THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. **** Saturday/Sunday, September 7 - 8, 2019 |C9
Corporate
Governance and
Corporate Warfare
tree”—pagodas being the currency of south India—
and he was never satisfied. As soon as Clive heard
the news of the British victory at Buxar, he wrote
in cipher to his agent in London to mortgage all his
property and buy up as many company shares as
he could, and he netted a huge profit when the
share price doubled. At the same time, he wrote to
the chairman of the East India Co., “we have at last
arrived at that critical Conjuncture...which
renders it necessary for us to determine whether
we can, or shall, take the whole [Mughal Empire]
to ourselves.” Never was there a less innocent im-
perialist, or a more unabashed one, as evidenced
by his famous reply in front of the Commons
Select Committee in 1773 to accusations of greed
after Plassey: “I walked through vaults which were
thrown open to me alone, piled on either hand
with gold and jewels! Mr. Chairman, at this
moment I stand astonished by my own moderation.”
He cut his throat the following year.
Meanwhile, the
Bengal that Clive had
conquered descended
into chaos. As a French
observer put it, “the
country lies groaning
under the Anarchy.”
The abuses had raised
an outcry back home.
Everyone in London was
aware of the terrible
famine in Bengal in 1770,
when the streets were
choked with the dying
and the dead (more than a million Bengalis died).
The Honourable Company went on collecting its
taxes as if nothing was happening and took none
of the steps the Mughal princes did in the native
states, such as setting up grain stores and relief
schemes. In Lucknow, for example, the nabob
Asaf-ud-Daula provided work for 40,000 in
building the great Imambara mourning hall, also
happens to be one of my favorite buildings in the
world. The East India Co. stockpiled rice only for
its own sepoys. As Horace Walpole put it, “the
groans of India have mounted to Heaven.”
A series of regulating acts followed, to bring the
company more under the control of the British
government. At the charter’s renewal in 1813, it
forfeited its monopoly on trade, in 1833 its right to
trade at all, and in 1858 it was abolished, after the
rapacity of the Governor-General Lord Dalhousie
had provoked the greatest rebellion in imperial
history. By then, it had long been obvious that, as
the pioneer agriculturist Arthur Young had written
back in 1772: “Trade and the Sword ought not to
be managed by the same people. Barter and
exchange is the business of merchants, not fighting
of battles and dethroning of princes.”
Mr. Dalrymple’s narrative does not carry on much
beyond the brutal victories of the Wellesley brothers
in the Maratha Wars at the beginning of the 1800s.
He is surely right in seeing this as the crucial period.
But the later eclipse and extinction of the company
would make a no less thrilling sequel.
The arrival of Lord Cornwallis in the 1780s,
fresh from his defeat in the American colonies,
did help to reduce corruption. Unfortunately, he
had drawn the wrong lesson from his experiences
and was determined not allow any uppity locals to
compete for power. Indians were removed from
the few official jobs they occupied, and a rigid
apartheid replaced the old informal relations
between the British officers and their Indian
sweethearts and their offspring. There was perhaps
more justice in this British Raj than there had been
in the old Company Raj, but it was a colder place.
The irony is that the company may have expired,
reviled by many and mourned by few, but like its
rival companies in France and Holland, it left a
permanent mark on the world, not least on India.
The joint-stock company endures, with its myriad
shareholders, limited liability and tightknit board of
directors, remarkably unchanged. Then and now, by
raising hefty initial capital, it gains the elbowroom
to embark on long-term and long-distance projects
and the credit to borrow even vaster sums.
Quite a few of the men who met in Founders’
Hall will have known one other; many others would
not. And as shares swiftly circulated on the new
bourses of Europe, the corporation became a
company of strangers, with its own legal person-
ality. These new practices were a revelation to the
Indian bankers and merchants. For all their savvy,
theirs were essentially family businesses and what
records they kept were kept secret within the
family. The Honourable Company ushered in an era
of contracts between strangers, of public records,
of global trade.
At the same time, it provided a cautionary tale.
To survive over the long term, corporations must
depend on a reliable framework of law and govern-
ment. As Mr. Dalrymple sums up: “The Company’s
conquest of India almost certainly remains the
supreme act of corporate violence in world history.
For all the power wielded today by the world’s
largest corporations—whether ExxonMobil, Walmart
or Google—they are tame beasts compared with
the ravaging territorial appetites of the militarized
East India Company. Yet if history shows anything,
it is that in the intimate dance between the power
of the state and that of the corporation, while the
latter can be regulated, the corporation will use
all the resources in its power to resist.”
“Intimate dance” is, I think, putting it rather
gently. “Wrestling match with no holds barred”
might be nearer the mark.Mr. Mount is a former editor of the Times
Literary Supplement and author of “The Tears
of the Rajas: Mutiny, Money and Marriage
in India 1805-1905.”Continued from page C7By the 1800s,
the East India
Co. accounted
for half of all
British trade.
It had become
too big to fail.BOOKS
‘So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart.’—BILLY COLLINS
mained trapped and doomed.
Among them, writes Mr. Zuckoff,
was a broker named Randy Scott,
“a fun-loving, motorcycle-riding,
happily married father of three
daughters. With no other way to
seek help, he scribbled a plea:
‘84th floor / west office / 12 People
trapped.’” He tossed his note out
of a window, “to flutter among
countless bits of paper blown from
both towers.” But before he did, he
“pressed a bloodied finger against
the note,” leaving the DNA that
would later identify him as the
writer.
Mr. Zuckoff’s chapter on United
Flight 93—which crashed to the
ground near Shanksville, Pa.—is
gripping. This was, sequentially,
the fourth of four hijacked flights,
and the passengers and crew on
board were aware of the hijackers’
intentions, having been in touch
with families and officials via the
Airfones in the plane. “That knowl-
edge,” writes Mr. Zuckoff, “became
a powerful motivator. It trans-
formed them from victimized
hostages into resistance fighters.”
He describes the passengers’
conversations with their spouses
and parents on the ground as “a
spoken tapestry of grace, warning,
bravery, resolve, and love.”
There are times in which
Mr. Zuckoff’s efforts to breathe
life back into his characters can
be florid or sentimental. John
Ogonowski, the pilot of AA 11, is
depicted as “country-boy hand-
some,” his smile etching “deep
crinkles in the ruddy skin around
his blue eyes.” CeeCee Lyles, a
heroic flight attendant on board
United Flight 93, “had flashing
brown eyes and a love of fine
clothes that complemented her
athletic figure.”
But such passages do not mar
the narrative righteousness of Mr.
Zuckoff’s enterprise. Reliving the
moment when the second plane
hit the South Tower, he writes
that “the off-center jolt caused the
upper floors to rotate like a boxer’s
torso twisted from an unexpected
blow.” The image is astonishing,
almost magical in its evocation of
a heretofore inconceivable assault.
Alongside the voices from Mr.
Graff’s oral history—calling down
from the upper floors for aid, for a
rescue that would never come—
words like these will keep memo-
ries alive.Mr. Varadarajan is executive
editor at Stanford University’s
Hoover Institution.A
REMEMBRANCE of
beauty persists along-
side thehorrors that
mark Sept. 11, 2001.
A storm had swept
across the Northeast the day be-
fore, giving rise that morning to a
rare meteorological phenomenon
known as “severe clear.”
In “The Only Plane in the Sky,”
an oral history of 9/11, Garrett
Graff writes of the “cloudless skies
that made an enduring impression
on all who would witness what
transpired in the hours ahead.” He
quotes people who describe the
sky high over New York and Wash-
ington. “A gorgeous blue,” says a
Virginia police officer. “Deep blue,”
says a Capitol Hill staffer. “Deep,
deep blue,” says a chef in Man-
hattan. Others remember the hue
overhead as “cobalt blue,” “ceru-
lean blue” and “the bluest of
blues,” and as one “that you wish
you could put in a bottle.”
Over 64 fine-sliced chapters,
Mr. Graff, a former editor at Polit-
ico, gives us “the stories of those
who lived through and experienced
9/11—where they were, what they
remember, and how their lives
changed.” The result is remarkable,
and Mr. Graff’s curation of these
accounts—drawn from hundreds
of his own interviews and from the
reporting of other journalists and
historians—is a priceless civic gift.
After all, as he notes, the fall of
2019 “will mark the entrance of
the first college class born after
the attacks.”
This is a new generation that
“barely remembers the day itself,”
and it is Mr. Graff’s mission to
offer these young, unscarred
Americans a book that will teach
them about what happened on
9/11. The book is refreshingly free
from editorializing, ideology and
ululation. It gives us instead poi-
gnant, often distressing, vignettes
and impressions of the day and
its aftermath.
On page after page, a reader
will encounter words that startle,
or make him angry, or heartbro-
ken, or queasy. Mohamed Atta was
BYTUNKUVARADARAJAN
The Only Plane in the Sky
By Garrett M. Graff
Avid Reader, 483 pages, $30
Fall and Rise:
The Story of 9/11
By Mitchell Zuckoff
Harper, 589 pages, $29.99
running late at Portland Interna-
tional Jetport, in Maine, for his
flight to Boston, where he would
board American Airlines Flight 11,
the plane he crashed into the
North Tower of the World Trade
Center in New York. Mike Tuohey,
a ticket agent in Portland, recalls
saying, with the usual professional
courtesy: “Mr. Atta, if you don’t go
now, you will miss your plane.”
(Yes, everyone who reads this will
ask himself what might have been
had Atta missed his flight.) Pages
later, we encounter the recorded
words of Amy Sweeney, a flight
attendant on AA 11, spoken on
an Airfone to a manager on the
ground. “Something is wrong. I
don’t think the captain is in con-
trol. I see water. I see buildings.
We’re flying low. We’re flying
very,verylow.OhmyGod. We’re
flying way too low .” Within sec-
onds, the plane hit the tower.
There is much in this book
about the bravery of the firefight-
ers and security personnel who
responded to the attacks. Father
Mychal Judge was a chaplain with
the Fire Department of New York,
the only priest to enter the towers
that day, administering last rites.
He died in the North Tower. “The
firemen took his body,” a friar
says. “Because they respected and
loved him so much, they didn’t
want to leave it in the street. They
quickly carried it into [nearby] St.
Peter’s Church.” Rick Rescorla was
a former British paratrooper who
was vice president of security for
Morgan Stanley in the South
Tower: Ignoring the Port Author-
ity’s assurance that the tower was
safe, he said: “I’m getting my
people the f— out of here.” He
saved hundreds of lives in the
process but lost his own.
Yet it is the goodness of ordi-
nary people that leaves the deepest
impression. We read, for instance,
of the reaction of Heather Ordover,
an English teacher at a high school
three blocks south of the World
Trade Center, just after the first
plane hit the tower. “We all heard
the scream of the engines,” Ms.
Ordover says, “like a bomb in a war
movie—then the flash.” As the kids
in her class ran to the window,
where they saw smoke and falling
debris, her protective teacher’s
instincts kicked in. “I ran back to
the front of the room, yelling to the
kids to sit down and write about
what they’d just seen—anything to
get them away from the windows.”
There are countless other
stories of selflessness, of decency,of 911-operators telling people
trapped on the topmost floors—
who had called in to say, “I’m going
to die, aren’t I?”—that help was on
the way and that they weren’t
going to die. Untruths, of course,
but of the utmost kindness. In Mr.
Graff’s book, the little details are
allowed to speak for themselves,
and the effect is one of notable
eloquence.
“Fall and Rise: The Story of
9/11,” by Mitchell Zuckoff, is a mon-
umental complement to Mr. Graff’s
spare book. A former reporter at
the Boston Globe, now a professor
at Boston University, Mr. Zuckoff
has sought to re-create in dramatic
prose the very story that Mr. Graff
sets out to assemble by oral jigsaw.He stresses that his narrative takes
“no license with facts, quotes, char-
acters, or chronologies.” His book’s
avowed purpose is—like Mr.
Graff’s—to preserve the memory of
the day America was attacked, “to
delay the descent of 9/11 into the
well of history.”
Mr. Zuckoff’s descriptions of
the hijacks—the turmoil on board
the planes, the crashing of the
aircraft, the destruction of the
towers, the rescues, the death,
the subsequent anguish—are su-
perb in their tautness and tension.
Particularly moving is the account
of how Brian Clark and Stan
Praimnath, two total strangers
who worked on the 84th and 81st
floors of the South Tower, re-
spectively, encountered each other
in the acrid ruins. When Brian
first extended a hand to help a
disoriented Stan to his feet, he was
startled to be asked by the latter
if he believed in Jesus Christ.
In response, Mr. Zuckoff writes,
“Brian stammered something
about church on Sundays. He
wondered if the man he was trying
to save had lost his mind.” In the
middle of the calamity, on the 81st
floor, they shook hands, told each
other their names, and swore to
be brothers for life. Then Brian
draped his arm around Stan’s
shoulder and said, “Let’s go home.”
They made it out alive. Else-
where, colleagues of Brian’s re-Out of the Blue
SUSAN MEISELAS/MAGNUM PHOTOS
WHAT REMAINS The ruins of the Twin Towers, seen through the shadows of Lower Manhattan.Two vivid and
immediate books
designed to ‘delay the
descent of 9/11 into
the well of history.’