allow competition with itself. Even then the Company was constantly uncomfortable with it and tried to ban it periodically. It tried to prosecute its most outstanding employees—Oxenden, Aungier, Day, Yale. Roy tells us that the most notorious employee-competitor was Thomas Pitt who returned home with a great fortune, including one of the world’s largest diamonds, which eventually went on to adorn Marie Antoinette’s crown and Napoleon’s sword. Pitt went to acquire a seat in Parliament from where he attacked the Company’s monopoly. But Adam Smith found a different flaw. Private trade of the Company’s employees confirmed to him a fundamental defect in the joint-stock company, where ownership was separated from management. He worried that employees might turn the corporation to their own ends and not look after shareholders’ interests with the‘same anxious vigilance’ that an owner or a partner would and, as a result, ‘negligence and profusion must always prevail, more or less, in the management of the affairs of such a company’. Smith’s was a prescient warning. Even today audit committees of company boards are wrestling with accountability of executives to shareholders. While separation of owners and managers has many positives—the ability to source capital from a wide range of investors and replace incompetent children of hereditary founders by effective professionals—the limited liability of shareholders makes for carelessness in the oversight of funds and leaves a company vulnerable to executive malpractice. The standards of governance are obviously higher today but there remains an ever present danger of executives exploiting the corporation for their own ends, just as the Company’s executives did in the eighteenth century. The attack on the Company’s monopoly grew over time in which Adam Smith was often quoted. Its share price boomed when news of the acquisition of the Bengal diwani from the Mughal emperor reached London’s financial markets in April 1766. However, the Bengal Bubble burst soon afterwards on repeated bad news about mismanagement in India. Many Members of Parliament were shareholders and, as the stock price plunged, they grew angry. There were cries against theCompany’s monopoly and this led to the reforms of the 1770s, 1780s and 1790s, which effectively punctured the Company’s autonomy as a business and breached its monopoly. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Company went into decline as a commercial concern. It was partly due its political troubles with Parliament, but had more to do with Britain’s industrial revolution which changed the pattern of trade. Consumers in England were now happy with cheaper cottons from their own mills and the Company’s famous auctions of Indian cottons declined precipitously. Weavers in India could not compete with machine-made cloth. If the Company had not been rescued by the growing trade with China in tea and opium, it would have quickly died. Its commercial importance declined in India after the 1820s where it essentially became a political administrator until the British government officially took over India after 1857. The Company’s second fortune The Company made its ‘second fortune’ in China. Since Roy’s book is confined to India, I shall supplement it with some remarks on its Chinese personality. The English love affair with Chinese tea began to grow afterParliament passed Pitt’s Commutation Act of 1784 which lowered barriers to the entry of tea and undercut smuggling. Consumption grew steadily and the Company’s profits from tea auctions touched a £1 million a year by 1833. Its second fortune was financed initially by silver bullion, but gradually it was funded by opium. The Celestial Empire of Qing China disliked foreigners and refused to trade with Europeans as it would have implied equality and compromised its sense of superiority. The Company persevered, however, and eventually set up temporary