But what exactly is the evidence for the original claim, just some priors on corps being better than governments in some Platonic sense?
Sense of history is notoriously hard to boil down to specific pieces of evidence, and it’s likely that Douglas_Knight would give a different answer than I would. But I would point primarily at the incentives (corporations are presumably weighting profit higher than glory, governments might be doing the reverse) and the number of boots on the ground; it seems to me that colonial corporations were more likely to use native power structures to suit their own ends, and colonial governments were more likely to replace native power structures. Whether or not this is a ‘light touch’ depends on what specifically you’re measuring. For example, the EIC never outlawed sati (though individual officers did in regions they had control over), and generally prevented Christian missionaries from operating in their lands, presumably because this would disrupt the creation of profit.
I think the point of the argument is whether somehow corporate colonial governments were better than regular ones, so saying a regular government also continued a [bad policy] isn’t really evidence for this.
I agree with you that the salt tax isn’t relevant evidence, because both the EIC and the British government enforced that policy. The point I was making is that you introduced the salt tax as relevant evidence for comparing the EIC and the British government, and that suggests to me that you may want to be more cautious in reasoning about this area.
(I don’t think inertia has enough of an effect to make creating and continuing a policy significantly different, especially given the amount of time involved.)
Initially, the company struggled in the spice trade because of the competition from the already well-established Dutch East India Company.
The Dutch and British appear to have been operating at roughly the same time—the first British voyage to the area seems to have been a few years sooner, but the first significantly profitable voyage seems to have been Dutch.
and got what they could.
I wouldn’t describe the Moluccas as “got what they could!”
Sense of history is notoriously hard to boil down to specific pieces of evidence, and it’s likely that Douglas_Knight would give a different answer than I would. But I would point primarily at the incentives (corporations are presumably weighting profit higher than glory, governments might be doing the reverse) and the number of boots on the ground; it seems to me that colonial corporations were more likely to use native power structures to suit their own ends, and colonial governments were more likely to replace native power structures. Whether or not this is a ‘light touch’ depends on what specifically you’re measuring. For example, the EIC never outlawed sati (though individual officers did in regions they had control over), and generally prevented Christian missionaries from operating in their lands, presumably because this would disrupt the creation of profit.
I agree with you that the salt tax isn’t relevant evidence, because both the EIC and the British government enforced that policy. The point I was making is that you introduced the salt tax as relevant evidence for comparing the EIC and the British government, and that suggests to me that you may want to be more cautious in reasoning about this area.
(I don’t think inertia has enough of an effect to make creating and continuing a policy significantly different, especially given the amount of time involved.)
From the East India Company wikipedia page:
The Dutch and British appear to have been operating at roughly the same time—the first British voyage to the area seems to have been a few years sooner, but the first significantly profitable voyage seems to have been Dutch.
I wouldn’t describe the Moluccas as “got what they could!”