The sordid history of the British in India also came to be a factor in the American Revolution. Thomas Paine was aware of the details of some of the most disgusting aspects of British East India Company activities, including artificially induced famines, tying native 'recruits' unwilling to fight across the mouth of a cannon and firing the cannon , etc. and wrote of this in Philadelphia, among other places. He argued that the state backed monstrous behavior of the British East India Company in India was a harbinger of what was to come in the American Colonies. And, of course, it was British East India Company tea that was famously dumped into Boston Harbor during the original Boston Tea Party. The relationship between the British East India Company and the British Government of the time is not too dissimilar to that between large corporations and the US government of today. May the outcome of the current example be as propitious.  

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."