"First published 1978"--T.p. verso. Includes bibliographical references and index.

In existence for 258 years, the English East India Company ran a complex, highly integrated global trading network. It supplied the tea for the Boston Tea Party, the cotton textiles used to purchase slaves in Africa, and the opium for China’s nineteenth-century addiction. In India it expanded from a few small coastal settlements to govern territories that far exceeded the British Isles in extent and population. It minted coins in its name, established law courts and prisons, and prosecuted wars with one of the world’s largest armies. Over time, the Company developed a pronounced and aggressive colonialism that laid the foundation for Britain’s Eastern empire. A study of the Company, therefore, is a study of the rise of the modern world. In clear, engaging prose, Ian Barrow sets the rise and fall of the Company into political, economic, and cultural contexts and explains how and why the Company was transformed from a maritime trading entity into a territorial colonial state. Excerpts from eighteen primary documents illustrate the main themes and ideas discussed in the text. Maps, illustrations, a glossary, and a chronology are also included.

The English East India Company was one of the most powerful and enduring organizations in history. Between Monopoly and Free Trade locates the source of that success in the innovative policy by which the Company's Court of Directors granted employees the right to pursue their own commercial interests while in the firm’s employ. Exploring trade network dynamics, decision-making processes, and ports and organizational context, Emily Erikson demonstrates why the English East India Company was a dominant force in the expansion of trade between Europe and Asia, and she sheds light on the related problems of why England experienced rapid economic development and how the relationship between Europe and Asia shifted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Though the Company held a monopoly on English overseas trade to Asia, the Court of Directors extended the right to trade in Asia to their employees, creating an unusual situation in which employees worked both for themselves and for the Company as overseas merchants. Building on the organizational infrastructure of the Company and the sophisticated commercial institutions of the markets of the East, employees constructed a cohesive internal network of peer communications that directed English trading ships during their voyages. This network integrated Company operations, encouraged innovation, and increased the Company’s flexibility, adaptability, and responsiveness to local circumstance. Between Monopoly and Free Trade highlights the dynamic potential of social networks in the early modern era.

Before the age of Industrial Revolution, the great Asian civilisations constituted areas not only of high culture but also of advanced economic development.

First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

For much of its two centuries of existence (1602 to 1799), the VOC, the Dutch East India Company was the largest trading company in the world. Although the VOC was established to operate primarily as a trading company, it soon also came to play a prominent military, diplomatic and political role on the Asian stage and eventually it laid the foundations of the Dutch colonial empire in the Indonesian Archipelago. Merchant in Asia is the first study to pay attention to the full breadth and width of the VOC commercial activities in Asia. It looks at the company from the peak of its fame until its final decline at the end of the eighteenth century. The study focuses on the main trade goods - spices, Indian textiles, Chinese tea and Javanese coffee - and their specific by-products. Els Jacobs has analyzed in detail the VOC trade in fifteen of the most important commodities that together made up 85% of the total turnover. This innovative study is based on extensive research of the VOC archives and many other Dutch sources, as well as a detailed quantitative analysis of the VOC bookkeeping records. In the study the author sketches in vivid detail how the merchants of the VOC sold, bought, and even supervised the production of tropical products and how they dealt with Asian suppliers and consumers. In addition, she looks at the range of problems the merchants encountered in the maritime trade from Yemen and Persia in the West to China and Japan in the East, including India, Ceylon, Malacca, and the Indonesian Archipelago.

The British merchants who began trading with Asia in the late 1500s found a sophisticated and thriving trading community. Goods were manufactured and traded on a scale never seen in Europe, and Britain discovered a wealth of products including silks, porcelain, tea, spices and furniture. This illustrated book examines the history of trading with Asia, drawing on the extensive collections of the British Library, the prime holder of the documentary legacy of the East India Company.

The East India Company at Home, 1757–1857 explores how empire in Asia shaped British country houses, their interiors and the lives of their residents. It includes chapters from researchers based in a wide range of settings such as archives and libraries, museums, heritage organisations, the community of family historians and universities. It moves beyond conventional academic narratives and makes an important contribution to ongoing debates around how empire impacted Britain. The volume focuses on the propertied families of the East India Company at the height of Company rule. From the Battle of Plassey in 1757 to the outbreak of the Indian Uprising in 1857, objects, people and wealth flowed to Britain from Asia. As men in Company service increasingly shifted their activities from trade to military expansion and political administration, a new population of civil servants, army officers, surveyors and surgeons journeyed to India to make their fortunes. These Company men and their families acquired wealth, tastes and identities in India, which travelled home with them to Britain. Their stories, the biographies of their Indian possessions and the narratives of the stately homes in Britain that came to house them, frame our explorations of imperial culture and its British legacies.

A collection of essays on the history and relationships of the East India Company from 1600 to the early 1800s.