Centuries before Silicon Valley’s algorithm traders, the British East India Company was mastering the art of high-frequency commerce. A newly discovered trove of 17th-century Mughal news reports, or 'akhbarat,' reveals the Company's sophisticated early operations in India. These manuscripts, unearthed from the archives of the Maharaja of Bikaner, detail how English merchants leveraged intelligence networks and currency arbitrage to dominate trade routes long before the industrial revolution.
The reports, written in Persian and dating from the 1660s, describe the Company’s agents as ‘masters of the bazaar,’ collecting real-time data on cotton, indigo, and saltpetre prices across the subcontinent. This was data harvesting centuries before big data. The Company’s success was not just about guns and ships, but about information asymmetry. They understood network effects before the term existed.
Historian Dr. Ananya Sharma of the University of Delhi, who led the analysis, notes: ‘The English were not the most powerful military force. They were the most agile information traders. They used local news reports to anticipate famines and surpluses, manipulating supply chains much like modern flash traders.’
The reports show how the Company employed local scribes to gather market gossip, creating a private intelligence feed that outpaced Mughal imperial couriers. This allowed them to undercut local and European rivals. They were the first algorithmic traders, but without the algorithms.
Yet this digital-age reflection on the past reveals a troubling parallel. Just as today we worry about AI ethics and data privacy, the Mughal empire eventually saw its sovereignty eroded by these data-driven corporate entities. The British East India Company’s early commercial genius was a forerunner of extractive capitalism, a lesson for our era of digital colonialism.
‘We are seeing the same pattern play out with tech giants today,’ warns Dr. Sharma. ‘Control of information flow leads to control of markets and eventually governance. The Mughal court realised too late that they had outsourced their economic intelligence.’
The akhbarat also highlight the human cost. Reports of famines and peasant revolts were used to time grain hoarding and price hikes. The company’s quarterly dividends were built on suffering.
For those of us who track the future through the lens of history, this find is a stark reminder. The user experience of society today is shaped by similar information asymmetries. Whether it's a 17th-century ledger or a cloud-based platform, the core principle remains: those who control the data control the system.
This discovery challenges our perception of the Company as a purely military enterprise. It was a tech company before the term existed, and its legacy is written in the code of today’s global trade. As we debate digital sovereignty and antitrust, we would do well to remember the Mughal news reports. The past is never dead. It is not even past.
