(15) EAST INDIA COMPANY 

It’s strange to think that most of the heavy lifting of the British Empire in India was done not by the British Crown or government, but by a company – indeed, to the extent that the British Empire in India was effectively that company. But what a company!

That is of course the East India Company – the British East India Company that is, not the Dutch East India Company or one of the other prolific East India Companies established in Europe (Danish, Portuguese, Genoese, French, Swedish and Austrian).

At its peak, the British East India Company was the largest company in the world and accounted for half the trade in the world.

So yes, you might say, that’s big – reflecting that they started with a Crown charter giving them a monopoly on English trade east of Cape of Good Hope and west of the Straits of Magellan – but it was just a company doing company things like trade, wasn’t it?

Well, for the East India Company, company things included having its own armed forces, including its own navy – the Bombay Marine – and three ‘presidency’ armies – the Bengal Army, the Madras Army and the Bombay Army – “totalling about 260,000 soldiers, twice the size of the British army at the time”.

They also included that the company “eventually came to rule large areas of present day Bangladesh, Pakistan and India, exercising military power and assuming administrative functions”, either directly or indirectly through “princely states tied to it by treaty”.

That was particularly so after the Battle of Plassey – the Anglicized form of Palashi or Polashi – when the Company, under the leadership of the famous Robert Clive or “Clive of India”, won against the Nawab of Bengal and the Nawab’s French allies in 1757.

However that all fell apart literally a century later, with the Indian or Sepoy Rebellion of 1857-1858, named for the sepoys that were the mainstay of the East India Company’s power – “locally raised, mostly Muslim, western trained and equipped soldiers that changed warfare in present day South Asia…a few thousand company sepoys, time and again, took on vastly superior Mughal forces numerically and came out victorious”.

Following this rebellion, the British Crown effectively took over the East India Company in India (by the Government of India Act 1858) – “assumed its governmental functions and absorbed its armies” – although the company survived as a financial shadow of its former self until it was formally dissolved (by the East India Stock Redemption Act 1874).

The Company also had its hand in Asia beyond the Indian subcontinent, not least competing with the Dutch for spice from Indonesia – and trading opium to China, prompting the Opium Wars.

“Wait – it’s all companies?”

“Always has been.”

As I said, it is strange to think of a company as the vanguard of British imperialism in India, but it might be observed how often that was the case in Western imperialism – and indeed, some might observe even more so for Western neo-imperialism. United Fruit and banana republics, anyone?

But yes – it was deeply ingrained in the DNA of European or Western imperialism that much of it was effectively private entrepreneurial rather than public governmental. That is, it was done by private individuals – including literal privateers or pirates – and corporations or organizations, albeit typically under government charters.

Map of the Teutonic Order around 1300 by Marco Zanoli for Wikipedia “Military order (religious society)” licensed under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

(14) TEUTONIC KNIGHTS 

It’s time to splash out with some wilder entries, as I usually do in my special mentions – although this entry is not as wild as you might think.

Yes – it’s pretty wild to think of a religious order, even one founded as a military society during the Crusades, as an empire. The Teutonic Knights or Teutonic Order was founded as the Order of Brothers of the German House of Saint Mary in Jerusalem.

But perhaps not that wild – after all, the Crusaders and their states or military orders served as precursors of European imperialism, as for example with the Reconquista leading directly into the Spanish Conquest of the Americas.

And the Teutonic Knights were arguably the most imperial of military orders, even carving out their own state – the State of the Teutonic Order – in the Baltic during the Northern Crusades. Although let’s not get too much in the past tense as the Teutonic Order still exists, albeit purely religious since 1810 after the military order was disbanded by Napoleon.

Also, I’m on a roll with German imperialism – I’ve managed to include all three German empires (from First to Third Reich) in my special mentions, so this is a bonus round for the imperialism of this definitively German military order, reflected in its very name. That’s pretty much it for German imperialism, except for a few weird African or American colonial ventures by German states prior to modern Germany (Brandenburg-Prussia, Augsburg, and so on).

Anyway, “after Christian forces were defeated in the Middle East”, the Order moved to Transylvania, where it got the taste for blood as an empire (heh) – attempting to build their own state before the Pope and the King of Hungary intervened to boot them out.

If at first you don’t succeed – try, try again. Which the Order did in Prussia as well as the present-day Baltic states, creating the aforementioned State of the Teutonic Order during the Northern Crusades (merging with the Livonian Brothers of the Sword)

From there, the Teutonic Knights “initiated numerous campaigns against its Christian neighbours, the Kingdom of Poland, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and the Novgorod Republic…and they also became a naval power in the Baltic Sea” but waned in power after being decisively defeated by a Polish-Lithuanian army at the Battle of Grunwald.

Map of the Timurid Empire in 1400, Demis Map Server (from reference The Jalayirids: Dynastic State Formation in the Mongol Middle East Map 3, Wikipedia “Timurid Empire” under license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

(13) TURKIC – TIMURID EMPIRE

Yeah, you know those horse blitzkriegs or nomadic empires by mounted nomadic pastoralist tribes from the Eurasian steppes – “those psychos on horseback” – that keep popping up in my top ten history lists?

A large number of them were Turkic, as one of the more prevalent ethnicities of Eurasian mounted nomadic pastoralist tribes – particularly after the so-called Turkic expansion throughout Eurasia from the 5th century AD onwards.

They are distinct from the Mongolic peoples but the Turkic expansion overlapped with the Mongol Empire as the latter enlisted Turkic peoples and confusingly gave rise to various Turko-Mongol “traditions” or ethnocultural syntheses. And to confuse things further, the Turkic expansion extended to the Middle East – giving rise to Turko-Persian tradition – and more famously, Anatolia, as the origin of the Turks who formed the Ottoman Empire and present nation of Turkey.

There’s enough Turkic empires for their own top ten, originating with the first definitive Turkic empire in the 6th century – the Göktürk Khaganate, variously titled the First Turkic Khaganate, the First Turkic Empire, or Turkic Khaganate, which also “became the first Central Asian transcontinental empire from Manchuria to the Black Sea”.

Indeed, Turkish nationalists have compiled their own top ten of Turkic empires, or rather, a top sixteen – the 16 Great Turkic Empires, albeit counting some disputed as Turkic, going back to the Xongniu or Huns.

However, one empire that is not disputed as Turkic – or rather, Turko-Mongol – is the Timurid Empire, founded by Timur or Tamerlane, “the last of the major nomadic conquerors of the Eurasian Steppe” and in doing so, mauled other states of such formidable reputation as the Golden Horde, Mamluk Sultanate, the Ottomans, and Delhi Sultanate. Or as I like to call him, the Timurnator. He was even eyeing off Ming China before his death

“The Timurid conquests and invasions started in the late 14th century with Timur’s control over the Chagatai Khanate” – one of the successor states of the Mongol Empire which I otherwise would have seen as the runt of the litter – and ended at the start of the 15th century with the death of Timur. Due to the sheer scale of Timur’s wars, and due to the fact that he was generally undefeated in battle, he has been regarded as one of the most successful military commanders of all time. These wars resulted in Timur’s supremacy over Central Asia, Persia, the Caucasus, the Levant, and parts of South Asia and eastern Europe, and they also resulted in the formation of the short-lived Timurid Empire”.

While his empire persisted for a century after his death, it slowly fragmented but one of his successors, his great-great-grandson Babur, conquered India to forge a whole new empire that was arguably the most powerful imperial state in the subcontinent prior to the British – the Mughal Empire, which survived even in decline to the nineteenth century.