The Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company was founded before legislation permitted the establishment of limited liability companies, and still operates today under the royal charter its self-made founders, Arthur Anderson and  Brodie Willcox, obtained when they won the lucrative contract to ship the Royal Mail to Britain’s eastern colonies.

The 20-year-old Queen Victoria could hardly have imagined that the business on which she bestowed these favours would one day be subject to rival bids from Dubai and Singapore, and that control of its activities might be transferred from Pall Mall – in the centre of London’s club land – to the Peninsula and Orient itself. Another demonstration, it would seem, of the globalisation of world capital markets and the rise of Asia. Not quite. When P&O was founded, India and China enjoyed a much larger share of the world economy than they do today and the world capital market was in important respects more international than it is now.