Nick Robins. Pluto Press. 218 pages. Paperback. £15.99. www.plutobooks.com
Forget Union Carbide or Enron. When it comes to corporate
irresponsibility, the East India Company is the granddaddy of them all.
Throughout its thoroughly nasty life from 1600 to 1874, the
British-owned trading company looted and murdered its way around the
East, starting wars, smuggling drugs, brutally exploiting workers,
torturing and killing its business rivals, and taking part in
monumental corporate graft – all in the name of its shareholders, whose
interests remained paramount.
In this thoughtful analysis of the company’s moral crimes, author Nick
Robins, better known to most EP readers as head of socially responsible
investment funds at Henderson Global Investors, draws parallels between
the great ogre popularly known as ‘John’s Company’ and today’s
multinationals. While he sensibly refrains from arguing that they are
one and the same, Robins points out areas where it is difficult to find
much difference – equating the £10million ($19m) bonus that Vodafone
boss Chris Gent was paid in 2000, for instance, with the vast sums that
the East India Company’s Robert Clive (‘Clive of India’) awarded
himself. Both payments, he notes, were accompanied by impotent howls of
public disgust.
Robins argues that a lack of legal or regulatory restraint, then as
now, remains the biggest barrier to controlling corporate power. With a
growing number of mergers and acquisitions restricting commerce to ever
fewer and ever larger companies, he worries that we are flirting with a
return to the days when a company could abuse its powers with impunity.
The answer, he says, is more laws to hold companies accountable, better
rules to counter shareholder supremacy, a ‘global competition
authority’ charged with breaking up concentrations of corporate power,
and a halt to deregulation. Without such measures, according to Robins,
we may end up breeding a latter-day version of John’s Company some time
soon.
