Date: Monday 31st March 10:30
Location: Salón de Actos, Espai la Senieta, Moraira (next to the large free car park)
Subject: The British East India Trading Company
Lecturer: Larry Sherrington
Monday 31st March 2014
From piracy to privateering. by stealing from Spain, beating the French, and joining with Portugal and Holland, the Company translated a British trading and Diplomatic presence into the Government of India. For better or worse, fair or foul, the world we know today is, in large measure, the product of Britain’s ‘Age of Empire’.
Winston Churchill said: ‘What enterprise that an enlightened community may attempt is more noble and more profitable than the reclamation from barbarism of fertile regions and large populations. But, the inevitable gap between conquest and dominion becomes filled with figures of the greedy trader, the inopportune missionary, the ambitious soldier and the lying speculator, who disquiet the minds of the conquered and excite the sordid appetites of the conquerors’.