In continuance of my little historical narrative,
The Industrial Revolution was actually born in Britain in the latter part of the 18th century, and quickly spread to the United States of America. Almost as though entirely by design, as the steady influx of tired and poor, yearning to breathe free immigrants translated to a steady influx of factory-working suckers. The East India Tea Company had maintained a long-running relationship with the grandest of colonial experiments, from transporting the vast majority of African slaves, to dominating the silk trade for the upper class and opium for the lower, to selling guns to everybody. But as end all matters of finance involving the USA, the company was losing money. It could be argued that the Boston Tea Party actually concerned British ships leased from the company, and that the famous act of rebellion wasn’t as focused on taxes to the crown (what with the only certainties in life being death and taxation, to paraphrase Benjamin Franklin), so much as offense taken over a foreign-based enterprise monopolizing embargoes and sanctions of international trade between east and west. Time is an increasingly fleeting thing the older we grow, but this applies to societies as well, and currents were taking the company over the metaphorical hill.
The first transcontinental telecommunications cables were laid out in the deep sea in the 1850s, which on one hand made communication faster, but on the other, made certain functions of the company obsolete. Harvesting, cataloging and controlling the ebb and flow of information must have proven problematic once it lost the reins to technological advancements. And then of course, there was India.
From 1859 to 1893, the United Kingdom was compelled to sign a number of legislations, gradually returning the wealth and resources of India from the company back to where it belonged. Minus the fleet of ships, of course. And what monies remained could not have been grand, as just a few short decades later the Indian government was so strapped for cash it had to begin raiding its own holy shrines for gold in order to settle debts.
But there were unacknowledged details to the bigger picture. Just as the Christian power structure’s greed turned on the Templar’s greed, and just as England’s greed distanced itself from the Vatican’s greed, so too would it appear that Britain had grown weary of the company, virtually castrating the past-its-prime conglomerate while surreptitiously taking over its more intriguing, and more lucrative, agendas. And, to stay abreast of said technological advancement Britain saw the proverbial writing on the wall, spelling out in emblazoned typography how black gold, aka Texas tea, was tantalizing a pair of promising joker cards. Oil would come to represent a larger impact on the impending future of world finance than the price of tea in China, as well as making for the ideal new utility of a must-have Trojan horse to masquerade efforts for cataloging and redefining the lives of all peoples. Like weaponized consumerism, which may sound redundant but empire-builders do love their fine print if nothing else.
How on Earth the East India Tea Company could have kept India in a choke-hold for so many years, oblivious to the oil flowing underneath is laughable. Yet, before the corpse of the company grew cold, a Scottish businessman named David Sime Cargill stumbled across the opportunity to found the Rangoon Oil Company, explicitly to claim oil fields in the Indian subcontinent. And only a few years later ownership of this new company passed to a British family which “already possessed vast colonial interests through its own trading company“. I think the larger players from the East India Tea Company, following the legal dissolution of said venture, all met with government contracts. Today, politicians favoring certain corporate interests comfortably though scandalously retire into positions with said corporate interests, which is fundamentally the layout of think-tanks. Equally, corporate heads who find means to enrich politicians are themselves rewarded with governmental positions, as can be seen by each and every one of current President Trump’s cabinet secretaries, as well as Obama’s before him. This is how western democracies run, in broad daylight, with open bribery and cronyism dancing back and forth and forth and back, across both sides of the aisle and all the way to the bank.
And I assert that this sort of arrangement presents the final legacy of the East India Tea Company.
British interests also established the Anglo-Persian Oil Company to pursue oil rights in Iran, with a bluntly-timed yet clandestinely-orchestrated overthrow of the Iranian government by the British military. (The whole scenario repeated play by play a half-century later by the Americans.) Rangoon Oil’s second owners rebranded as Burmah Oil, which then merged with Anglo-Persian to eventually be inducted (back) under the flag of the British government as the state-owned British Petrol, only to later be privatized again over the 1980s and existing to this day as BP. Dance partners keep changing, while the oil of other nations gets nationalized in death-grips by the “special relationship” between British and American governmental business interests, depriving the rightful owners from nationalizing their own fields themselves.
As the ebb and flow of information itself depended less and less on physical mobility, the British and American governments, learning from history, opted to tighten their reins of control and together oversaw production of the internet, to literally create the new playing field of a containment spell, where all datum is more easily collected and defined anew. But this required its own must-have Trojan, specifically the copper which all wiring is dependent on, but which comes predominately from the Dark Continent. Both the British and American governments, along with an exorbitant display of enterprising new companies rising to exploit the internet trade, are proactively exploiting the long-exploited African peoples, doing all that they can to fan their own flames and validate their own obsessive greed.
And all the while, recording everything under the sun, to summarize our species as a kind of senior project to await grading by whichever alien folks cross paths with the inevitable rubble of our planet drifting about tiredly in outer space. Or perhaps to discern where exactly the time machine wound up. Maybe Google, the largest and most powerful of modern corporations, is collecting the final drafts of the many crusading record-keepers of the ages, to inform a secretive mission back, back before the dawn of mankind. Lacking the means to finitely leave the ruin of our world, the wealthiest of modern elites are plotting to instead travel backwards in time, to preemptively better their own cards dealt in a second chance to exert absolute control over the gambles of their own blasted, wanton desire. Barred by the consequences of their own actions from having their cake and eating it too, they will take their bread and flee approaching doom.
With the web address of Google’s parent company Alphabet literally meta-spelling out its own beginning and end, perhaps it’s their way of asserting themselves as the Alpha and the Omega, with the upper echelon of the “Don’t be evil” conglomerate set on manufacturing the Ark of the Covenant, to indeed service as carrier of God’s commandments. Their god, to be sure, the one studiously recorded and collected and comprised from all the blessed knowledge that humans have ever gathered about themselves and this world they are made to suffer.