Karen·’s Reviews > The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company > Status Update

In itself, the Regulating Act (1773) did little to muzzle the worst excesses of the EIC, but it did create a precedent, and it marked the beginning of a steady process of state interference in the Company that would ultimately end in its nationalisation eighty years later, in 1858.

The world's first aggressive multinational corporation was saved by one of history's first mega-bailouts, an early example of a nation state extracting, as its price for saving a failing corporation, the right to regulate it and rein it in. But despite much parliamentary rhetoric, the EIC still remained a semi-autonomous imperial power in its own right, albeit one now partially incorporated within the state...