Such was the reputation of the East India Company that in the cold winter of 1772-3, a panic spread across the 13 Colonies that the Company would be let loose on America. John Dickinson, the “Penman of the Revolution,” feared that the soldiers of the Company, having plundered India, were now “casting their eyes on America as a new theater whereon to exercise their talents of rapine, oppression and cruelty.”

As a result of this panic, and the slapping of British taxes on tea, some 90,000 pounds of Company tea, worth £9,659 (more than $1.2 million today), was dumped in Boston Harbor. The Revolutionary War broke out soon after.

The Company had become, as one of its directors said, “an empire within an empire,” with the power to make war or peace anywhere in the East. It had also by this stage created a vast and sophisticated administration and Civil Service, built much of London docklands and come close to generating a quarter of Britain’s trade. Its annual spending within Britain alone equaled about a quarter of total British government annual expenditure. Its armies were larger than those of almost all nation- states and its power now encircled the globe.

The Company’s lawyers and lobbyists and some of its shareholders who were members of the British Parliament subtly worked to influence legislation in its favor. Indeed the Company may have invented corporate lobbying. In 1693, less than a century after its foundation, the Company was discovered to be using its own shares for buying parliamentarians. The investigation into this, the world’s first corporate lobbying scandal, resulted in the Company being found guilty of bribery and the imprisonment of the Company’s governor.

Yet, like more recent mega corporations, the Company proved at once hugely powerful and oddly vulnerable to economic uncertainty. The East India bubble burst when famine broke out in Bengal in 1770. Conditions there were worsened by the Company’s pillaging of what had once been the wealthiest province in India, and in turn led to huge shortfalls in expected revenues.

The Company was left with debts of £1.5 million and a bill of £1 million in unpaid tax owed to the Crown. At the news of this, 30 banks collapsed like dominoes across Europe. On July 15, 1772, the directors of the Company applied to the Bank of England for a loan of £400,000. By August, the directors were whispering to the government that they would actually need an unprecedented sum of a further £1 million.

The official report the following year foresaw that the Company’s financial problems could potentially drag the government “down into an unfathomable abyss” and worried that “this cursed Company would, at last, like a viper, be the destruction of the country which fostered it at its bosom.”