The Company's reach stretched until almost all of India south of the Himalayas was effectively ruled from a boardroom in London.
In less than four decades it had trained up a security force of around 200,000 men-twice the size of the British army-and had subdued an entire subcontinent, conquering first Bengal and finally, in 1803, the Mughal capital of Delhi itself. But the creation of this new government marked the moment that the East India Company ceased to be a conventional international trading corporation dealing in silks and spices and became something much more unusual: an aggressive colonial power in the guise of a multinational business. The East India Company's founding charter authorized it to 'wage war' and it had always used violence to gain its ends.
Summary: "In August 1756 the East India Company defeated the young Mughal emperor and forced him to establish in his richest provinces a new administration run by English merchants who collected taxes through means of a ruthless private army-what we would now call an act of involuntary privatization.
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