The story of John Palmer and his agency house, his rise to the “prince of merchants” in British India as well as the agency’s bankruptcy is a fine example of the changing economic and commercial environs within the emerging British Empire in Asia. It demonstrates how free trade after 1813 affected the business of private companies in India, how personal entanglement in British Indian politics, machinations with princely states, mismanagement and growing incompetence within a company ultimately caused the breakdown of a firm. In particular, the dubious practices of debt control, a complete absence of effective accounting and cash security arrangements, in short: bad financial management, caused the collapse of Palmer & Co triggering the bankruptcy of more than thirty agency houses.

http://www.economist.com/node/21541753

i want to read this book!

This looks like an interesting read. " Business history " has been - over the years - a much neglected and thinly researched field. A poor relation to more ' glamorous ' or dramatic subjects. Books like this one should help to fill in a few of the more glaring pot-holes along the historical highway ...

Mr John Palmer's daughter married William Taylor,CS

Julian, I just finished reading the Concise Oxford History of Indian Business. I will recommend it if you are interested in business history. Sadly, as you have said there are not many takers for a subject of this kind. The author of this book will probably be the last person teaching this subject at IIMA.

This book had indeed been a good read, i gt my copy in 2011...I think it is yet too early to write off these subjects!

Business history should be boring to a romantic like me - but perhaps I should give it a shot. The last book I read was, "india after Gandhi," by Guha. Eminently readable and filled many gaps in my knowledge of recent history. "The secret history of India's independence," by an English lady author filled in many gaps in what we know of the then protagonists: the beef-eating Nehru and his pork-eating counterpart Jinna, the cuckolded Mountbatten and the insane Gandhi who advised the Jews to throw them-selves off cliffs to appease hitler. However let me try this book - so generously offered by "flipcart" for the sum of rs 595!

Laughing out loud, Sanjaya at your pithy description of 'The secret history of India's independence!' :)

Read the book! The author has researched and documented and supported her astonishing asseverations.

Will do - now to get my hands on it!

Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire Alex Von Tunzelmann $18.00 $12.00 Sent using Amazon Mobile for iPhone Sorry the title was quoted incorrectly. This is the actual book.

Thanks.

Julian and Sanjaya, Webster's account is a must read along with his other title 'Twilight of EIC' and H Bowen’s ‘The Business of Empire’. The books under discussion demonstrate a recent trend in researching the EIC, namely a renewed interest in commercial and administrative aspects which seems to respond to the growing importance of the effects of globalisation and the emergence of a new field of academic research: global studies. Of late there have been many books on the series of Indian business under the series editor of Gurcharan Das (ex CEO of Procter and Gamble). 1. East India Company by Tirthankar Roy 2. Merchants of Tamilakam by K. Mukund 3. Arthashastra : The science of Wealth by Thomas Traumann 4. Three Merchants by Laksmi Subramanian Each slender volume recounts the romance and adventure o business enterprise in the bazaar or on the high seas along a 5000 mile coastline. All these volumes are sub Rs.450 each.

Hello Mr. Kanoria. Ms. Von Tunzelmann's book is indeed sharp and entertaining. But, it is with incredulity, not certainty, that she refers to Jinnah eating ham sandwiches, while also explicitly stating in her notes that no evidence exists to corroborate such a diet. I am unable to locate her remarks about Nehru being a beef eater. Do share the coordinates for the same. Gandhiji is not an easy man to understand, given his Western training, Western liberal influences during his stay in London, profound spiritual awareness and the theater of competing Western imperial ideologies and Indian political awakening that he had to play out his part in. He supported Britain in her war effort in WWI, even volunteering to recruit Indian soldiers. But, he did so not to kill the Germans but as an opportunity to teach the virtues of manly self-sacrifice (of mind and body) to fellow Indians on a large scale when no other such scheme, which also won British favor, was available. His intent was to raise them above their meek existence to engage with their European masters more evenly. He did so with the express intention of training people for Swaraj. In later years, he did become ambivalent about this idea but maintained that he was right in spirit. During WWII, Gandhiji was more inflexible about ahimsa, considering it the only righteous weapon to be used in conflict. His creed was that of self-sacrifice for what one considers right, and not that of the opponent. It is in this vein that he made the remark about Jews, stating that they should have thrown themselves from a cliff, not to appease Hitler, but for maintaining their beliefs against their oppressors. Nobody took these remarks seriously, as they knew that Germany wasn't governed by the same moral and legal codes at the British Empire. Even if despotic and blind to their subjects wants, the Empire was run under a legal framework that many upper class Indian's were educated in. London, in the late 19th century, was also home to several pockets of progressive societies (vegetarianism, Orientalism, theosophy etc.) whose liberal use of print to perpetrate, argue for and defend ideas impressed the Indians to do the same in their homeland. This lead to the formation of bodies like the INC, also peopled by sympathetic Britons. It is difficult to see how someone like Gandhi, who as a lawyer trained in English and could thus appeal to institutional justice, could write against unjust rule and who earned the respect of many Britons, could have been effective under a Nazi regime. I think he was as much a product of the British Empire as of his spiritual heritage.

Mr. Sen, thank you for listing some of the books that deal with the economic aspect of EIC. I would like to add "The Corporation that Changed the World" by Nick Robins to it.

Mesmerized by how RBSI excels itself so frequently. Eagerly waiting for the website.