everyone, including the people of the military
conquest they surrendered. The company said, like in the agreement
it was stated like this is to be kept by
us forever. Wow, like we just own this island now,
and this is the first time that had happened. So

(23:02):
not a lot of average when it comes to trade
back to the trade table. So look, I know you
own us now, but the spices are still good right
well how and sailed away from the band Islands and
the islanders went right back to trading with people they pleased,
albeit just kind of quietly this time, so they haven't
figured out force projection yet, so the natives are still
able to get away with some stuff. But the stage

(23:24):
had been set for the Dutch East India Corporation's rise
to power. By three the end of its original twenty
one year charter, its forces had engaged in naval battles
with every major c power on the world because they're
trading all around Asia and Europe at this point, they're
going up into China. They're just sending boats everywhere and
they're constantly fighting with people. This Yeah, it's like the wire,
like it's inherent to trade that. Well, when you get there,

(23:45):
you're gonna have to fun some people. You have to
shoot some people. Then you control the corner. Then you
can start selling the products. Yeah yeah, yeah, so and
this is a lot of companies will set up posts
and stuff, right, you know, and they'll maybe conquer the post,
but they weren't taking much land beyond that were fortresses.
It sounds like, which I'm imagining as flying steampunk fortresses.

(24:06):
And please don'ticipate that that's perfectly fun. Yeah, but the
Duchy Cindia Company starts actually trying to do more than that,
trying to actually rule land to an extent, and you
know they're not good at it at first, but that's
where their ambition starts to head. So in addition to
fighting the local peoples, they're also fighting the British East
India Company. At this point, you know, there are sort

(24:26):
of fighting them in the market, but there's also like
street fights in these towns and these islands between company
representatives and stuff, and you know, things gradually start to escalate.
And this brings us to a guy named Jan Peter
Zoon Cohen. Now Cohen was born in seven He served
as a junior merchant in Verhoven's fleet and distinguished himself
by quite literally writing reports. Like he he wrote really

(24:49):
good reports on how to make more money in these islands.
It was that guy, See, I think a guy who
just makes his living writing these law reports. A guy
like that, You know what I mean? Robert, Yeah, you
hate that just sits around researching and type type type
and away. All right, So this guy hate already, I

(25:10):
remember Zoonah Cohen. Yeah, but well Piaster Zoon, Piper Zoon,
John piers Zo, I'm not even gonna try to Frank
tider Zo. So By six fourteen, Cohen rose to become
the second in command of the company's operations and the spiceries, which,
to be fair, was as much about not dying of
tropical disease as it was about merits. Other than that,
very hard at darkness, It's like, that's a real important point.

(25:33):
Was at the top the British guy who hasn't died
of malaria yet. Yeah, he was just born immune to malaria.
So he's the boss. Yeah, everyone else died in a month. Um.
So Cohen starts looking over the broader economic situation in
the spiceries and one thing becomes very clear to him,
and this is a quote from the book Merchant Kings.
Spices grew in such abundance in these regions that there

(25:54):
was no shortage of supply. Hence competition from the English
could not be tolerated because this would lower prices in
your up and make the business unprofitable, which is literally
like the epitome of evil because on the pole from
empathy too, it's like, yeah, so there's this thing everyone
in the world wants. Oh, it turns out God has

(26:14):
left such a that everyone could just have it, and
it's fine, Well, we better burn most of it, like
keep it locked in this box, and they do that.
Throughout this period. They will exterminate nutmeg from several of
these other islands, just to make it easy for them
to control. Like they'd be like, well, these islands are
too far off and we don't have enough ships to

(26:35):
so let's just kill all the nutmeg. Flamethrowers, burn the nutmeg.
No one else gets nutmeg. To say they're evil, but
it smells delicious around here. It's delightful, delightly scented island. Yeah.
So coin solutions for the company to expand throughout the
region and get a you know, a total monopoly. Um.

(26:55):
This way they have the power to restrict the supply
of spices in Europe and thus always charge really high prices,
which was necessary because they were running an increasingly large
navy and army and that ship don't come cheap. So
in order to achieve this vision, Cohen called to the
creation of an even larger corporate fleet so that he
could assault the Spanish and the Portuguese and the Philippines
and Macau in China. He also advocated sending Dutch colonists

(27:16):
and slaves to colonize these newly conquered territories all throughout
Southeast Asia. It was a beautiful dream. And the Council
of seventeen, who were the board of directors for this,
you know right, it's that's a sinister This whole story
is so like it should take place in the future
and this should be three years from now or maybe
time is cyclical, because this really feels like what our

(27:39):
corporate cultural we currently have is gonna return to ultimately,
like people start sniping CEOs and ship. Yeah, this is
gonna happen. It sounds like in twenty years this will happen.
Most of the players will have robot arms exactly. Yeah,
and it'll be cool as hell. It'll be better. Our
version will be higher effects but yeah, yeah, way higher
effects budget. So yeah, the Council of seventeen gets on board.

(28:02):
But to actually achieve his goals, Cohen knew he would
first have to kick the British out of the band aisles.
So there's a bunch of different islands. They're concerned with
a lot of other trading points. But he starts trying
to really lock down the bandas so two of the
islands I and Run had not signed any kind of
agreement with the Dutch, they were still free and independent.
Here's how a book The Honorable Company describes the political

(28:23):
situation in those islands at this point in the best
tradition of Southeast Asian adat consensus, each villager island was
in fact as self governing and fairly democratic republic. They
could withhold or dispose of their sovereignty as they saw fit.
And whereas the inhabitants of neighboring Nearra and Lonthor had
already been bullied into accepting a large measure of Dutch control,
those of out lying I and Run had managed to

(28:44):
preserve their independence intact. So, in other words, I ruined
so far away. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. But why were
they able to maintain that? Is that because they were
militarily stronger or just remote, they were just further away.
So my lack of seagulls pun scams, yes, but I
hate it, and I'm not happy that you made it.

(29:06):
And then it's on this anyway, it's happens. It can
be cut. No, it's happened, all right, there's no cutting
on this h So in sixteen fifteen, the company under
Cohen sent a thousand soldiers to eye to subjugate the locals.
The invasion was, however, defeated and repulsed because the natives
had been armed with British guns and trained by British troops,
not troops of the British government, for troops of the

(29:27):
British East India Company. It begins. So, yes, multinational corporations
were funding insurgent armies to fight each other four years
in the past. Wow. Yeah. And the idea of governments
just funneling guns to a convenient ally that you have
no control over. In the long term, just give them
all our weapons, they'll do it for us. The lesson

(29:48):
of history is that no one has ever learned anything. Ever. Yeah.
I always feel like learn history so that you know
what the repetition is going to be noted, because you're
doomed if you're going to repeat it. People only do
the same thing, just with bigger and bigger guns. Yeah. Yeah.

(30:09):
So the next year Cohensen is another army to invade I.
He also sent a message ahead of them to the
English soldiers helping to defend the island, saying that quote,
if any slaughter of men happened, they would not be culpable.
So the English company runs away because they don't want
to die, and I gets conquered. Uh so sci fi
and sorry, like the honorable Company and Council of seventeen

(30:30):
lay waste to eye for spice. Oh boy, it's about
to get wasted. So oh no bad, Yeah, no, it's terrible.
Now at this point, the English are still active and
ruining other islands in Indonesia. So Cohen's you know, he's
not finished kicking them out yet. He wrote a letter
to the Council of seventeen around this point that inadvertently
sums up the military industrial complex today. Quote your honors

(30:54):
should know by experience that trade in Asia must be
driven and maintained under the protection in favor of your
honor his own weapons, and that the weapons must be
paid for by the profits from the trade, so that
we cannot carry on trade without war, nor war without trade.
And no, I don't under everyone who lays the foundation
of the military industrial complex. How do you not scan

(31:15):
that as Oh, and that seems bad, This might end
really badly Like, uh, sir, well, what's the report from
the front. Well, we have chained our trade to violence,
and violence to trade, and a never ending only accelerating
freight train of who knows what will happen? Good good report,
like an end, like anage road to more profits. Feels

(31:38):
like it will never go badly for at the gravy
train will never stop. This seems sustainable forever. So in
April thirty six, eighteen, the company promotes Cohen to head
of Eastern Operations and basically gives him a mandate to congrats. Yea,
I know, right, he got a plaque so hard for
he did? He did, Yeah, that cannon on broccoli. He

(32:01):
missed his kids Dutch baseball games a lot, but you
know it was worth it in the end, I'm sure,
because his kid's gonna go to Dutch Harvard. So yeah.
Once Cohen was in total command, things quickly got even
more violent. The fighting in the islands were sort of
the Dutch in the British are still kind of holding
an uneasy piece. You know. There are more and more
street fights, there are more and more naval battles between

(32:21):
the fleets of the corporations. Soldiers start fighting in the jungle,
but sort of. While Cohen is working on eliminating the
last of the British from this area, the English and
Dutch governments go behind his back in a range of
peace treaty for the two corporations and kind of force
it on them because they're like, you're going to draw
our countries into war, and like England doesn't need to
be at war with the Netherlands for spices that there's

(32:45):
plenty of thousand miles away. We don't want this, so
the governments make peace. Cohen is furious about this because
if there's one thing he loves, it's fighting the British
East India Corporation. And I love that. This is like
to be the first time in history a human had
the impulse how dare the government regulate my corporation? My

(33:06):
corporation is more important than the government. I think this
is where that begins, because this is the first time
that I'm aware of that a government really stepped into
a multinational corporation and was like, what the fuck? Yeah,
there's so much nutmeg? Why are people dying here? So Cohen, yeah,

(33:27):
has to deal with the fact that the British East
India Company is now his friend and ally he grumbles
about this, but he turns his attention to fucking over
a completely different group of people. The remaining unconquered Banda Islands,
so he symbols an invasion force and he subjugates the
remaining free indigenous people of the island chain. He burns
their mosques. Uh, he requires them to pay taxes and
sweet sweet spices. Uh. And when certain people among the

(33:49):
islanders fight back and start massacring his patrols and basically
draw the company into a guerrilla war, Jeanne piders and
Cohen goes scorched earth on their asses. Uh. He captures
forty five tribesmen, behead eight tribal elders in public, and
then quarters the rest, which means he just cuts them
for One officer working for Cohen at the time stated
that quote things are carried on in such a criminal

(34:10):
and murderous way that the blood of the poor people
cries to Heaven for revenge. So that's one of his employees, Like,
we're the bad guys. This is really clear to me.
He's like quarter that man. He's quartering everybody us. He's
fucking I'll tell you one thing about jan Petrizon Cohen.
He's always able to fucking clean his laundry because he's
got quarters coming out. That you nailed his name, That

(34:33):
time to thank you, well play thank you? Uh so,
Subjugation was not the only thing Jan Cohen was out for.
His plan for the islands was, in essence, genocide. Here's
how Merchant Kings describes it quote. He wanted to depopulate
the islands to replace their inhabitants with imported slaves and
indentured labor under company control. He proceeded with the ethnic
cleansing of the band Islands over the next several months.

(34:54):
Company troops burned and destroyed dwellings, rounded up entire villages,
and hurting captives into ships so that they could be
transported to Batavia and sold as slaves. Thousands of men,
women and children died of disease and starvation during the voyage.
Out of a total population of perhaps thirteen to fifteen thousand.
Barely a thousand of the original residents remain in the
Banda Islands. Holy shit, how much right can you think

(35:18):
you have to reform the earth? That's crazy, Like showing
up in a place and being like, yeah, let's move
that over there, build these buildings, kill all these people,
just all of them. Would it change your opinion? Though?
You know that there's a nutmeg? Yeah? What do they
don't you dare forget clothes at home? Are people outraged

(35:40):
or are they just like I love heart and they're building,
like the government gets taxes out of this duties and
they're building nice new buildings and or what have you.
If you're just a dude in the Netherlands, you're like,
shipload of money is coming in from over here, and
I'm sure your average person on the street in the
sixte doesn't have their going like, oh, all this ship

(36:01):
is evil. And by the height of the Dutch East
India Corporation, it's responsible for something like half of all
of the trade in Europe. So they become huge to
the point where people just take it for granted, like well,
they're just always there there McDonald's going to do. They're
even it would be fair to say they're even bigger
in this society as a force for like the life

(36:22):
in commerce than Amazon is today, like half of the
trade like that. They are enormous. They're like Googles. Yeah,
and they just had to genocide some people. So you
might think that for any rational man, or even a
moderately crazy genocidal man, this would have been enough. But
it was not enough for Jan Peterson Cohen. He decided

(36:44):
unilaterally to reneg on the peace treaty with the British
East India Company that his government had negotiated. He arrested
all of the English people on the islands, tortured and
executed a huge number of them, took all their goods
and destroyed everything that they've built. Wow. So he's not
even because a lot of times evil bastards will have
the ability to dehumanize foreign or exotic people's but he's

(37:08):
he'll kill anyone. No one is a human to Jan.
That's what I mean, is like he doesn't. It's not
a thing where he has any justification. He's like, I'll
kill anyone who opposes me. He doesn't. Just not clear.
He has fox, but he took half of his fox
and he executed them in front of the other half
of his fox to keep them quiet. Like that's the
man here. So we're gonna talk more about Jan fucking Cohen,

(37:31):
and then we're gonna talk about a motherfucking or named
Robert Clive and a little subcontinent called India. But first,
do you love products and services and using currency to
purchase those things? You know it? That's how I'm here,
it's the best off. We go and we're back. We're back.

(37:56):
When we're talking about Jan Piastres and Cohen Jan Pizza ship,
it's a real piece of shit, real the piece of
shittiest Cohen there's ever been. What are if the Cohen Brothers,
it would be weird piece of ship. It would be
weird if we've been talking about ancestors to both Paul
Verehoven and the Cohen Brothers, the three greatest directors of
all history, and they hear this and have a bare

(38:17):
chested fist fight to resolve the conflict or make this
into a sweetass movie. There you go, Because I think
if you're gonna have the Cohen Brothers and Paul Verehoven
came up on a movie, you need Verehoven for how
bloody this story is. You have the Cohen Brothers direct
like the peaceful native people in their their plight, and
I think you have Paul Verehoven direct the Dutch after

(38:41):
the landing. So yeah, Jan's corporate masters were angry that
he had disobeyed them and massacred the British company, but
he'd also guaranteed them soul World monopoly over nutmeg and
mace two of the most valuable things on the planet.
Um So, they gave him histories first slap on the
wrist corporate punishment, and also gave it to him with
a gigantic bonus uh so literal golden parachute. Well, he

(39:05):
stays on. No, they're not going to kick it out.
He's really good at this. Uh so. One of the
company's directors, looking out at the burnt farms and slave
run plantations that had replaced a once thriving society and
the band aisles, said, quote, this is fine, this seems
good to me. Oh no, he said, there is no
profit at all in an empty sea, empty countries and
dead people. That's I agree. Like, what at some point

(39:26):
if you burn everything the funk down, where are you
getting the nutmeg? Dude? Well he was right eventually, because
this all does collapse for the Dutch India Company, but
for a while it's super profitable and the Dutch East
India Company becomes most powerful corporation on the planet. Cohen
died of a horrible tropical disease in age at age
forty two, so he didn't last that long, but the

(39:48):
company lived on. By the end of the century, it
had a private fleet of more than a hundred and
fifty merchant ships and forty warships and employed fifty thousand
people across the world, including a ten thousand man private army.
Uh it eventually sank into decline in irrelevance and by
seventeen ninety nine it was dissolved under a tremendous amount
of debt. Uh so. Yeah, the Netherlands continued to govern

(40:08):
much of Indonesian till but the Dutch East India Company
was not the most successful or the most notable East
India Company and all of history that title goes to
the people they defeated in the Battle for the spiceries,
the British East India Company, so after Cohen massacred a
bunch of their people in the band Aisles back in
sixteen twenty three, the British East India Company hit had
a wee bit of a rough patch. The company took

(40:29):
on more and more debt and had to sell most
of its assets in order to stay alive. The only
reason it didn't get dissolved and go out of business
is that it maintained a small trading post on India's
northwest coast. Now, the company limped along through the sixteen
thirties and sixteen forties, when Oliver Cromwell took away its
royal monopoly over Indian trade at the same time as
he took off the King's head. By early sixteen fifty seven,

(40:49):
the British East India Company was near death and its
governor suggested ending it all together. But all Oliver Cromwell
was like, what about it? Maybe this thing just needs
a little tune up, and he issued the company a
new charter. It would again have a monopoly on trade
within the Indies, but it would also have to organize
itself differently. So, as I said before, the Dutch corporation
had been similar in organization to today's corporations. You know,

(41:12):
it accumulated wealth, invested on projects and was able to,
you know, operate the way a company operates. The British
East India Company had not functioned that way. The new
charter was basically a rip off of the Dutch East
India companies organizing principle, so that it could compete with
a company like that and develop an effective navy and army.
The government even seeded the reformed British East India Company

(41:32):
with seven and fifty thousand pounds of capital. But is
this after the Dutch East India company had already collapsed? No? No, no,
this is when when it's the biggest thing in because
I thought it was like they saw a train crash
and they're like, let's do that. This is like the
sixteen fifties when they're they're making a shipload of money
and over fist. So they're emulating success exactly, much like
Coke has to payalely imitate PepsiCo's delicious brand umbrella. Yes, yes,

(41:59):
and much like all other tortilla chips are a pale
imitation of der ritos. Did they taste like ashes in
my mouth? I would rather boil my tongue hard now.
Oliver Cromwell died two years after reforming the company when
a new king took over Britain. That king issued a
royal decree that granted the company even wider powers to quote,
wage war, administer justice, engage in diplomacy with foreign princes,

(42:23):
acquired territories, raise in command armies, and capture and plunder ships,
violating its monopoly. So the King's like, you're basically a government,
but just to make money. Yeah, get out of jail free,
instruct the laser cannons. Yeah, well, funny that you bring
up laser camps. Because this company's new focus was not spices.

(42:43):
The British dec India Company was not stealings the the
six hundreds equivalent, because India just happened to be the
world's largest reservoir of saltpeter. Now, saltpeter forms from animal
droppings after they've been left to sit and calcify for
a while, and he was the indispensable ingredient in gunpowder.

(43:03):
Whoever controlled India assault Peter supply would basically control Europe's
ability to shoot people. If you know Europe in the
six shooting people's kind of their thing. So the British
Company focused on India and spread. By the seventeen hundreds,
they had established control over three separate presidencies along the subcontinent.
And these are fairly small areas. They're still just setting

(43:25):
up trade. Sometimes they control like a city and a
little bit of the surrounding territory, but they're not capturing territories, right,
you know, they're starting trading posts. Some of those turn
into cities, some of them are based around cities, but
they don't control vast swaths of land yet, and they're
not saying, here are our soldiers, we own this whole city.
Here's our little building, here's our little building. We're here
to trade for now. For now. Yes, we'll give us

(43:51):
the give us the gunpowder. We'll just see what happens later.
It'll probably go great for everybody. Well, we love is
mutual product. Now. The fact that Indian saltpeter was behind
most of the gunpowder used in Europe's many, many, many, many, many,
many many many, pretty much constant and unending wars meant
that the British East India Company was not the only
corporate power of buying for control of the subcontinent's resources.

(44:13):
Their old enemies that Dutch were there, as well as French, Danish,
Swedish and Australian corporations, all fighting over the Indian saltpeter.
Do these places not have animals that ship? Like, if
you've been to India, it's a beautiful country, fascinating culture. Yes,
absolutely it will not like when I read like, oh,
saltpeter comes from poop and India had the most it

(44:35):
was because I spent a lot of time and he's like, oh,
of course, yeah, that's the place where there would be
all the saltpeter. Interesting. Yeah, and they've been you know,
India has been developed for a very long time, so
long history of animal husbandry, a long history of of cultivation,
and so they were just huge reserves of this stuff
sitting around um and it just so happened that the

(44:55):
Mughal Empire. I don't know why, I said, nice, they
have a lot of po good it's not about to
be good for them. Uh So, the Mughal Empire, who
ruled most of India, was in decline at this point UM.
And as it declined, the French and British corporations particularly
grew more powerful. So these corporations all had armies on

(45:16):
the subcontinent, usually a mix of regular government troops and
corporate soldiers basically mercenaries, along with cadres of local troops
trained to a rough approximation of European standards. These armies
were there to defend against other corporations, but they'd sometimes
make military alliances with like local princes and stuff, who
were more or less independent because again, sort of the
centralized nature of the Mughal government's breaking down at these points.

(45:38):
So you've got local princes and whatnot. Nawab's kind of
vying for more and more control. And I'm sure the
local forces they trained were just as effective as the
local forces we trained nowadays. You know, it's easy to
transmit that kind of knowledge. It really is. Uh So,
this is the world that one Robert Clive is born
into in ninety five. Now, have you ever heard of

(46:01):
Robert Clive. He's one of the most important people who's
ever lived. Um yeah, I mean yes, I know everything
about him. You can skip it. Like Jan Cohen, he
is a monster, but at least to me, he's also
kind of a likable monster. I kind of want to
see a movie about this guy. And I credit that
to the decades I spent reading adventure novels set during
the colonial era, like King Solomon's Minds. Clive is an

(46:24):
objectively bad person, but holy god, he had hotspah. So
he was born into the aristocracy, but like the poor aristocracy.
So you would think this guy is like lower middle class.
They get a nice house, but his dad's working all
the time, and like he doesn't have a lot of
prospects for the future. You know, while he's a kid,
he keeps getting expelled from schools because he can't stop
pulling pranks. Um. At one point a bunch of his

(46:46):
friends get together and they form a protection racket to
extort money from local business owners. So he's like a
thug from Oh yeah, that old prank of beating the
ship out of people if they don't pay you. Classic
Clooney on set all the time, all the time. This
is just a prank, This is give me your money.

(47:07):
So Clive eventually grows up and decides to take a
job in India with a company because again he doesn't
have any prospects in England. And if you want to
get fucking rich in this period, you roll the fucking
die of a tropical disease dice and get a job
with one of these Death of a salesman and you
just go into the jungle and come out a millionaire.
Yeah yeah that's the or die of malaria. Yeah a

(47:29):
lot of people did both. Uh So yeah, he gets
a and he's he's he's not the stuff that he's
gonna sound like an action here. I want to get
through with this. He is a small man, he's not
good looking, he's sick all the time, and he is
manic depressive, Okay, Yeah, I also like to think he's
just a mesa Halic. He needs that that's further south,

(47:51):
although he's probably loving the curry. Yeah. So, in Clive
gets a job working as a clerk at an outpost
in Madras. He's twenty. Uh, they're only about three hundred
guys there from the East India Corporation when a force
of French Company soldiers shows up and tries to conquer
the place. Now, the company men a hole up inside
the fort, but rather than fight, they just drink all

(48:12):
of the liquor and the fort and then once the
liquor runs out, they surrender, which is I can respect that.
That means they probably knew they were going to surrender
the whole time, but they're like, wait, wait, give us
a minute, give us a minute, They're probably gonna take
the liquor. If first, I should say, They all surrender
except for Robert Clive. He dresses up in a the

(48:32):
traditional outfit of a local interpreter, paints himself in black face,
and escapes with a few of his colleagues. Nice They
hike a hundred and fifty kilometers to the company's last
intact coastal fort and get there just in time to
warn them that the French army is on its way.
This gives the British company men enough time to get
the local ruler, the Nawab, to raise up an army
of ten thousand men to defend them. So the French

(48:54):
show up with twelve hundred men and they easily beat
this army. Because we could know if he was man
or depressive at each time. This is a manic fucking
is that diagnosable in the six we know, but people
since then because he wrote a lot and he had
a biographer who hung out with him all the time,
so there's enough info that people are like, it seems

(49:16):
like he was manic depressive. Yeah, it seems like it,
you know. So, yeah, the French beat the army that's
raised up to defend the last sort of British Company
port on the coast, but the delay in fighting them
gives the Royal Navy enough time to show up and
save the day. Uh So, in seventeen forty eight, that
little trade war ends and Robert Clive realizes that he

(49:37):
kind of loves being in terrifying danger, so he volunteers. Definitely, man, Yeah, yeah,
I feel like I could kill him million French guys,
so he volunteers for service in the militant wing of
the East India Company. He basically transfers over to the
armed Division request to be in the fighting section, and

(49:58):
his his request is granted because he's did a really
good job the last time, so he immediately gets a
promotion and he winds up in a pretty sweet position
where he basically gets a cut of all of the
trade within a certain small area. So he starts making
good money. And the thing that the trade war had
driven home to Clive is that Europeans were just way
better at fighting than everybody else. Um. Again, that was
like a French army versus ten thousand Indian soldiers and

(50:20):
it wasn't even a hard fight. Um. There's a lot
of reasons for this, you know. It's not that these
guys are superhuman or genius. It's that number one, they
have guns and fairly modern and number two, none of
these soldiers usually want to be fighting for the side
therewith they're kind of press getting into it. These aren't
large professional armies that are motivated. They're just like guys

(50:42):
this local rulers forcing to fight and they run pretty easy,
right come to fight another day whenever they want. Yeah, yeah,
if they want, but they don't really want to fight
because they're farmers. They're not. And that's the other thing
is that all of the European soldiers in here are
soldiers usually for decades. If they live long enough, they'll
have twenty years of fighting experience. As it almost all

(51:04):
spent overseas. Yeah. Yeah, it's not like now where they
have regular like go home for you, because it takes
like two years to get home. It's just crazy to
imagine that you sign up for my life is just
totally detached from my home now forever going into the void.
Amount of violent, kind of off balance people. So Europe
trains them really well, harms them and sends them away

(51:26):
from Europe. Like, yeah, it's like the beginning of the
space program. This is just a bunch of asshole astronauts
being sent out. We're just like, we gotta get Neil
Armstrong at a planet such a prick, send him away,
send him to the moon. Yes, this this show has
always had a strong anti astronaut five and I'm glad
that you caught onto that. Yeah, he's gottast or not.

(51:48):
Their bastards Kadafi would agree with you. Yeah, this suits.
They should all commit suicide. Yes, the hollow life of
the astronaut, the existence of an astronaut. Yeah, so yeah.
Robert Clive realizes that European armies are just unbelievably good
compared to anything that particularly that the Indian rulers can

(52:12):
put together. Um, and he realizes that with enough soldiers,
there's basically no native force in India who could stop
him from doing whatever he wanted. Now, he did not
turn straight to conquest. He just saw this as a
service he could offer the local rulers. Basically, I want
trade in a certain reason. You're the guy in charge.
I can help you beat whatever local enemies you have,
and it won't it's not even hard for me. I

(52:33):
send my guys up for a couple of weeks, it's done,
and then you let me get your ship at a
lower price or whatever. We set up a deal, right,
So that's kind of that's his first idea is just
to set rent his mercenaries out in order to get
better trading deals. Pumps that guy in the face and
we'll give you a Costco club card. I get it
so and that that that's when all this is happening.

(52:53):
The empire is dying, regional leaders are getting more and
more power, and he's just renting his army out. And
basically the different European companies to start sort of backing
puppet rulers in the regions where they're active, because it's
easy for them to prop up a government, and it
makes it easier if they can know the government's going
to be supportive of their company. And they've learned from
the mistake of like, don't have your mercenaries try to

(53:13):
turn into judges and magistrates and lawmakers and ship. Yeah
that the company building here, like it's not worth the investment. Yeah,
So they're leaving the state intact. They're just making sure
the ruler won't do anything they don't want or knows
that they'll be killed if they do. Yeah, And it's
a it's a pretty sweet position because they don't really
have any responsibility over anything, like other than fighting every

(53:34):
now and then. Yeah, robbing gunpoint is usually a pretty
advantageous position to be in. Yeah. So at one, you know,
at various points, the puppets of these corporations go to
war with each other, and during one of these little
trade wars between the puppets of the French and the
puppets of the English, like the different puppet rulers they
put up. Robert Clive talks his way into a major

(53:57):
military command. Uh. He takes a force of English Company
soldiers and three hundred mercenaries on a daring jungle march.
They go a hundred kilometers in six days and they
capture the enemy capital, a town called our Cot, with
a hundred thousand citizens. They don't even have to fire
a shot, so Clive takes command of the town's fort.
He orders his men not to loot or take bribes
um because he doesn't want any trouble with the locals,

(54:19):
because he knows that there's going to be a big
counter attack to quarter only only cut him in four. No,
but he's really he's not that kind of guy. He
really is trying to He's just trying not to lose
them because he knows the people they don't care about
the local ruler either. They're just piste off that everything
is chaos, they exactly, and he just like, don't give
them a reason to hate us, Like there's there's no

(54:40):
benefit to that to us in that So yeah, Clive
took takes command of the fort. He and his men
start to like fortify it for the counter attack, and
the counter attack comes um Clive and has men wind
up surviving like a fifty day long siege from this
like massive Indian army, ten thousand men who have been
partly trained by French soldiers, so they're a little bit

(55:02):
better than the Indian armies usually are. And they have
several dozen war elephants that are covered in metal plates
on their heads that are basically meant to batter down
this fort. We've reached that three of the movie. Yeah,
we've reached at three of the movie. But being a
military genius, Robert Clive realized that elephants don't like being
shot by rifles. Uh so he just had his men
do that repeatedly. He's a brilliant man, wiley son of

(55:25):
a bit. So the muskets of that era weren't really
good at killing elephants, but they scared the ship out
of them, and the elephants stampeded and trampled the guys
on side. It's like, you don't have to kill the elephant,
you just have to make the elephant be like this.
So the army retreats and a few hours later Clive
and his men are relieved by reinforcements. So at this point,
Robert Clive twenties something dude had seen more adventure than

(55:48):
most people in two lifetimes. But he was still like,
fuck it, I want more action. So he takes charge
of the reinforcements and he leads an attack on the
guy who'd just been laying siege to him. Clive bribes
hundreds of the enemy's best soldiers to defect and adds
them to his army, and he spends the next few
months just winning a series of skirmishes and slowly demolishing
this Indian king's army. Uh. He everywhere he conquered. He

(56:08):
took bribes and cuts of all of the riches in
the region and just took it. Some of them went
to the company, some of it just went to Robert Clive.
So by the time this whole war is over, Clive
has fuck you money. Um, So he goes back to
England for a while. Once yeah he's he's one of
the guy's manifort. We'll be trying to burnish the image
of like, yeah he was, he's a real inspiration. So

(56:31):
he goes back to England for a while once his
trade war ends, and he does the fancy rich British
gentleman stick for a spell, he gets married. He's sort
of famous at this point. Um Prime Minister William Pitt
the Elder called him quote the heaven born general Wealth,
and politics quickly grew boring for him, though, So when
Clive heard the company was having more trouble with the French,
he took the opportunity to go back to India and

(56:51):
do more war stuff. So this time he winds up
in Bengal, a super productive and agriculturally rich region of
the country. A local nawab his soldiers, by the French,
had just conquered the city of Calcutta, which had been
sort of a British trading city, and he captured the
English sport there. Now, the area around Calcutta had both
a lot of cotton and also the world's largest reserves
of high quality saltpeter, so the British can't really afford

(57:14):
to lose this area. So Clive takes a fleet and
two hundred soldiers and he sails back to India to
function up. Okay, I thought you're saying Clive took it
like they like, the British East India Company defend its
like fucking over England. He's going in to get it back.
It gets conquered by a an Indian army that's backed
by the French, and the British decided to take it.

(57:36):
They go easier on the ratio of elephants to soldiers,
they're able to win this time. Well, there's just not
that many guys, like a couple of hundred dudes, right,
and they're not really well organized. So yeah, they get
they get so they call the sociopaths and sociopath real
fucking hard. So Clive winds up back there and he's
he's he's great. You know. He wins a bunch of battles,

(57:57):
He scares a bunch of elephants and makes them run
through enemy ranks. Happens a number of times. It's like
the classic Clive move uh and the British East India
Company stock raises off of his victories. Everything culminates in
the Battle of Plassy. Now, this is one of those battles,
like the Battle of Hastings, that everybody should know about.
It's one of the most important moments in the history
of both India and of the British Empire. So Clive,

(58:20):
with three thousand soldiers only a thousand of whom are European,
fights a local army of fifty thousand men and he
just wipes the floor with them. They're basically charging cannons
and gun lines with swords and it just doesn't work.
Clive is not a military genius, although he gets that
reputation at the time, the consensus now more seems to
be that he was just competent and didn't fun anything
up and was very brave and it wasn't hard to

(58:43):
win a war like this, because again, you've got disciplined
soldiers with muskets and cannons, and the natives are charging
you with swords across an open field. As long as
you're able to just barely keep them in line and
be like don't run, yeah, we'll win. And these guys,
they're all hard sons of bitches who have been killing
people for decades there, for years, and they are rough

(59:07):
sons of I can't run my head around the mercenary
concept because I just it's so crazy to be like, hey,
here's money, kill that guy, and then someone else comes along.
They're like here's more money. I don't kill that guy,
and you're like, okay, shoot this guy. Money is good
and I'm good at shooting people a guy who paid
you before. Because here's more money. Can I stay drunken

(59:27):
on opium for forever? Of course, it's that seemed to
be like part and parcel of being a mercenary at
this time, just shipping your pants, taking opium, killing people. Yeah,
that's that's these guests. So uh. With the victory at Plassy,
Clive instantly rockets from having fuck you money to funk

(59:48):
the world. He's one of the richest humans on the planet.
After this, Uh, he places a new guy on the
throne of Bengal, which is a huge chunk of India,
and is given a cut of all of the wealth
and like the wealthiest part of the Indian subcontinent. So
he's given three hundred thousand pounds and not pounds in
terms of British currency, three hundred thousand pounds in golden

(01:00:11):
jewels just for him. Like he just gets that loot
pounds of ship a hundred and fifty thousand tons. There's
only one reason to accrue that in physical gold. He's
Scrooge mcducking that ship need as physical golden jewels. Now
his men get another huge chunk of money, like half

(01:00:32):
a million pounds of well, so they all get rich too,
but not nearly as rich as Clive, and the company
gets also huge huge amounts of money. Uh. And also
the British heat Stindia company winds up with a total
monopoly pretty much on high quality saltpeter. So the British
government from this point on basically has the power to
cut every nation on Earth off from gunpowder. Doesn't that

(01:00:53):
play a key role in the American Revolution? In every
war that happens, that's the Seven Years War, the French
and Indian law. Big part of why the British win
is because they own the gunpowder. Thomas Jefferson tells his
wife how to yeah, self saltpeter. Yeah. So Clive is
appointed governor of Bengal, but Bengal is still technically ruled

(01:01:16):
by a local dude. But for the first time, the
company finds itself in control of more than just a
few ports. They're more or less in control of this
whole region. They're not officially because they don't want to be,
because they don't want to be, but they really are
running this now because they think there's a lot of
money in it. For one, they just get as soon
as they conquered, the guy they put on the throne
gives them huge amounts of money, so they start to

(01:01:38):
get a taste for eating big chunks of land. Right.
That's kind of where the East India companies and Nation
Building are just owning them and sitting up. They don't
give a shit about nation They just want to take
the money. Um. But back at home in England, this
starts to scare people both the company having this big
chunk of land that's larger than England and contains more
people in it, which is weird for everybody, and it

(01:02:01):
even scares Clive a little bit. In seventeen fifty nine,
he writes this to a company officer. So large a
sovereignty may possibly be an object too expensive for a
mercantile company, and it is feared that they are not
of themselves able without the nation's assistance to maintain so
wide a dominion. Um, it took that long. Yeah, you
might start a business and then you're like, we an
most of Canada, parts of Texas, and like, have we

(01:02:24):
gone too far? Is this is this not what a
company should Nobody asked this till now. But should we
own the moon here? I mean we just make build
a bears. This has gone maybe too far for build
a Bear. So the sheer amount of wealth Clive acquired
in one fell swoop after the Battle of Plassy also

(01:02:45):
terrifies everybody in Britain. This is a semi modern state.
We're not talking the Roman Empire where generals are meant
to plunder things. This is a place with press and
like civil rights rules and like limitations on the power
of government and stuff. Nothing like clearly not or within
within England. They do right, obviously not compared to what
we'd consider, but like, this is still weird for them.

(01:03:09):
We're not just doing crimes. This is a officer of
a corporation. And under Clive is not just company troops
but Royal British soldiers and the Royal British Navy. So
the British government soldiers are fighting under the command of
a corporate officer who just took hundreds of thousands of
pounds in plunder. This is weird for everybody. And I
kept as much as he wanted. Yeah, yeah, So people

(01:03:31):
start to speak up and be like this might not
be okay with England. We need to talk about this.
And Bengal is not at this point the only chunk
of land that's been taken over by corporations. We just
talked about the Dutch. But obviously, like in Canada, the
American Northwest was like the Hudson Bay Company by this
point controls a million square kilometers of North America. So
it's starting to be a thing, and it's starting to

(01:03:53):
get weird to people. And also it's probably worth noting
that in sixteen sixty the British government issued a charter
to the Company of Royal advent Sers trading to Africa.
This would become the Royal African Company. By nine the
Royal African Company had shipped roughly one thousand slaves out
of Africa and into the New World. So the Duchy
India Company, the guys from the beginning, also founded the

(01:04:15):
New Amsterdam Colony. Their mismanagement gave it over to the
English and it eventually became New York. So like, this
is what else is happening at this time. Robert Clive
is back in England with all of the money in
the world and starting to fend off some like legal
challenge as a result of how much he's taken. Um.
So maybe your education was different than mine, Michael and
people listening, Maybe you all learned about this stuff when

(01:04:36):
you were a kid. But part of my research here,
the only thing I knew about the British East India
Company was something to do with the Boston Tea Party,
and that they were bad guys and at least one
of the pirates of the Caribbean movies. Right. I knew
that in in narratives of this time period they're seen
as like an evil empire, so I was ready for
that to be true, and it is. It's super true,
and it's true that their actions built the modern world.

(01:04:58):
In very many ways. They embody what's possible when a
gigantic business enterprise is completely unencumbered by the rule of
law or conscience. But what we've seen happen here isn't
just the birth of free enterprise utterly devoid of regulation,
international corporations that cannot be regulated. It's not just that
this is the birth of colonialism, because this is now

(01:05:18):
when these companies start thinking about colonies, not just as
a place for like people to move or whatever, for
whatever but like this is part of a trading empire
that we've set up and like a planned community, and so,
I mean there's several movies where the evil plan is
to like just reshape people on a genetic level until
you have the perfect worker or whatever, and this is

(01:05:39):
almost that, like, let's just change the whole world, do
whatever the funk we want now. In the eighteen fifties,
the British annexed Mandalay in modern day Burma. Ruyard Kipling
wrote a poem about life as a colonial soldier there
that I think sums up very well the attitude many
of these corrupt corporate officers had towards the vast domains
now under their charge. I'm surprise the government is not

(01:06:01):
already pushing back harder, Like they don't see this as
an existential threat, I guess because it enriches them so much, right, yeah, yeah,
And we'll be getting to that in the next part
of this. But I want to read you this quote
from Kipling's poem Mandalay. That's sort of I think it
helps me get into the head of these people, and
I'm gonna do it in a British accent ship me
Someway as east of Suez, where the best is like

(01:06:22):
the Wist, where there ain't no tin commandments and a
man can raise a fist. That's that's the attitude here. Yeah,
there's no god out here. Let's go to international waters
and get drunk do whatever we think next. So if
you want to see what it looks like when a
bunch of cash hungry corporate types winds up in charge
of one of the most populous nations on the planet

(01:06:43):
and realizes that there are no fucking rules about what
they can do, you'll have to tune into the next
episode of Behind the Bastards because this is again a
two parter. We will be dropping the next part on Thursday,
and it's going to get ugly. Not just as ugly
as it's been, but as ugly as in anything lest
century was this so far compared to other episodes I've

(01:07:04):
heard his tame in terms of detailed graphic detail about
see like, now you have the overview, we'll get to
the blood and guts. So Michael, yeah, Mikhail as you
have never gone by, and Miguelito sometimes yeah, So you
got any pluggables before we close this episode, Well, my

(01:07:25):
Twitter handle is at swam Underscore Corp. But now I
want nothing to do. I thought it'd be cute. I'm
a corporation, I'm a brand, you know. Um, But now
I realized that I'm destined to colonize the earth and
crush people under my boot heel. Yes, and it doesn't
feel good. But if you want to follow my progress

(01:07:46):
on conquering the Earth, that would be its swam Underscore Corp.
And as you mentioned at the top, very graciously, our
own podcast and sketch network is called small Beans. You
can find us on Patreon, Instagram, iTunes, and etcetera. All right,
and I'm Robert Evans. You can find me on Twitter
at I right, okay, just two letters, and you can
find this podcast on the internet at behind the Bastards

(01:08:07):
dot com. Well, we'll have all of the sources for
this episode and next episode. You can also find us
on Twitter at at Bastards pod. You can find us
on Instagram in the same way. So thank you for listening,
and we'll be back next Thursday with part two of
the Age of Heroic Commerce. M