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After the Company gained the right to collect Bengal's land revenue in 1765, it kept raising collections to pay shareholders and cover its costs, even as drought struck. Its servants hoarded rice and profited from grain speculation, and roughly a third of Bengal's population died. The case shows how a corporate duty to maximize returns, once it controls a territory's revenue base, can turn a harvest failure into a mass-mortality famine.
The Company's shares soared after the Bengal diwani grant because investors priced in territorial revenues as if they were guaranteed profits. That pushed directors to raise dividends and extract more from Bengal. When the revenues fell short, the 1772 crash caused a credit crisis in Britain and forced a state bailout, which shows how financial-market expectations can dictate conduct on the ground far away.
The Company's royal charter granted it a trade monopoly and also quasi-state powers: raising armies, making war, minting coins and administering justice. Merging commercial incentive with sovereign coercion let it use military force to gain market advantage while answering to shareholders rather than to the people it governed.
Robins treats the Company's trade as a force that reshaped economies rather than a neutral exchange. Looked at this way, 'free trade' outcomes carry the marks of earlier coercion and of whoever controlled the terms of exchange.
Edmund Burke's prosecution of Governor-General Warren Hastings for corruption and cruelty lasted from 1788 to 1795 and ended in acquittal. It exposed the Company's abuses, yet no one was held personally responsible. The trial shows that public exposure and parliamentary theatre are poor substitutes for binding legal accountability over corporate executives acting abroad.
Drawing lessons from the Company, Robins argues that corporations should hold their licence to operate conditionally from society. That means limits on scale and market dominance, enforceable liability for harms caused abroad, and a voice for affected communities, not only shareholders. He presents the Company's history as proof that corporate power grows past the reach of existing regulation unless these checks are built in from the start.