Brow Beat

A Tattooed Tom Hardy Trolls Pundits Into Their Least Defensible Position Yet in the Taboo Promo

The first promo for the BBC/FX limited series Taboo is out, and it looks like America should start battening down the hatches for a wave of think pieces. “I have sworn to do very foolish things,” Tom Hardy says, ominously, in the dimly lit promo. It’s an oath that contrarian opinion writers have always taken to heart, and Taboo, created by Steven Knight, will give them the chance to live out their wildest fantasies. Hardy plays a businessman who returns to London from Africa in 1813 with even-more-ethically-dubious-than-usual diamonds and plans to avenge his father. Where do the op-eds come in? Well, as Knight put it when the series was announced:

[Hardy’s character’s] greatest struggle will be against the East India Company which, throughout the nineteenth century, was the equivalent of the CIA, the NSA and the biggest, baddest multi-national corporation on Earth, all rolled into one self-righteous, religiously motivated monolith.

If you can’t imagine anyone would stand up for the good name of the company that fought the First Opium War, violently put down the Indian Rebellion of 1857, and murdered 10 million people in the Great Bengal Famine, I’m sorry to report that they started two years ago. Here’s London School of Economics professor Dr. Tirthankar Roy talking to the Guardian in 2014, when Taboo was announced:

[The East India Company] made a very positive contribution overall. It was a business firm and the way to understand its contributions is to look at its effects on business, trade, and enterprise. … Its effects were not just the profits the company made for itself. Its major effect was on creating a whole new business world, which wouldn’t have happened without it.

Similarly, Union Carbide was a business firm, and the way to understand its contributions is to look at its effects on business, trade, and enterprise, not on the citizens of Bhopal. Brits are probably more likely to stand up for the flagship company of their empire than Americans, but it still might be a good idea to stay far away from the internet when Taboo comes out in 2017. It may be hard to imagine that Hardy and Knight will successfully bait American pundits into affecting a position as cartoonishly evil as defending the East India Company, but remember: Stranger things have happened.