September 6, 2018 • 42 mins
Robert is joined again by Michael Swaim to continue discussing the 'era of heroic commerce.'
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Mmm, hello friends, I'm Robert Evans, and this is once
again Behind the Bastards, the show we tell you everything
you don't know about the very worst people in all
of history. Now, this is part two of our episode
on the age of Heroic Commerce. Uh and my my
(00:20):
guest with me, as with the last episode, is the imminent,
the tenerant, the excellent Michael Swain. Thank you, the auspicious
Robert Evans for having me. Yeah, you know what's fun good?
Poor tense, abound adjective. Yeah, I love them. That little
blue triangle and adverbs, little orange circle. I think did
(00:44):
you do that what we're talking about? I learned with
the system where you put symbols for every part of
speech that sounds exhaust So to me, a conjunction will
always be a little pink rainbow. Oh okay, that's good
to know. Actually, I think that's preposition. Let's talk about
some speaking of prepositions. I'm gonna make a preposition. I
don't think you are. I think prosition that one. That
(01:06):
one didn't come out. I was going to try to
tie that in more smoothly, but then you caught me
scripted apart. So where we are in the story. We
got we got this guy, Robert Clive, and Robert Clive
has conquered Bengal like a big chunk of India and
he's rich as ship. And the East India Company has
got like tens of millions of people that they don't
really have to take care of, but they kind of control.
(01:29):
And it's getting weird. And everybody back in England is like,
this is getting weird. And also corporations are spreading throughout
the world and starting colonies all over the place and
extending European domination and center the globe. They're collecting rents,
they are starting to do that, and yeah, they are
starting to to carry out taxes and stuff that that
that is beginning in this period of time. But mostly
what's happening, mostly the thing that the company is doing
(01:51):
in this big area they now control is being corrupt
as ship. Corruption had always been indemic among the East
India Company's foreign officers. That's why you did it, is
so that you could take a bunch of stuff and
come back home and be rich if you survived the
tropical diseases. So everybody skimmed a little bit off the
top that was kind of built into the system. Clive
had just done what everybody else had been doing when
(02:12):
he took the three thousand pounds of gold and jewels
and stuff. But the cup that he'd been skimming from
was the biggest cup anyone had ever stumbled across. Right, Yeah,
so that's that's the situation. And it was unprecedented, and
people started to ask the question do we want it
to be okay for our corporate officers in foreign countries
to be this corrupt? And that's something we as British
(02:34):
people are fine with. It's not like he's a brilliant innovator,
it's just the most Yeah, he's Yeah, no one has
ever had that. This seems like it could go bad places.
And some of that is people who like have a
human sense of like it's wrong, we're plundering the world.
A lot of it is other rich guys who are
old money and are just don't like just like this
(02:54):
is a threat to our fortresses of the money that
we have built in our places. Exactly. Now this gross
guy is rich and yeah, this uncouth guy who joined
because he likes beating people up, Yeah, it's too wealthy. Exactly.
So Clive leaves India after conquering and Bengal and governing
it for a while, and he goes back to England,
and to give you an idea of how modern this
(03:15):
period is, he takes all this lute that he earned
from conquering Bengal and he deposits it with the Dutch
East India Company and then when he gets back to London,
he withdraws it from them as cash or as cash okay,
So they didn't like transport his jewels and because he
he was like, there's no way, this is way too
much ship to syd I'll give it to them, They'll
give me the cash value and I'll take it out
(03:37):
in London. Boom, it was done. Just upload it to
the cloud. You're good to go. Yeah. This is like
the first time people were figuring out how to do
that sort of ship. So yeah, again this is becoming
a very modern time period. Uh So Cloud gets back
to England and he's rich and he's popular for a while.
He buys his shipload of mansions, but all is not
well because his boss, Laurence Sullivan does not like him. Now,
Laurence Sullivan is the chairman of the company, so Clive
(03:59):
in addition to all of them, and he had gotten
was guaranteed a giant yearly payment from all of ben Goal.
So basically the prints that he put in power was like,
we'll give you a huge a fortune every single year.
Because you put me in power, He's just free to
write up that contract. And that's why the company challenges
it because I just don't understand how people take pure
(04:21):
will yeah and make it reality because people to go along,
they're not they don't want to. His own company takes
him to court the like, you're not allowed to make
that deal. Yeah, they you're not allowed to make that deal.
We never voted to confirm this giant annual payment for you.
You know, you worked it out directly with the prince,
but you were working with the company at the time
and this is our area. So and they're not saying
this money should go back to the Indian people. They're
(04:42):
saying that we should this should get us, not you. Um.
So they go to quarter over and they fight in
court for a while. So they're battling in court while
things in India are kind of starting to go sour
for the company. They're making a lot of money because
they found a bunch of different ways to tax and
sell and suck being gold Eye, but they start being
rebellions as a result of this, So now the company
(05:03):
is spending more and more money putting down rebellions, and
eventually they agree to confirm Clive's big annual payment in
exchange for him going back to India and fixing the
ship that's gone wrong since he left the last time.
But that makes it sound like it's arm again, like
he's the only man in the world who can do this,
don't they have other trustworthy mercenaries they do. They think
he's special, but as he's traveling back to India, they
(05:25):
learned that he's really not because some other guy puts
the rebellion down. First. Yeah, first, British guns are just
so much better than everything they face. So they agree
to give him his money and he leaves over there
because they're worried they're going to lose control of the
region because of these rebellions. And then when he's in transit,
some other guy beats. You can tell like, you don't
need this guy. Yeah, you don't need any guy. You've
got canav guns. It's the guns that you need. And
(05:47):
in fact, actually Clive's big contribution winds up being that
when he gets there, things are going so well that
the company has almost invaded Delhi, the capital of India,
and conquered the whole Mughal Empire, and he stops them.
Like Robert Clive is like, this is this has gone unessential. Also,
it seems like he may have just actually gotten scared
(06:08):
at how much thinks have escalated. This is this could
be bad. Yeah, yeah, you launch a new Starbucks franchise
and somehow you accidentally now took over city hall. Yeah.
So he writes a letter when he's justifying his corporate
bosses why he stopped the army, he writes a letter
that says, quote to go further, it is, in my opinion,
a scheme so extravagantly ambitious and absurd that no governor
(06:31):
and counsel in their senses can adopt it unless the
whole system of the company's interests be first entirely new modeled.
Said the guy who's like, but acquiring three hundred thousand
pounds of gold, that is not overly ambsual. I think
he would say that was never his goal. He found
himself in a war and he won, and then they
handed him all this stuff. What am I gonna do
say no, that is yeah, yeah, but he didn't, and
(06:56):
I don't think most people would to be fair, I
think most people who are the kind of people who
could be in Clive's position, I was gonna say most
people would never get in that position. There's no way
to get to there. But anyone who's capable of being
in that position is probably gonna be like, yeah, hit
me the uh so. Clive basically thought that the company
already had a sweet deal. They weren't officially in charge
(07:18):
of anything. They were in control because guns, but they
didn't have to do anything aside from occasionally fighting cash checks.
The Indians were still nominally at least leaders of their
own land, and they were outside of Bengal. They were
still in control, so the East Indian Company didn't have
to worry about this giant subcontinent that they had no
business interests in. Most of this changed on August twelfth,
(07:40):
seventeen sixty five, when Robert Clive, with worry and his gut,
signed a deal on behalf of the East India Trading
Company with the Mughal Emperor that guaranteed the British East
India Company formal control over three big chunks of India
and the lives of almost thirty million people. So we'll
have the graphic up on the site, but you can
see outline there this is what the East India Company
after this agreement now controls. That's land they own and govern.
(08:04):
So now, okay, it's about a fifth about a fifth
of India, the largest country in existence, I believe, one
of them and Russia. Yeah wow. So but what I
don't understand is to what level did they control people's
lives because I assume they have no interest in going
in and being like we're going to make laws and
moral codes. They just want to loot the place. That
(08:24):
is the point of today's episode. But now they are
in charge of it. So they are now the government
in a big chunk of India. Right, So that's the
situation after this. It's weird that they'd even want to
be what's the prophet Clive did not want to be,
but I think they got greedy and so well Clive
is in charge, he tries to cut back on the
shocking amount of corruption and graph that he sees amongst
the company officers. He banns his officers from taking gifts
(08:47):
or bribes, although he doesn't give up his own bribes
so people don't take it super seriously. He increases salaries
to try to make people want to steal less. Uh.
And he restricts the company's monopoly so that some sort
of local economy can exists, so that the East India
Company is not the only people who are allowed to
sell products to Indians, so that they can have a
functioning society. So he tries to pump the brakes, just
(09:11):
let them do what they do. Um. He also does
nice stuff, like he gives a shipload of money to
the pension fund for the company army. Again, he's one
of these people. He starts this road, but he does
not seem to be running unchecked in that direction. It's
not like jan Coon or new money is evolving into
old money like you talked about on the Brothers episode
where it's time to get philanthropic now and resuscitate my image,
(09:34):
gloss over all that ship. It's possible. I don't know
the man, but eventually he like his health isn't great.
At this point, he winds up heading back to England
and other people take over for for India, and he
winds up in court again fighting a company for access
to his yearly bribe basically because they can't get him hired.
Can't they fire him? Well, he when he leaves every time,
he stops working for them, essentially, and so then there's
(09:57):
like big legal fights in the court because they don't
want him to just forever get a fortune every year.
They want that fortunate. But it seems like they keep
coming back and being like, Okay, we'll give you your
old job back, sign this deal. Well, they thought they
needed him, and now they know they really don't um
and he's starting to try to we should steal slightly less. Yeah,
(10:18):
this guy's served his purpose getting out here. So the
East India Company now after Clive leaves, is essentially, yeah,
the government of a big chunk of India. And if
you're a government, need to provide things for people, right
and then just take tax money like you take tax money,
but you provide roads and libraries and e m t
s and firefighters and the FDA and ship. The company
(10:39):
doesn't provide anything. They just take pretty much. And so
that's the situation in seventeen seventy when a famine hits
and it's a bad one, and we will get into
the famine in a little bit. Right now, we're talking
about Clive because this famine is a disaster for his image.
He's not in charge when it happens, but it goes
big in the press and it looks bad for him,
and he's basically portrayed aid by a lot of the
(11:00):
media as a greedy idiot who had ruined India, even
though a lot of other people had ruined India as
well as Robert Clive. And here you are throwing him
under the bus. A full two hundred years later, we
leave Clive alone. I mean, he had tried to clamp
down on the shameless left. He did see the problem. Um.
So he winds up in court and you know, has
a big legal case where he tries to essentially defend
(11:22):
his legacy. And during the court proceedings he delivers a
famous speech. So it's it's like one of those really
like movie ready moments from history. So he's being cross
examined about robbing Bengal blind and accused of plundering India,
and he says, quote, consider the situation in which the
victory of Plassy placed me a great prince was dependent
on my pleasure. An opulent city lay at my mercy.
(11:45):
It's richest bankers bid against each other for my smiles.
I walked through vaults which were thrown open to me alone,
piled on either hand with gold and jewels. Mr Chairman.
At this moment, I stand astonished at my own moderation.
I mean, that's literally just the same as you want
the truth, you can't handle the truth when you're out there.
(12:06):
Can you think I stole a lot? I could have
stolen a lot more? Mother? Why does the loophole exist
if I'm not supposed to exploit it? That classic justification
we hear all the time to this day. So he
was acquitted, Uh, yeah, but he didn't last that much longer.
He was very sick from all of the tropical diseases
he'd picked up overseas, and he also might have been
(12:26):
suffering terrible regret for his actions and the famine. He
has described as having had a nervous disorder. It's also
possibly he had severe PTSD. There are numerous times where
people exploded next to him, Like would be shot by
cannons and just the guy next to him would burst.
Like So if you don't mean got mad at him,
you mean physically exploded? Yeah, yeah, Like was burst by
a cannon, so he lived through horrible commas, so it's
(12:48):
possible he was just a broken mentally at this point.
Then he drowned on gold. No. In seventeen seventy four,
he stabbed himself to death in the throat with a
pocket knife. Yeah, at home alone, a suicide with no explanation.
That's a crazy math. People knew he was depressed, it
has always been depressed. But he cut his own throat
with a tiny knife, so he was gone. This is
(13:09):
the end of Robert Clive. But the British were still
in India, and they would stay there from nearly two
centuries now. Merchant Kings mentioned the famine in passing but
didn't get into much detail on the matter. It was
a famine, it was very, very bad. So I decided
to do a little bit of extra digging and I
ran into a college textbook called The East India Company
and the Natural World. It had a whole chapter on
the famine, and thanks to the bountiful Goddess of Capitalism,
(13:32):
Springer allowed me to buy just that chapter for thirty dollars.
What a deal, right, for a single single chapter exercised
from the book Capitalism it's different from the stuff we're
talking about today because reasons. Anyway, I read the chapter
and it's really good. I'm gonna I'm gonna quote from
it now. According to the report from the Famine Commission,
in a period of ninety years from seventeen sixty five
(13:54):
when the British East India Company took over the Dwani
of Bengal to eighteen fifty eight Bengal experience, it's twelve
famines and four severe scarcities. Now, some of those famines
would have occurred with or without the British East India Company,
because famines are a thing. They've always been a thing, right,
But once you delve into it, their whole period of
rule is basically a master class and had a funk
over an entire subcontinent. In essence, in order to compensate
(14:18):
for the minimal amount of actual government work the company
needed to do in order to turn a profit, they
just started jacking up taxes on rural workers and on farmers,
and usually these taxes were in kind, so you'd pay
with whatever it is you were growing at the time.
So the company commercialized agriculture in India and tried to
turn it into an almost industrial operation to maximize output.
So there's been a bunch of small independent farms and
(14:40):
villages and whatnot, And now the whole countryside was basically
one giant, big food production plan and made a lot
of money. But it also made it impossible for the
farmers themselves to handle bad years. Everything was sold every year,
nothing was set aside for the bad times. There wasn't
enough left over after the taxes for the individual farmers. Anyway,
the dis East India Company had disrupted the intricate cultural
(15:02):
systems that had formed during and before the Mughal Empire.
In the past, when there was a bad year and
the rains didn't come, villages had standing arrangements with other
villages to help each other out with food. These were
local insurance plans that were present all across India and
particularly in the farming regions have been gal was very
common way to stop people from dying horribly when a famine.
Presumably have been working for a thousand years exactly. Now, No,
(15:27):
now you all work one giant farm together. Yeah, this
will be better for us. So now when famine hit,
everybody worked for the company. Nobody had anything extra. There
were no more insurance policies. They'd all been taken in
taxes and sold. Quote from that same chapter. Bengali society
was divided between the Zamindars, the hereditary revenue collectors of
(15:47):
the Mughal Empire, and a broad base consisting of some
landless laborers and a large number of poor cultivators. Most
of them were sharecroppers, so taxes started to ratch it
up on these people in the late seventeen hundreds. The
company started jacking up to acts is really hard in
the seventeen fifties, and by the mid seventeen sixties they
were like doubling every couple of years. The agricultural reforms
the Corporation put in place didn't really work out. Yields
(16:09):
started to fall, so they're actually growing feware crops because
it turns out a bunch of British guys ideas on
how to farm Indian land did not work as well
as what the Indians that are going to a totally
different culture with different land and just telling them do this,
I think this would work for you for farming. You
have to do it or will shoot you try it out? Yeah,
(16:31):
give it a shot, let us know it works, but
don't tell us if it doesn't, we're not really interested
in that. So would they ration food back because it
is in their interests to keep people alive? And that
right now, you would think that, right, you think it's
it's in your interest that, yeah, you you would think
that other people did not. So the price of grains
(16:54):
started to rise right as the company takes over UM.
And the company has no less in interest in selling
cheap grain to the people growing grain to pay them
grain taxes. So when the famine hit, the company just
reacted with a kind of sociopathy. I think we're coming
to expect from the British East India Company. Oh, because
they're not even paying a portion of their income they
pay in grain anyway. Yeah, exactly. So they're like, well,
(17:15):
you're going to give us all your grain anyway, why
should we even give you some back when we just
get it all anywhere. We're just going to get it
all like um, so that I continue living and they're
already gone, they're already walking off with the grain. Yea.
So here's another quote from that chapter. The effect of
the famine was to enshrine free market economics as part
(17:37):
of the colonial policy all over the Empire, periodic famines
were seen as a check to population growth. As Mike
Davis notes, by the nineteenth century, these Malthusian ideas, which
were voiced all throughout the colonial period, resulted in the
pursuit of free market economics and quote, India, like Ireland,
became a utilitarian laboratory where millions of lives were wagered
against a dogmatic faith in omnipotent markets, overcoming the convenience
(18:00):
of dearth. This was a policy that was to become
quote a mask for colonial genocide. So you want to
talk about colonial genocide, first, let's talk about some ads,
because it is time. I need something the gird myself.
I need some time heared yourself with these products and
or services that support the shades, and we're back. Fabulous ads.
(18:29):
They like wrapped me in such a cozy feeling that
I feel like I have the buffer I need for
what's gonna come now. But what's gonna come now is
we're gonna talk about how free market economics became a
mask for colonial genocide. We're getting to the genocide part
of that. Again, to Charles Cooke Bonner, he would have
loved this period. Just a pig in plot, just stealing money,
(18:52):
watch selling people into slips, defying it with bizarre, nonsensical statements.
It would have been great. He would have been super
good at this. Really was born in the wrong time,
although making this time, that time, doing his best. It's
just business. This is like the beginning of that ethos.
It's just business, just business. So it's worth getting into
exactly how different the famines caused by the East India
(19:15):
Company's management were from the famines that had come before
in India and in every society in human history. There
had been famines in India shortly before the company's period
of dominance, including one that lasted from sixteen seventy to
sixteen seventy one. Thousands of people had died one to
three hundred every day during the months that the famine
was active. It was a terrible time, but the Mughal government,
shitty as it was by that point, had taken action
(19:36):
to mitigate it. The government had repaired and built new
irrigation works. They'd created reservoirs to make sure they'd be
able to grow crops during the next dry season. They
cut taxes so farmers would be able to keep more
of the food they'd grown, they'd set up free kitchens
and given out grain to try and reduce the number
of people who start to death. In other words, they
were a fucking government. The East India Company was not so.
(20:00):
Starting in the seventeen seventies, all of India started to
learn the difference between the two. The Great Bengal Famine
of seventeen seventy lasted from seventeen sixty nine to seventeen
seventy three. See a media I'm like, a famine supposed
to last a season, Yeah right, that four years? Supposed
for four years? Yeah. So the last famine had lasted
less than a year and killed thousands. This famine lasted
(20:21):
four years, it would kill millions. The Great Bengal Famine
was made a lot worse by the fact that in
the years leading up to it, the company had kind
of sort of gutt of the local economy and shipped
all of their silver away to marry Old England or
rather China. Uh see economics isn't my strong suit. But
I did manage to find a very detailed article on
the Wire, an independent journalism website that publishes in Hindi
(20:41):
and Urdu, and it focuses a lot on historical economic
stuff in that region of the world. The article is
called the role that currency played in the Great Bengal
Famine of seventeen seventy. It breaks down how the company
spent its tax revenue. This is talking about one district
in berb Home District. Out of ninety thousand pounds connected
through taxs and duties and net surplus of some sixty
(21:02):
pounds was employed for the purchase of silks, Muslims, cotton
cloths and other articles to be sold in Leadenhall Street,
the headquarters of the company. In short, the revenues have
been goal supplied the means of providing the expenditure for
purchases in Bengal, reducing the net annual influx of specie,
which is hard currency, to a pittance. So the company
was taking taxes, making a shipload of money, using it
(21:23):
to buy products Indian people needed, and then it would
sell those products back to them for a profit and
ship the hard currency the silver and gold back to
England and out of India. The two primary impacts of
this on England were Number one, A few people got
very very very very very rich, and it's always a
few people. What's crazy to me is countries will swallow
(21:44):
up and destroy whole other countries and only eighteen people
were involved. It's like the country that crushed the other
country doesn't even benefit from us. Well, England does in
one way. This is how the tax. But know this
is how gets ta okay this, yeah, I've heard this.
So the Chinese were the only place to get tea,
(22:04):
you know, China was the only place where it grew
at this point, not anymore. And China only wanted silver.
They wanted the specie, the hard currency. Now sounding like
a Sidmyer civilization, Yeah, that's exactly what's happening. Here's another quote.
The relatively undervalued silver and Bengal proved a profitable source
to finance the growing tea trade with China. Within a
span of just three years, some seven d and twenty
(22:26):
thousand pounds of specie was sent out of Bengal to China.
The widespread corruption and plunder by the servants of the
company not only transferred the wealth of the country to
these individuals, but was also sent out of the country
through ingenious means. Now this meant that very quickly, being
Golf's hard currency, ran out the parts of India the
company owned only had so much silver and gold and whatever.
The sheer lack of currency meant that Indians could no
(22:49):
longer buy and sell things. The local economy collapsed, and
this also meant that suddenly the company had no money
since they weren't willing to send silver over from India
so they could just buy things. The company sort of
twiddle it's them and failed to import grain from outside
to avert the millions of deaths. In fact, they banned
the importation of grain between different regions of India and
seized boats to prevent it. Jesus, here's what one comes
(23:13):
them products down at the company's store. Well, they're not
buying those anymore because the company doesn't have the money
to stop the famine. Vicious circle. No one's at fault, right,
How could it possibly ever have been prevented? This is
just what had to happen. No one could have foreseen.
This is the Irish potato famines. Sorry, like quiz you
on stuff even research? But was that also corporate ization?
(23:36):
That not in the same way, but it involved a
lot of very rich landown story. Yeah, that's it. We
will be talking about that. I'm talking about Victoria at
some point. Yeah, here is a quote from a company
worker at the time about what Bingal was like during
this famine. This is a guy who who's watching it
as a white dude who has enough food. Quote. All
through the stifling summer of seventeen seventy, the people went
(23:59):
on dying. The husbandmen sold their cattle, they sold their
implements of agriculture. They devoured their seed grain. They sold
their sons and daughters, till at length no buyer of
children could be found. They ate the leaves of trees
and the grass on the field. And in June seventeen seventy,
the resident at the Durbar affirmed that the living were
feeding on the dead day and night. A torrent of
famished and disease stricken wretches poured into the great cities.
(24:22):
At an early period of the year. Pestilence had broken out.
In March, we find smallpox at the Morschetta Bad. The
streets were blocked up with promiscuous heaps of the dying
and dead. In Terment cannot do its work quick enough.
Even the dogs and jackals, the public scavengers of the East,
became unable to accomplish their revolting work, and the multitude
of mangled in festering corpses at length threatened the existence
(24:43):
of the citizens. And even through all this, the East
India Company keeps increasing taxes on the farmers, which must
not even mean anything anymore, Like fine, no, they're still
growing food, it's just being taken from them while they're starving.
So why don't they just eat the food that they're harvesting?
Right then there's guys with guns there, but yeah, and
(25:05):
they've got to like, bad things will happen if you
don't pay your time. What's crazy is they treat it
like it's business, like they have some god given right
to do this because they created this abstract thing we
call like a business plan structure. But really it boils
down to robbery because at the end of the day,
it's always just like, well, why couldn't China come trade
directly for silver with India? Well, because we'd kill them
(25:26):
all and we'd shoot it. You, that's what it comes
down to, you the guns. Yeah, yeah, yeah, So the
taxes on the Bengalese people are higher in seventeen seventy
and seventy one, the year the famine starts. Then in
seventeen sixty nine to seventy, the year that preceded the famine.
I mean, you work on a grain farm and you
go home and eat your dead sibling, your children you
(25:49):
sold a long time ago. Yeah, So in April of
seventeen seventy quote astoundingly, the Council, acting on the advice
of the Muslim Minister of Finance Mohammed Rezakan, added ten
percent to the land acts of the ensuing year, but
the distress continued to increase at a rate that baffled
official calculation. In the second week of May, the central
government awoke to find itself in the midst of universal
(26:09):
and irredeemable starvation. So some company officers advised basically cutting
taxes and giving back some of what they'd taken so
the people wouldn't starve to death. But that just didn't happen.
I can't because they want some were living people to
work the field. I really thought their response would be
give them all a pittance of food. They're even like,
(26:31):
I don't know if we shouldn't even give them that.
It's not the company is a big force. Make like,
the company is a big force of making some of
these calls. But a lot of it's just individuals being like, Yeah,
but if we give some of it back, then I'll
be able to steal less. And I want to be
home in a year with a pile of money, so
I'll just keep stealing for another year. Still totally reliance
on most of the people being like and that's worth
watching everyone starved to death around me while I'm here.
(26:54):
If we've learned one thing about corporations from the last
four hundred years, it's that they have a great deal
of foresight. Yeah, and never murder in poison themselves out
of like sci fi movies where there's a desert planet,
but so but the evil corporate lady lives in like
a glass pyramid filled with water. Always seems so over
the top, but it's real. It's reality. Boy, howdy has
(27:17):
it happened? So yeah. By May seventeen, seventy one third
of the Bengalese population six out of every seventeen people
was dead. Company officials estimated one half of the cultivators
and pairs of revenue will perish with hunger. The sheer
scale of the devastation was terrible for the company's bank statement.
(27:38):
By October, the company started to notice that an awful
lot of the workers they relied on had been quote
destroyed by the famine. Oh so we're already using business
devil speak. They're already euphemizing it. Um, some of our
bipedal product was destroyed a transaction. Yeah. Quote the failure
(27:59):
of a single up following a year of scarcity had
wiped out an estimated ten million human beings. God, so
that's the death toll of this first famine, ten million.
The famines continued though, off and on through the seventeen seventies.
In seventeen eighty, another big famine hit and again one
third of Bengal just died. Revenue plummeted. The British government
(28:20):
started to get involved. Even to people at the time,
what was happening was seen as horrific, and the press
attack the East India Company. By seventeen eighty four, the
British government started to pass the first regulations limiting the
company's powers, really limiting any company's powers. This is the
birth of regulation and corporations. It's because the corporation killed
ten million people, probably more like twelve to fifteen at
(28:40):
that point. It's roughly a holocaust to a holocaust and
a half worth of human beings. You hear me slowing
down because my brains just grappling with actually trying to
absorb in. Oh, and there's another that's real that we
were like, this way of organizing humans seems to be
making money. Oh, it also kills people. Well, that's fine,
unless goes too far. When did it go too far?
(29:02):
When did we go like, maybe it has gone too far?
When ten million people were dead, Well, ten million people died,
and then ten years later, maybe we should do another
probably five or six million people died. And then in
eighteen hundred ten percent of all of India died. There's
not even a death count for that. It's just roughly
one billion people in India today. But probably if we're
(29:24):
trying to take the whole East India Company's death toll
from famine, it wouldn't be outrageous to assume somewhere in
the million deaths by this whole over the whole course
of this whole period. So it's good to know that
humanity does have a point where you're like, is this
too many people that you can for me to have
slightly bigger houses? Yeah? Uh so, Yeah. In seventeen eighty four,
(29:48):
they start regulating the Company. In seventeen eighty eight, Edmund
or someone Burke, I forget which Burke gives a speech
at the impeachment trial of India's Governor General. Because they're like,
you've killed like twenty million people, you should probably not
have this job. So Burke called the company quote a
rogue state, waging war, administering justice, minting coin and collecting
(30:08):
revenue over Indian territory. He didn't exaggerate. Horace Walpole, a
Whig member of Parliament, said at the time that quote,
the oppressions of India, and even of the English settled
there under the rape and cruelties of the servants of
the company have now reached England and created a general
clamor here to such monopolies were imputed the late famine
(30:29):
of Bengal and the loss of three million they didn't
know the whole total of its inhabitants. A tithe of
these crimes was sufficient to inspire horror. So the famine
of seventeen seventy, seventeen eighty and seventeen ninety nine. It
is likely, and these are other historians to me saying this,
that the famines the East India Company brought onto India
where the single greatest atrocity, the single worst disaster of
(30:51):
the entire seventeen hundreds of that whole century. It was
the beginning of the end for the East India Company too,
although businessmen would continue to trade and profit off of
her for nearly a tree. India continued to suffer famines,
which led to unrest in war, which led to uprisings
and crackdowns. This led the East India Company's army to expand,
which led them to take over more and more of India,
until pretty soon they controlled basically all of India and
(31:13):
had an army of two hundred thousand soldiers. A guy
named Lord Wellesley eventually wound up in charge, and he
became the company's most successful general. He's the guy who
expanded them from sort of the eastern coast of India
all the way into what's now Pakistan and eventually Afghanistan.
According to the wonderful book Return of a King. By
seventeen ninety six, quote the company was expanding rapidly out
(31:34):
from its coastal factories to conquer much of the interior.
Wellesley's Indian campaigns would ultimately annex more territory than all
of Napoleon's conquests in Europe. Yeah. This eventually brought the
East India Company to the doorstep of Afghanistan. In eighteen sixteen,
the British East India Company extended an offer of asylum
to Shah Shuja, the exiled king of Afghanistan. In eighteen
(31:56):
thirty nine, due to a basically minor dispute with the
Afghan from it, the East India Company invaded Afghanistan, conquered
the country and placed Shah Shuja on a throne as
a puppet Lord Auckland, who was the guy who had
ordered the invasion, and the company quickly lost interest in
their conquest of Afghanistan and immediately invaded China next because
it feels it seems like they feel that, well, you
(32:18):
got to invade something that's not mandatory, you're allowed to stop.
Let me explain it to you, Michael. They've been selling
opium to China and it had created a horrific endemic
drug problem that was crippling the local economy and killing
people in huge So the Chinese government band opium sales,
and so they had to invade China to keep selling
them deadly just like it's like, yeah, we funked up
(32:40):
India until it's stopped bleeding money, so we have to
move on to a new place and funk that place up,
So let's stop the bleeding. I'm of the opinion that
this is all fine. Well know that the great heroes
in history are probably the afghan people, because the East
India Company is on a tear killing people by the millions,
(33:01):
conquering land, and then they take over Afghanistan and they
find themselves the rulers of Afghanistan, a country that has
nothing of value for the East India Company. It's not profitable.
So they have this huge army in Afghanistan that they
start needing to cut back on. And they can't cut
back on the army because Afghanistan is big and hard
(33:22):
to control, so they stopped paying bribes to all of
these local war lords, which means the local warlords start
attacking the army, which means there's eventually a gigantic revolution
in Afghanistan that ousts the garrison, the Company's giant army
in Kabul and wipes it out in the mountain passes
of Afghanistan. And there, you know, these are British soldiers
with muskets, unrifled guns that aren't good at very long range.
(33:45):
The Afghans have these weapons called Jezail Cheese, which are
basically sniper rifles. So they're hiding in the mountains murdering
huge numbers of British soldiers and their Indian sepoys, and
they just massacre this entire British army. It's a huge,
huge disaster. Uh. And this disaster comes after years of
declining revenues for the East India Company and ballooning expenses. Finally,
(34:07):
all of this helps kill the East India Company as
a global power. In eighteen fifty eight, the British government
finally decided that letting a for profit enterprise governed the
lives of tens of millions of people and like a
fifth of the world was a really bad idea. Instead
they give it to a queen. Yeah, there's there's if.
I feel like the Afghan uprising just delayed what we're
(34:32):
already So it was it was like there was this
weird chance at the very beginning of corporate history that
corporations and governments could have merged then become one and
the same. In the East India Company could have been
like literally the empire and just own the world, and
they stop that from happening for five years. It's still
gonna happen, but it could have happened really fast. There's
(34:54):
news today that President Donald Trump is considering a plan
by Eric Prince, the founder of Blackwater, to basically put
private mercenaries in charge of the war of An Afghanistan
and have a guy who Erik Prince is described as
a viceroy run Afghanistan for the Western Powers. So there's
a chance the Afghans might get to stop the next
stage ship. Of course, Trump has named six to the
(35:18):
Council of Operance. Yeah, like everything's becoming So I will
tell you one thing about Afghanistan. Nobody wins when they
fight there, other than not even after the Afghan people
don't even win. Everybody loses, but you don't win. And
usually when you quote unquote win or are are holding
it for a while, you're just they're being hot standing
(35:39):
around and it It's worth noting that when we invaded Afghanistan,
the guy we put in charge of the country was
a dude named Hamid Karzai who was an ascendant of
Shah Shuja. The people the East India company put in
charge of Afghanistan, who was then massacred after the revolution.
It's a small, small, awful world, dumb, dumb world. So yeah.
(36:00):
In eighteen fifty eight, India becomes the property of Queen Victoria,
who we will almost certainly discuss in a subsequent episode.
The East India Company survives for another few years, but
it is dissolved for good in eighteen seventy four by
the East India Stock Redemption Act. This ever, shall we
get our tea? Who's to say at this point, I'm
sure there's competitors. So that's that's the era of heroic
(36:24):
commerce slog. What does that have to do with the
Boston Tea party? They just brought the tea that yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's really just like the militarization aspect, and that's crazy
that we're going down that road again. And I left
out there's so because we didn't really talk about North America.
(36:46):
There's a lot of the story of these companies, and
we didn't even because there's just so much totally because
I don't know about that, but the things I do know.
It's so this is like the template for like ouran
contra all kinds of ship that I do know about
the I'm like, oh, this is the first time people
were like, let's do this particular kind of It's a
template for Iran, it's a template for all these ideas.
(37:07):
It's a template for colonialism, and thus all these colonial
wars have their start here. This is a big part
of the origin of our problems with race in the
United States, because these corporations really jump start the slave
trade because they're depopulating these islands of the natives, and
then they need to move slaves in to work the
spice plantations. It seems like it's almost and it's inevitable
(37:29):
because you're reaching this technological threshold where we now we
have compasses and sextant so we can get further away.
It's just like in any community, there's going to be
some bastards. You have job security for sure, and this
is the first time that you're like, oh, the bastards
operate on a global level now, because it's the first
time this clive motherfucker can go all the way over
(37:50):
there and funck everything up and come all the way back.
It's remarkable. It's the birth of something horrible, some Cathulu
type monster. Yeah, that is destined to destroy us all
I firmly believe, and this is the to get and
I think the tiniest bit to political just to explain
somet of my own beliefs, because I've received some negative
feedback from people over a few episodes for anti capitalist
(38:14):
rants and stuff. Ill on what the internet? That's not
the Internet. I know I'm not anti capitalist. I'm enjoying
a delightful bag of Darrino's right now. I understand that,
God damn it is good. I think they'd have to
eventually pay you for it to be considered capitalism though, Yeah,
that's fair. But me buying the products, me enjoying a good, clean,
(38:34):
fancy new phone is capitalism. It's not that I'm saying, Oh,
this system all needs to be torn down tomorrow and
I have a solution. It's that I'm saying when we
start talking about how like all the deaths from communism
and stuff like you hear on the right people be
like communisms killed ninety million People's man, there's a lot
tens and millions of people have died under communist governments.
I will never argue that with you, But if you
(38:54):
think capitalism's death toll isn't as higher for much even
much higher, because it's been going on for four hundred years.
You are not paying attention to the actual facts, in
the actual history. Everything we do that we elevate to
an ideology kills buckets of people. That's what people do.
So don't get on your high horse. If you like capitalism.
(39:15):
I'm not going to argue with you about the right
way to run the world because I don't know what
it is. But don't get on your high horse because
whatever you believe, there's blood on your hands, or there's
blood on the hands of the thing that you believe in.
You don't like this show, now, I couldn't agree more
as Jack Johnson saying about so long he's a wise man,
(39:36):
my friend, we've all got the blood on our hands. Yeah,
I think this is I was really happy to be
on this episode because it ectoes something I do. Definitely believe.
There's no bigger bastard than the abstract system that develops
its own momentum. Yeah, because Robert Clive, if you told
him when he came to India, your actions will kill
tens of millions of people. I think the guy might
(39:58):
have killed himself. And like we don't think of him
as hitler, Yeah, because he never never exactly. So it's
just there's nothing. Nothing will funk you up, like a
group of self interested people who none of them think
of themselves as guiding the thing. The thing just it's
too late now, the things rolling. Yeah, And they don't
think about the larger system. They're just like, how can
(40:20):
we get money out of this place? They don't think
about what allows a region this large and densely populated
to not get wiped out by famine constantly? Is it
maybe that they've built systems over the course of millennia
that you should pay attention. It's now your job to
think that you're in sub Block C six of s
District nine and you're supposed to make this number number
increased tax revenues by four and that's all you're supposed
(40:44):
and you kind of trust that someone well, if there
was going to be a famine that would kill everyone,
someone up the chain exactly. Damn dude. Yeah, anyway, anytally
you want to plug your stuff, No, I'm want to
be associated with UM. You can buy all our wonderful
(41:07):
products on now. We are opening a merging store soon.
But you can find the content that might inspire. What
island is your merch store up? The only island with
the right cotton for us are Yeah, our baseball caps
are currently being freightered over from the Cayman Islands. Already
sketchy money wise, but over at small Beans. Small Beans
(41:29):
is the name of my outfit and you can find
all of our content there. We do podcasts, sketches, occasional songs,
all kinds of stuff. And I am personally on Twitter
at Swain Underscore Corp. You can find me on Twitter
at I right, okay. I have a book on Amazon
call a Brief History Advice. Uh. And you can find
this website on the internet at Behind the Bastards dot com.
(41:52):
And you can also find us on Twitter at at
Bastard's Pod. You can find us on Instagram same way. Uh.
And that's that's the episode. So check back in UM
next Tuesday and there will be another episode and probably
something just as depressing and frightening. That's my goal. I
hope it is. I hope it really is. UM. So
(42:14):
have a good week and I love you about h
Mmm, hello friends, I'm Robert Evans, and this is once
again Behind the Bastards, the show we tell you everything
you don't know about the very worst people in all
of history. Now, this is part two of our episode
on the age of Heroic Commerce. Uh and my my
(00:20):
guest with me, as with the last episode, is the imminent,
the tenerant, the excellent Michael Swain. Thank you, the auspicious
Robert Evans for having me. Yeah, you know what's fun good?
Poor tense, abound adjective. Yeah, I love them. That little
blue triangle and adverbs, little orange circle. I think did
(00:44):
you do that what we're talking about? I learned with
the system where you put symbols for every part of
speech that sounds exhaust So to me, a conjunction will
always be a little pink rainbow. Oh okay, that's good
to know. Actually, I think that's preposition. Let's talk about
some speaking of prepositions. I'm gonna make a preposition. I
don't think you are. I think prosition that one. That
(01:06):
one didn't come out. I was going to try to
tie that in more smoothly, but then you caught me
scripted apart. So where we are in the story. We
got we got this guy, Robert Clive, and Robert Clive
has conquered Bengal like a big chunk of India and
he's rich as ship. And the East India Company has
got like tens of millions of people that they don't
really have to take care of, but they kind of control.
(01:29):
And it's getting weird. And everybody back in England is like,
this is getting weird. And also corporations are spreading throughout
the world and starting colonies all over the place and
extending European domination and center the globe. They're collecting rents,
they are starting to do that, and yeah, they are
starting to to carry out taxes and stuff that that
that is beginning in this period of time. But mostly
what's happening, mostly the thing that the company is doing
(01:51):
in this big area they now control is being corrupt
as ship. Corruption had always been indemic among the East
India Company's foreign officers. That's why you did it, is
so that you could take a bunch of stuff and
come back home and be rich if you survived the
tropical diseases. So everybody skimmed a little bit off the
top that was kind of built into the system. Clive
had just done what everybody else had been doing when
(02:12):
he took the three thousand pounds of gold and jewels
and stuff. But the cup that he'd been skimming from
was the biggest cup anyone had ever stumbled across. Right, Yeah,
so that's that's the situation. And it was unprecedented, and
people started to ask the question do we want it
to be okay for our corporate officers in foreign countries
to be this corrupt? And that's something we as British
(02:34):
people are fine with. It's not like he's a brilliant innovator,
it's just the most Yeah, he's Yeah, no one has
ever had that. This seems like it could go bad places.
And some of that is people who like have a
human sense of like it's wrong, we're plundering the world.
A lot of it is other rich guys who are
old money and are just don't like just like this
(02:54):
is a threat to our fortresses of the money that
we have built in our places. Exactly. Now this gross
guy is rich and yeah, this uncouth guy who joined
because he likes beating people up, Yeah, it's too wealthy. Exactly.
So Clive leaves India after conquering and Bengal and governing
it for a while, and he goes back to England,
and to give you an idea of how modern this
(03:15):
period is, he takes all this lute that he earned
from conquering Bengal and he deposits it with the Dutch
East India Company and then when he gets back to London,
he withdraws it from them as cash or as cash okay,
So they didn't like transport his jewels and because he
he was like, there's no way, this is way too
much ship to syd I'll give it to them, They'll
give me the cash value and I'll take it out
(03:37):
in London. Boom, it was done. Just upload it to
the cloud. You're good to go. Yeah. This is like
the first time people were figuring out how to do
that sort of ship. So yeah, again this is becoming
a very modern time period. Uh So Cloud gets back
to England and he's rich and he's popular for a while.
He buys his shipload of mansions, but all is not
well because his boss, Laurence Sullivan does not like him. Now,
Laurence Sullivan is the chairman of the company, so Clive
(03:59):
in addition to all of them, and he had gotten
was guaranteed a giant yearly payment from all of ben Goal.
So basically the prints that he put in power was like,
we'll give you a huge a fortune every single year.
Because you put me in power, He's just free to
write up that contract. And that's why the company challenges
it because I just don't understand how people take pure
(04:21):
will yeah and make it reality because people to go along,
they're not they don't want to. His own company takes
him to court the like, you're not allowed to make
that deal. Yeah, they you're not allowed to make that deal.
We never voted to confirm this giant annual payment for you.
You know, you worked it out directly with the prince,
but you were working with the company at the time
and this is our area. So and they're not saying
this money should go back to the Indian people. They're
(04:42):
saying that we should this should get us, not you. Um.
So they go to quarter over and they fight in
court for a while. So they're battling in court while
things in India are kind of starting to go sour
for the company. They're making a lot of money because
they found a bunch of different ways to tax and
sell and suck being gold Eye, but they start being
rebellions as a result of this, So now the company
(05:03):
is spending more and more money putting down rebellions, and
eventually they agree to confirm Clive's big annual payment in
exchange for him going back to India and fixing the
ship that's gone wrong since he left the last time.
But that makes it sound like it's arm again, like
he's the only man in the world who can do this,
don't they have other trustworthy mercenaries they do. They think
he's special, but as he's traveling back to India, they
(05:25):
learned that he's really not because some other guy puts
the rebellion down. First. Yeah, first, British guns are just
so much better than everything they face. So they agree
to give him his money and he leaves over there
because they're worried they're going to lose control of the
region because of these rebellions. And then when he's in transit,
some other guy beats. You can tell like, you don't
need this guy. Yeah, you don't need any guy. You've
got canav guns. It's the guns that you need. And
(05:47):
in fact, actually Clive's big contribution winds up being that
when he gets there, things are going so well that
the company has almost invaded Delhi, the capital of India,
and conquered the whole Mughal Empire, and he stops them.
Like Robert Clive is like, this is this has gone unessential. Also,
it seems like he may have just actually gotten scared
(06:08):
at how much thinks have escalated. This is this could
be bad. Yeah, yeah, you launch a new Starbucks franchise
and somehow you accidentally now took over city hall. Yeah.
So he writes a letter when he's justifying his corporate
bosses why he stopped the army, he writes a letter
that says, quote to go further, it is, in my opinion,
a scheme so extravagantly ambitious and absurd that no governor
(06:31):
and counsel in their senses can adopt it unless the
whole system of the company's interests be first entirely new modeled.
Said the guy who's like, but acquiring three hundred thousand
pounds of gold, that is not overly ambsual. I think
he would say that was never his goal. He found
himself in a war and he won, and then they
handed him all this stuff. What am I gonna do
say no, that is yeah, yeah, but he didn't, and
(06:56):
I don't think most people would to be fair, I
think most people who are the kind of people who
could be in Clive's position, I was gonna say most
people would never get in that position. There's no way
to get to there. But anyone who's capable of being
in that position is probably gonna be like, yeah, hit
me the uh so. Clive basically thought that the company
already had a sweet deal. They weren't officially in charge
(07:18):
of anything. They were in control because guns, but they
didn't have to do anything aside from occasionally fighting cash checks.
The Indians were still nominally at least leaders of their
own land, and they were outside of Bengal. They were
still in control, so the East Indian Company didn't have
to worry about this giant subcontinent that they had no
business interests in. Most of this changed on August twelfth,
(07:40):
seventeen sixty five, when Robert Clive, with worry and his gut,
signed a deal on behalf of the East India Trading
Company with the Mughal Emperor that guaranteed the British East
India Company formal control over three big chunks of India
and the lives of almost thirty million people. So we'll
have the graphic up on the site, but you can
see outline there this is what the East India Company
after this agreement now controls. That's land they own and govern.
(08:04):
So now, okay, it's about a fifth about a fifth
of India, the largest country in existence, I believe, one
of them and Russia. Yeah wow. So but what I
don't understand is to what level did they control people's
lives because I assume they have no interest in going
in and being like we're going to make laws and
moral codes. They just want to loot the place. That
(08:24):
is the point of today's episode. But now they are
in charge of it. So they are now the government
in a big chunk of India. Right, So that's the
situation after this. It's weird that they'd even want to
be what's the prophet Clive did not want to be,
but I think they got greedy and so well Clive
is in charge, he tries to cut back on the
shocking amount of corruption and graph that he sees amongst
the company officers. He banns his officers from taking gifts
(08:47):
or bribes, although he doesn't give up his own bribes
so people don't take it super seriously. He increases salaries
to try to make people want to steal less. Uh.
And he restricts the company's monopoly so that some sort
of local economy can exists, so that the East India
Company is not the only people who are allowed to
sell products to Indians, so that they can have a
functioning society. So he tries to pump the brakes, just
(09:11):
let them do what they do. Um. He also does
nice stuff, like he gives a shipload of money to
the pension fund for the company army. Again, he's one
of these people. He starts this road, but he does
not seem to be running unchecked in that direction. It's
not like jan Coon or new money is evolving into
old money like you talked about on the Brothers episode
where it's time to get philanthropic now and resuscitate my image,
(09:34):
gloss over all that ship. It's possible. I don't know
the man, but eventually he like his health isn't great.
At this point, he winds up heading back to England
and other people take over for for India, and he
winds up in court again fighting a company for access
to his yearly bribe basically because they can't get him hired.
Can't they fire him? Well, he when he leaves every time,
he stops working for them, essentially, and so then there's
(09:57):
like big legal fights in the court because they don't
want him to just forever get a fortune every year.
They want that fortunate. But it seems like they keep
coming back and being like, Okay, we'll give you your
old job back, sign this deal. Well, they thought they
needed him, and now they know they really don't um
and he's starting to try to we should steal slightly less. Yeah,
(10:18):
this guy's served his purpose getting out here. So the
East India Company now after Clive leaves, is essentially, yeah,
the government of a big chunk of India. And if
you're a government, need to provide things for people, right
and then just take tax money like you take tax money,
but you provide roads and libraries and e m t
s and firefighters and the FDA and ship. The company
(10:39):
doesn't provide anything. They just take pretty much. And so
that's the situation in seventeen seventy when a famine hits
and it's a bad one, and we will get into
the famine in a little bit. Right now, we're talking
about Clive because this famine is a disaster for his image.
He's not in charge when it happens, but it goes
big in the press and it looks bad for him,
and he's basically portrayed aid by a lot of the
(11:00):
media as a greedy idiot who had ruined India, even
though a lot of other people had ruined India as
well as Robert Clive. And here you are throwing him
under the bus. A full two hundred years later, we
leave Clive alone. I mean, he had tried to clamp
down on the shameless left. He did see the problem. Um.
So he winds up in court and you know, has
a big legal case where he tries to essentially defend
(11:22):
his legacy. And during the court proceedings he delivers a
famous speech. So it's it's like one of those really
like movie ready moments from history. So he's being cross
examined about robbing Bengal blind and accused of plundering India,
and he says, quote, consider the situation in which the
victory of Plassy placed me a great prince was dependent
on my pleasure. An opulent city lay at my mercy.
(11:45):
It's richest bankers bid against each other for my smiles.
I walked through vaults which were thrown open to me alone,
piled on either hand with gold and jewels. Mr Chairman.
At this moment, I stand astonished at my own moderation.
I mean, that's literally just the same as you want
the truth, you can't handle the truth when you're out there.
(12:06):
Can you think I stole a lot? I could have
stolen a lot more? Mother? Why does the loophole exist
if I'm not supposed to exploit it? That classic justification
we hear all the time to this day. So he
was acquitted, Uh, yeah, but he didn't last that much longer.
He was very sick from all of the tropical diseases
he'd picked up overseas, and he also might have been
(12:26):
suffering terrible regret for his actions and the famine. He
has described as having had a nervous disorder. It's also
possibly he had severe PTSD. There are numerous times where
people exploded next to him, Like would be shot by
cannons and just the guy next to him would burst.
Like So if you don't mean got mad at him,
you mean physically exploded? Yeah, yeah, Like was burst by
a cannon, so he lived through horrible commas, so it's
(12:48):
possible he was just a broken mentally at this point.
Then he drowned on gold. No. In seventeen seventy four,
he stabbed himself to death in the throat with a
pocket knife. Yeah, at home alone, a suicide with no explanation.
That's a crazy math. People knew he was depressed, it
has always been depressed. But he cut his own throat
with a tiny knife, so he was gone. This is
(13:09):
the end of Robert Clive. But the British were still
in India, and they would stay there from nearly two
centuries now. Merchant Kings mentioned the famine in passing but
didn't get into much detail on the matter. It was
a famine, it was very, very bad. So I decided
to do a little bit of extra digging and I
ran into a college textbook called The East India Company
and the Natural World. It had a whole chapter on
the famine, and thanks to the bountiful Goddess of Capitalism,
(13:32):
Springer allowed me to buy just that chapter for thirty dollars.
What a deal, right, for a single single chapter exercised
from the book Capitalism it's different from the stuff we're
talking about today because reasons. Anyway, I read the chapter
and it's really good. I'm gonna I'm gonna quote from
it now. According to the report from the Famine Commission,
in a period of ninety years from seventeen sixty five
(13:54):
when the British East India Company took over the Dwani
of Bengal to eighteen fifty eight Bengal experience, it's twelve
famines and four severe scarcities. Now, some of those famines
would have occurred with or without the British East India Company,
because famines are a thing. They've always been a thing, right,
But once you delve into it, their whole period of
rule is basically a master class and had a funk
over an entire subcontinent. In essence, in order to compensate
(14:18):
for the minimal amount of actual government work the company
needed to do in order to turn a profit, they
just started jacking up taxes on rural workers and on farmers,
and usually these taxes were in kind, so you'd pay
with whatever it is you were growing at the time.
So the company commercialized agriculture in India and tried to
turn it into an almost industrial operation to maximize output.
So there's been a bunch of small independent farms and
(14:40):
villages and whatnot, And now the whole countryside was basically
one giant, big food production plan and made a lot
of money. But it also made it impossible for the
farmers themselves to handle bad years. Everything was sold every year,
nothing was set aside for the bad times. There wasn't
enough left over after the taxes for the individual farmers. Anyway,
the dis East India Company had disrupted the intricate cultural
(15:02):
systems that had formed during and before the Mughal Empire.
In the past, when there was a bad year and
the rains didn't come, villages had standing arrangements with other
villages to help each other out with food. These were
local insurance plans that were present all across India and
particularly in the farming regions have been gal was very
common way to stop people from dying horribly when a famine.
Presumably have been working for a thousand years exactly. Now, No,
(15:27):
now you all work one giant farm together. Yeah, this
will be better for us. So now when famine hit,
everybody worked for the company. Nobody had anything extra. There
were no more insurance policies. They'd all been taken in
taxes and sold. Quote from that same chapter. Bengali society
was divided between the Zamindars, the hereditary revenue collectors of
(15:47):
the Mughal Empire, and a broad base consisting of some
landless laborers and a large number of poor cultivators. Most
of them were sharecroppers, so taxes started to ratch it
up on these people in the late seventeen hundreds. The
company started jacking up to acts is really hard in
the seventeen fifties, and by the mid seventeen sixties they
were like doubling every couple of years. The agricultural reforms
the Corporation put in place didn't really work out. Yields
(16:09):
started to fall, so they're actually growing feware crops because
it turns out a bunch of British guys ideas on
how to farm Indian land did not work as well
as what the Indians that are going to a totally
different culture with different land and just telling them do this,
I think this would work for you for farming. You
have to do it or will shoot you try it out? Yeah,
(16:31):
give it a shot, let us know it works, but
don't tell us if it doesn't, we're not really interested
in that. So would they ration food back because it
is in their interests to keep people alive? And that
right now, you would think that, right, you think it's
it's in your interest that, yeah, you you would think
that other people did not. So the price of grains
(16:54):
started to rise right as the company takes over UM.
And the company has no less in interest in selling
cheap grain to the people growing grain to pay them
grain taxes. So when the famine hit, the company just
reacted with a kind of sociopathy. I think we're coming
to expect from the British East India Company. Oh, because
they're not even paying a portion of their income they
pay in grain anyway. Yeah, exactly. So they're like, well,
(17:15):
you're going to give us all your grain anyway, why
should we even give you some back when we just
get it all anywhere. We're just going to get it
all like um, so that I continue living and they're
already gone, they're already walking off with the grain. Yea.
So here's another quote from that chapter. The effect of
the famine was to enshrine free market economics as part
(17:37):
of the colonial policy all over the Empire, periodic famines
were seen as a check to population growth. As Mike
Davis notes, by the nineteenth century, these Malthusian ideas, which
were voiced all throughout the colonial period, resulted in the
pursuit of free market economics and quote, India, like Ireland,
became a utilitarian laboratory where millions of lives were wagered
against a dogmatic faith in omnipotent markets, overcoming the convenience
(18:00):
of dearth. This was a policy that was to become
quote a mask for colonial genocide. So you want to
talk about colonial genocide, first, let's talk about some ads,
because it is time. I need something the gird myself.
I need some time heared yourself with these products and
or services that support the shades, and we're back. Fabulous ads.
(18:29):
They like wrapped me in such a cozy feeling that
I feel like I have the buffer I need for
what's gonna come now. But what's gonna come now is
we're gonna talk about how free market economics became a
mask for colonial genocide. We're getting to the genocide part
of that. Again, to Charles Cooke Bonner, he would have
loved this period. Just a pig in plot, just stealing money,
(18:52):
watch selling people into slips, defying it with bizarre, nonsensical statements.
It would have been great. He would have been super
good at this. Really was born in the wrong time,
although making this time, that time, doing his best. It's
just business. This is like the beginning of that ethos.
It's just business, just business. So it's worth getting into
exactly how different the famines caused by the East India
(19:15):
Company's management were from the famines that had come before
in India and in every society in human history. There
had been famines in India shortly before the company's period
of dominance, including one that lasted from sixteen seventy to
sixteen seventy one. Thousands of people had died one to
three hundred every day during the months that the famine
was active. It was a terrible time, but the Mughal government,
shitty as it was by that point, had taken action
(19:36):
to mitigate it. The government had repaired and built new
irrigation works. They'd created reservoirs to make sure they'd be
able to grow crops during the next dry season. They
cut taxes so farmers would be able to keep more
of the food they'd grown, they'd set up free kitchens
and given out grain to try and reduce the number
of people who start to death. In other words, they
were a fucking government. The East India Company was not so.
(20:00):
Starting in the seventeen seventies, all of India started to
learn the difference between the two. The Great Bengal Famine
of seventeen seventy lasted from seventeen sixty nine to seventeen
seventy three. See a media I'm like, a famine supposed
to last a season, Yeah right, that four years? Supposed
for four years? Yeah. So the last famine had lasted
less than a year and killed thousands. This famine lasted
(20:21):
four years, it would kill millions. The Great Bengal Famine
was made a lot worse by the fact that in
the years leading up to it, the company had kind
of sort of gutt of the local economy and shipped
all of their silver away to marry Old England or
rather China. Uh see economics isn't my strong suit. But
I did manage to find a very detailed article on
the Wire, an independent journalism website that publishes in Hindi
(20:41):
and Urdu, and it focuses a lot on historical economic
stuff in that region of the world. The article is
called the role that currency played in the Great Bengal
Famine of seventeen seventy. It breaks down how the company
spent its tax revenue. This is talking about one district
in berb Home District. Out of ninety thousand pounds connected
through taxs and duties and net surplus of some sixty
(21:02):
pounds was employed for the purchase of silks, Muslims, cotton
cloths and other articles to be sold in Leadenhall Street,
the headquarters of the company. In short, the revenues have
been goal supplied the means of providing the expenditure for
purchases in Bengal, reducing the net annual influx of specie,
which is hard currency, to a pittance. So the company
was taking taxes, making a shipload of money, using it
(21:23):
to buy products Indian people needed, and then it would
sell those products back to them for a profit and
ship the hard currency the silver and gold back to
England and out of India. The two primary impacts of
this on England were Number one, A few people got
very very very very very rich, and it's always a
few people. What's crazy to me is countries will swallow
(21:44):
up and destroy whole other countries and only eighteen people
were involved. It's like the country that crushed the other
country doesn't even benefit from us. Well, England does in
one way. This is how the tax. But know this
is how gets ta okay this, yeah, I've heard this.
So the Chinese were the only place to get tea,
(22:04):
you know, China was the only place where it grew
at this point, not anymore. And China only wanted silver.
They wanted the specie, the hard currency. Now sounding like
a Sidmyer civilization, Yeah, that's exactly what's happening. Here's another quote.
The relatively undervalued silver and Bengal proved a profitable source
to finance the growing tea trade with China. Within a
span of just three years, some seven d and twenty
(22:26):
thousand pounds of specie was sent out of Bengal to China.
The widespread corruption and plunder by the servants of the
company not only transferred the wealth of the country to
these individuals, but was also sent out of the country
through ingenious means. Now this meant that very quickly, being
Golf's hard currency, ran out the parts of India the
company owned only had so much silver and gold and whatever.
The sheer lack of currency meant that Indians could no
(22:49):
longer buy and sell things. The local economy collapsed, and
this also meant that suddenly the company had no money
since they weren't willing to send silver over from India
so they could just buy things. The company sort of
twiddle it's them and failed to import grain from outside
to avert the millions of deaths. In fact, they banned
the importation of grain between different regions of India and
seized boats to prevent it. Jesus, here's what one comes
(23:13):
them products down at the company's store. Well, they're not
buying those anymore because the company doesn't have the money
to stop the famine. Vicious circle. No one's at fault, right,
How could it possibly ever have been prevented? This is
just what had to happen. No one could have foreseen.
This is the Irish potato famines. Sorry, like quiz you
on stuff even research? But was that also corporate ization?
(23:36):
That not in the same way, but it involved a
lot of very rich landown story. Yeah, that's it. We
will be talking about that. I'm talking about Victoria at
some point. Yeah, here is a quote from a company
worker at the time about what Bingal was like during
this famine. This is a guy who who's watching it
as a white dude who has enough food. Quote. All
through the stifling summer of seventeen seventy, the people went
(23:59):
on dying. The husbandmen sold their cattle, they sold their
implements of agriculture. They devoured their seed grain. They sold
their sons and daughters, till at length no buyer of
children could be found. They ate the leaves of trees
and the grass on the field. And in June seventeen seventy,
the resident at the Durbar affirmed that the living were
feeding on the dead day and night. A torrent of
famished and disease stricken wretches poured into the great cities.
(24:22):
At an early period of the year. Pestilence had broken out.
In March, we find smallpox at the Morschetta Bad. The
streets were blocked up with promiscuous heaps of the dying
and dead. In Terment cannot do its work quick enough.
Even the dogs and jackals, the public scavengers of the East,
became unable to accomplish their revolting work, and the multitude
of mangled in festering corpses at length threatened the existence
(24:43):
of the citizens. And even through all this, the East
India Company keeps increasing taxes on the farmers, which must
not even mean anything anymore, Like fine, no, they're still
growing food, it's just being taken from them while they're starving.
So why don't they just eat the food that they're harvesting?
Right then there's guys with guns there, but yeah, and
(25:05):
they've got to like, bad things will happen if you
don't pay your time. What's crazy is they treat it
like it's business, like they have some god given right
to do this because they created this abstract thing we
call like a business plan structure. But really it boils
down to robbery because at the end of the day,
it's always just like, well, why couldn't China come trade
directly for silver with India? Well, because we'd kill them
(25:26):
all and we'd shoot it. You, that's what it comes
down to, you the guns. Yeah, yeah, yeah, So the
taxes on the Bengalese people are higher in seventeen seventy
and seventy one, the year the famine starts. Then in
seventeen sixty nine to seventy, the year that preceded the famine.
I mean, you work on a grain farm and you
go home and eat your dead sibling, your children you
(25:49):
sold a long time ago. Yeah, So in April of
seventeen seventy quote astoundingly, the Council, acting on the advice
of the Muslim Minister of Finance Mohammed Rezakan, added ten
percent to the land acts of the ensuing year, but
the distress continued to increase at a rate that baffled
official calculation. In the second week of May, the central
government awoke to find itself in the midst of universal
(26:09):
and irredeemable starvation. So some company officers advised basically cutting
taxes and giving back some of what they'd taken so
the people wouldn't starve to death. But that just didn't happen.
I can't because they want some were living people to
work the field. I really thought their response would be
give them all a pittance of food. They're even like,
(26:31):
I don't know if we shouldn't even give them that.
It's not the company is a big force. Make like,
the company is a big force of making some of
these calls. But a lot of it's just individuals being like, Yeah,
but if we give some of it back, then I'll
be able to steal less. And I want to be
home in a year with a pile of money, so
I'll just keep stealing for another year. Still totally reliance
on most of the people being like and that's worth
watching everyone starved to death around me while I'm here.
(26:54):
If we've learned one thing about corporations from the last
four hundred years, it's that they have a great deal
of foresight. Yeah, and never murder in poison themselves out
of like sci fi movies where there's a desert planet,
but so but the evil corporate lady lives in like
a glass pyramid filled with water. Always seems so over
the top, but it's real. It's reality. Boy, howdy has
(27:17):
it happened? So yeah. By May seventeen, seventy one third
of the Bengalese population six out of every seventeen people
was dead. Company officials estimated one half of the cultivators
and pairs of revenue will perish with hunger. The sheer
scale of the devastation was terrible for the company's bank statement.
(27:38):
By October, the company started to notice that an awful
lot of the workers they relied on had been quote
destroyed by the famine. Oh so we're already using business
devil speak. They're already euphemizing it. Um, some of our
bipedal product was destroyed a transaction. Yeah. Quote the failure
(27:59):
of a single up following a year of scarcity had
wiped out an estimated ten million human beings. God, so
that's the death toll of this first famine, ten million.
The famines continued though, off and on through the seventeen seventies.
In seventeen eighty, another big famine hit and again one
third of Bengal just died. Revenue plummeted. The British government
(28:20):
started to get involved. Even to people at the time,
what was happening was seen as horrific, and the press
attack the East India Company. By seventeen eighty four, the
British government started to pass the first regulations limiting the
company's powers, really limiting any company's powers. This is the
birth of regulation and corporations. It's because the corporation killed
ten million people, probably more like twelve to fifteen at
(28:40):
that point. It's roughly a holocaust to a holocaust and
a half worth of human beings. You hear me slowing
down because my brains just grappling with actually trying to
absorb in. Oh, and there's another that's real that we
were like, this way of organizing humans seems to be
making money. Oh, it also kills people. Well, that's fine,
unless goes too far. When did it go too far?
(29:02):
When did we go like, maybe it has gone too far?
When ten million people were dead, Well, ten million people died,
and then ten years later, maybe we should do another
probably five or six million people died. And then in
eighteen hundred ten percent of all of India died. There's
not even a death count for that. It's just roughly
one billion people in India today. But probably if we're
(29:24):
trying to take the whole East India Company's death toll
from famine, it wouldn't be outrageous to assume somewhere in
the million deaths by this whole over the whole course
of this whole period. So it's good to know that
humanity does have a point where you're like, is this
too many people that you can for me to have
slightly bigger houses? Yeah? Uh so, Yeah. In seventeen eighty four,
(29:48):
they start regulating the Company. In seventeen eighty eight, Edmund
or someone Burke, I forget which Burke gives a speech
at the impeachment trial of India's Governor General. Because they're like,
you've killed like twenty million people, you should probably not
have this job. So Burke called the company quote a
rogue state, waging war, administering justice, minting coin and collecting
(30:08):
revenue over Indian territory. He didn't exaggerate. Horace Walpole, a
Whig member of Parliament, said at the time that quote,
the oppressions of India, and even of the English settled
there under the rape and cruelties of the servants of
the company have now reached England and created a general
clamor here to such monopolies were imputed the late famine
(30:29):
of Bengal and the loss of three million they didn't
know the whole total of its inhabitants. A tithe of
these crimes was sufficient to inspire horror. So the famine
of seventeen seventy, seventeen eighty and seventeen ninety nine. It
is likely, and these are other historians to me saying this,
that the famines the East India Company brought onto India
where the single greatest atrocity, the single worst disaster of
(30:51):
the entire seventeen hundreds of that whole century. It was
the beginning of the end for the East India Company too,
although businessmen would continue to trade and profit off of
her for nearly a tree. India continued to suffer famines,
which led to unrest in war, which led to uprisings
and crackdowns. This led the East India Company's army to expand,
which led them to take over more and more of India,
until pretty soon they controlled basically all of India and
(31:13):
had an army of two hundred thousand soldiers. A guy
named Lord Wellesley eventually wound up in charge, and he
became the company's most successful general. He's the guy who
expanded them from sort of the eastern coast of India
all the way into what's now Pakistan and eventually Afghanistan.
According to the wonderful book Return of a King. By
seventeen ninety six, quote the company was expanding rapidly out
(31:34):
from its coastal factories to conquer much of the interior.
Wellesley's Indian campaigns would ultimately annex more territory than all
of Napoleon's conquests in Europe. Yeah. This eventually brought the
East India Company to the doorstep of Afghanistan. In eighteen sixteen,
the British East India Company extended an offer of asylum
to Shah Shuja, the exiled king of Afghanistan. In eighteen
(31:56):
thirty nine, due to a basically minor dispute with the
Afghan from it, the East India Company invaded Afghanistan, conquered
the country and placed Shah Shuja on a throne as
a puppet Lord Auckland, who was the guy who had
ordered the invasion, and the company quickly lost interest in
their conquest of Afghanistan and immediately invaded China next because
it feels it seems like they feel that, well, you
(32:18):
got to invade something that's not mandatory, you're allowed to stop.
Let me explain it to you, Michael. They've been selling
opium to China and it had created a horrific endemic
drug problem that was crippling the local economy and killing
people in huge So the Chinese government band opium sales,
and so they had to invade China to keep selling
them deadly just like it's like, yeah, we funked up
(32:40):
India until it's stopped bleeding money, so we have to
move on to a new place and funk that place up,
So let's stop the bleeding. I'm of the opinion that
this is all fine. Well know that the great heroes
in history are probably the afghan people, because the East
India Company is on a tear killing people by the millions,
(33:01):
conquering land, and then they take over Afghanistan and they
find themselves the rulers of Afghanistan, a country that has
nothing of value for the East India Company. It's not profitable.
So they have this huge army in Afghanistan that they
start needing to cut back on. And they can't cut
back on the army because Afghanistan is big and hard
(33:22):
to control, so they stopped paying bribes to all of
these local war lords, which means the local warlords start
attacking the army, which means there's eventually a gigantic revolution
in Afghanistan that ousts the garrison, the Company's giant army
in Kabul and wipes it out in the mountain passes
of Afghanistan. And there, you know, these are British soldiers
with muskets, unrifled guns that aren't good at very long range.
(33:45):
The Afghans have these weapons called Jezail Cheese, which are
basically sniper rifles. So they're hiding in the mountains murdering
huge numbers of British soldiers and their Indian sepoys, and
they just massacre this entire British army. It's a huge,
huge disaster. Uh. And this disaster comes after years of
declining revenues for the East India Company and ballooning expenses. Finally,
(34:07):
all of this helps kill the East India Company as
a global power. In eighteen fifty eight, the British government
finally decided that letting a for profit enterprise governed the
lives of tens of millions of people and like a
fifth of the world was a really bad idea. Instead
they give it to a queen. Yeah, there's there's if.
I feel like the Afghan uprising just delayed what we're
(34:32):
already So it was it was like there was this
weird chance at the very beginning of corporate history that
corporations and governments could have merged then become one and
the same. In the East India Company could have been
like literally the empire and just own the world, and
they stop that from happening for five years. It's still
gonna happen, but it could have happened really fast. There's
(34:54):
news today that President Donald Trump is considering a plan
by Eric Prince, the founder of Blackwater, to basically put
private mercenaries in charge of the war of An Afghanistan
and have a guy who Erik Prince is described as
a viceroy run Afghanistan for the Western Powers. So there's
a chance the Afghans might get to stop the next
stage ship. Of course, Trump has named six to the
(35:18):
Council of Operance. Yeah, like everything's becoming So I will
tell you one thing about Afghanistan. Nobody wins when they
fight there, other than not even after the Afghan people
don't even win. Everybody loses, but you don't win. And
usually when you quote unquote win or are are holding
it for a while, you're just they're being hot standing
(35:39):
around and it It's worth noting that when we invaded Afghanistan,
the guy we put in charge of the country was
a dude named Hamid Karzai who was an ascendant of
Shah Shuja. The people the East India company put in
charge of Afghanistan, who was then massacred after the revolution.
It's a small, small, awful world, dumb, dumb world. So yeah.
(36:00):
In eighteen fifty eight, India becomes the property of Queen Victoria,
who we will almost certainly discuss in a subsequent episode.
The East India Company survives for another few years, but
it is dissolved for good in eighteen seventy four by
the East India Stock Redemption Act. This ever, shall we
get our tea? Who's to say at this point, I'm
sure there's competitors. So that's that's the era of heroic
(36:24):
commerce slog. What does that have to do with the
Boston Tea party? They just brought the tea that yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's really just like the militarization aspect, and that's crazy
that we're going down that road again. And I left
out there's so because we didn't really talk about North America.
(36:46):
There's a lot of the story of these companies, and
we didn't even because there's just so much totally because
I don't know about that, but the things I do know.
It's so this is like the template for like ouran
contra all kinds of ship that I do know about
the I'm like, oh, this is the first time people
were like, let's do this particular kind of It's a
template for Iran, it's a template for all these ideas.
(37:07):
It's a template for colonialism, and thus all these colonial
wars have their start here. This is a big part
of the origin of our problems with race in the
United States, because these corporations really jump start the slave
trade because they're depopulating these islands of the natives, and
then they need to move slaves in to work the
spice plantations. It seems like it's almost and it's inevitable
(37:29):
because you're reaching this technological threshold where we now we
have compasses and sextant so we can get further away.
It's just like in any community, there's going to be
some bastards. You have job security for sure, and this
is the first time that you're like, oh, the bastards
operate on a global level now, because it's the first
time this clive motherfucker can go all the way over
(37:50):
there and funck everything up and come all the way back.
It's remarkable. It's the birth of something horrible, some Cathulu
type monster. Yeah, that is destined to destroy us all
I firmly believe, and this is the to get and
I think the tiniest bit to political just to explain
somet of my own beliefs, because I've received some negative
feedback from people over a few episodes for anti capitalist
(38:14):
rants and stuff. Ill on what the internet? That's not
the Internet. I know I'm not anti capitalist. I'm enjoying
a delightful bag of Darrino's right now. I understand that,
God damn it is good. I think they'd have to
eventually pay you for it to be considered capitalism though, Yeah,
that's fair. But me buying the products, me enjoying a good, clean,
(38:34):
fancy new phone is capitalism. It's not that I'm saying, Oh,
this system all needs to be torn down tomorrow and
I have a solution. It's that I'm saying when we
start talking about how like all the deaths from communism
and stuff like you hear on the right people be
like communisms killed ninety million People's man, there's a lot
tens and millions of people have died under communist governments.
I will never argue that with you, But if you
(38:54):
think capitalism's death toll isn't as higher for much even
much higher, because it's been going on for four hundred years.
You are not paying attention to the actual facts, in
the actual history. Everything we do that we elevate to
an ideology kills buckets of people. That's what people do.
So don't get on your high horse. If you like capitalism.
(39:15):
I'm not going to argue with you about the right
way to run the world because I don't know what
it is. But don't get on your high horse because
whatever you believe, there's blood on your hands, or there's
blood on the hands of the thing that you believe in.
You don't like this show, now, I couldn't agree more
as Jack Johnson saying about so long he's a wise man,
(39:36):
my friend, we've all got the blood on our hands. Yeah,
I think this is I was really happy to be
on this episode because it ectoes something I do. Definitely believe.
There's no bigger bastard than the abstract system that develops
its own momentum. Yeah, because Robert Clive, if you told
him when he came to India, your actions will kill
tens of millions of people. I think the guy might
(39:58):
have killed himself. And like we don't think of him
as hitler, Yeah, because he never never exactly. So it's
just there's nothing. Nothing will funk you up, like a
group of self interested people who none of them think
of themselves as guiding the thing. The thing just it's
too late now, the things rolling. Yeah, And they don't
think about the larger system. They're just like, how can
(40:20):
we get money out of this place? They don't think
about what allows a region this large and densely populated
to not get wiped out by famine constantly? Is it
maybe that they've built systems over the course of millennia
that you should pay attention. It's now your job to
think that you're in sub Block C six of s
District nine and you're supposed to make this number number
increased tax revenues by four and that's all you're supposed
(40:44):
and you kind of trust that someone well, if there
was going to be a famine that would kill everyone,
someone up the chain exactly. Damn dude. Yeah, anyway, anytally
you want to plug your stuff, No, I'm want to
be associated with UM. You can buy all our wonderful
(41:07):
products on now. We are opening a merging store soon.
But you can find the content that might inspire. What
island is your merch store up? The only island with
the right cotton for us are Yeah, our baseball caps
are currently being freightered over from the Cayman Islands. Already
sketchy money wise, but over at small Beans. Small Beans
(41:29):
is the name of my outfit and you can find
all of our content there. We do podcasts, sketches, occasional songs,
all kinds of stuff. And I am personally on Twitter
at Swain Underscore Corp. You can find me on Twitter
at I right, okay. I have a book on Amazon
call a Brief History Advice. Uh. And you can find
this website on the internet at Behind the Bastards dot com.
(41:52):
And you can also find us on Twitter at at
Bastard's Pod. You can find us on Instagram same way. Uh.
And that's that's the episode. So check back in UM
next Tuesday and there will be another episode and probably
something just as depressing and frightening. That's my goal. I
hope it is. I hope it really is. UM. So
(42:14):
have a good week and I love you about h
Behind the Bastards News
Host
Robert Evans
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