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A Farcaster Exclusive
East India Company: A Brief Provocation
The East India Company didn't die, it transmuted into modern empires of domination. Its blueprint of corporate plunder, racial hierarchy, and resource extraction disguised as enlightenment persists in Nazism's quest for a "Greater German Reich" and Zionism's project of ethnic exclusivity: privatised invasions, supremacist ideologies, and genocidal expulsions rationalised as destiny. From the engineered famines of Bengal to the blockaded devastation of Gaza, the imperial script endures unbroken.
To unpack this continuity, consider the historical threads. The East India Company, founded in 1600 as a joint-stock corporation, pioneered a model of privatised imperialism that blended commerce with conquest. By the 18th century, it controlled vast swathes of India through divide-and-rule tactics, local proxies, and brutal enforcement, extracting wealth that fuelled Britain's industrial revolution while causing catastrophes like the Bengal Famine of 1770, which killed up to 10 million people under policies of monopolistic grain hoarding and export. This corporate colonialism set a precedent for later empires, where economic exploitation wore the mask of "civilising missions."
Adolf Hitler explicitly drew inspiration from such models for his vision of a racial empire. In Mein Kampf and private discussions, he praised the British Empire's subjugation of India as a template for Germany's eastward expansion, viewing it as proof that a small elite could dominate "inferior" masses through superior organisation and ruthlessness. Historians note direct continuities: Nazi Lebensraum policies in Eastern Europe echoed colonial practices in Africa and Asia, treating Slavs and Jews as expendable natives in a settler project, complete with plans for German farms on conquered lands. The Holocaust itself can be seen as an extreme escalation of colonial genocide, building on precedents like the Herero and Nama massacres in German Southwest Africa (1904–1908), where extermination camps and racial pseudoscience were first honed. As scholar A. Dirk Moses argues, Nazism wasn't an aberration but a radicalised form of European imperialism turned inward.
Zionism, emerging in the late 19th century amid European nationalism, adopted settler-colonial elements influenced by the same imperial logic. Theodor Herzl and other founders framed Jewish settlement in Palestine as a "return" but operated through land purchases, evictions, and demographic engineering akin to British and French colonial ventures. Critics like Patrick Wolfe describe it as a "logic of elimination," where indigenous Palestinians were displaced to create an exclusive Jewish state, mirroring EIC strategies of enclosure and extraction. The British Mandate facilitated this, drawing on their Indian playbook, while post-1948 Israel expanded through settlements and resource control, often justified by narratives of racial or civilisational superiority.
While direct lineages are debated, the shared "playbook", corporate-led conquest, supremacist rationales, and masked extraction, binds these phenomena. Bengal's plunder enriched London; Nazi-occupied Ukraine was to feed Berlin; Gaza's blockade sustains strategic dominance. Breaking this cycle demands confronting imperialism's enduring mutations, not just its historical ghosts. 2 replies
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