PREFACE
My interest in world trade began with watching cargo ships passing through the Bosphorus during my commute to the Faculty of Business Administration of Istanbul Technical University in Maçka on the Üsküdar-Beşiktaş ferry during my university years. However, this interest was not rooted in a personal desire to enter the business and make it big but rather in a thirst for knowledge on what Turkey needed to do in order to achieve a stronger position in the global political economy. Deep down, I knew the answer lay in the ships I watched passing daily. With these questions on my mind, I started working at a maritime company after graduating.

As if verifying my inner questions, I learned that 90 percent of world trade was done through large cargo ships. This led me to realize that foreign companies with turnovers close to Turkey's gross national product profited tremendously by situating the worldwide market as their village and transporting their products via ships. Moreover, this was not a new phenomenon taking place overnight but rather a result of various historical conjectures. I quickly decided to prepare a presentation on the history of world trade for the end-of-year Student Symposium at the Foundation for Sciences and Arts (Bilim ve Sanat Vakfı), which I attended on saturdays. Skimming over the thousands of books lining the walls of my family home, a great many books entitled "The East India Company" caught my eye. Almost all books covering the economic development of Western countries from the fifteenth century onwards involved the British, French, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, Danish, and Swedish East India Companies.

The most influential and successful of these companies was the British East India Company, which retrospectively led to the founding of the United States of America and Great Britain and the destruction of the Chinese and the Mughal Empires. By the time I finished my presentation in 2009, I had only researched the first forty years of the British East India Company. Deciding to take my time with the subject, I continued my research for the next twelve years, all of which have come together to form the book in your hands. In my MBA dissertation at Istanbul Şehir University, I examined how the British East India Company became a role model for today's international companies that shape contemporary world economy politics. I hope that this study will aid us in better understanding the world's political economy and how the role of international companies in world trade has emerged over the course of history...