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IlyaShpitser comments on Open Thread August 31 - September 6 - Less Wrong
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Well, there are two competing claims here: EIC was a light touch government, or the EIC was a heavy-handed disaster. Now you can argue that the EIC was in fact a light touch government, and all the disasters in India that resulted in EIC terminating its existence were just due to confounders of the time and place. Maybe that's true! But what exactly is the evidence for the original claim, just some priors on corps being better than governments in some Platonic sense?
I think the point of the argument is whether somehow corporate colonial governments were better than regular ones, so saying a regular government also continued a [bad policy] isn't really evidence for this.
I define 'light touch' operationally -- did it work as intended?
The Dutch were late to the game, and got what they could. They did not have a luxury of choosing. Even the British, who essentially were the premier power in a multipolar world, had to worry about other powers sniffing around.
Sense of history is notoriously hard to boil down to specific pieces of evidence, and it's likely that Douglas_Knight would give a different answer than I would. But I would point primarily at the incentives (corporations are presumably weighting profit higher than glory, governments might be doing the reverse) and the number of boots on the ground; it seems to me that colonial corporations were more likely to use native power structures to suit their own ends, and colonial governments were more likely to replace native power structures. Whether or not this is a 'light touch' depends on what specifically you're measuring. For example, the EIC never outlawed sati (though individual officers did in regions they had control over), and generally prevented Christian missionaries from operating in their lands, presumably because this would disrupt the creation of profit.
I agree with you that the salt tax isn't relevant evidence, because both the EIC and the British government enforced that policy. The point I was making is that you introduced the salt tax as relevant evidence for comparing the EIC and the British government, and that suggests to me that you may want to be more cautious in reasoning about this area.
(I don't think inertia has enough of an effect to make creating and continuing a policy significantly different, especially given the amount of time involved.)
From the East India Company wikipedia page:
The Dutch and British appear to have been operating at roughly the same time--the first British voyage to the area seems to have been a few years sooner, but the first significantly profitable voyage seems to have been Dutch.
I wouldn't describe the Moluccas as "got what they could!"