Publisher's Synopsis
When the EIC and its corrupt allies in Parliament and the government ministry precipitated a world credit crisis in the 1770s, Americans were made to suffer and pay for it. Unreasonable demands on the imperial economy were especially evident in the case of the business affairs of the EIC, the greatest corporate monopoly in recorded history up to that time. If corrected for inflation and fluctuations in the value of money, the EIC would be rated among the greatest non-manufacturing corporations of all time. Yet there is evidence that more gold and silver was transferred through the EIC to China and India in the 18th century to satisfy the desires of European fashion than the Spanish Conquistadors stripped from all the mines and Native temples of America in two centuries of rapine and greed. Here is the nexus, the unheralded financial connection, between British policy and American protest. Asian trade sucked up Britain's wealth as a sponge draws in water. The Company's failed attempt at landing a few hundred chests of China tea in Boston had been initiated by economic, political, and military concerns in far away London, Calcutta, and Canton.
