The Messed Up Truth About The East India Company

The East India Company had innocent beginnings. Sort of. It started out as a small, private collection of merchants who were looking to trade spices in Indonesia, because in those days, British food was super bland, and they really, really needed something to make it taste better (or really, to taste like anything at all). Wait, who are we kidding? Millions of dead people later, British food is still super bland, and that somehow makes the whole history of the East India Company so much worse.

Anyway, according to ThoughtCo., the Company was first chartered by Queen Elizabeth I, and the ships set sail in 1601 for the Spice Islands. When the Company got there, the Dutch and the Portuguese were all, "Nope, we got here first," and so the merchants figured they'd maybe just go to India instead. And India was all, "Crap."

Well, not at first. At first, the merchants set up outposts and started trading English wool and silver for silk, sugar, tea, cotton, and opium, because of course opium. There was some pretty valuable stuff moving in and out of those outposts, so it wasn't long before the merchants realized they needed to hire people to help protect the outposts from thieves and various other forms of angry people. That's how a simple trading operation turned into, well, the thing it turned into.