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 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.

THE TOP 5 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S BEST BOOKS OF 2019 THE TIMES HISTORY BOOK OF THE YEAR FINALIST FOR THE CUNDILL HISTORY PRIZE 2020 LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2019 A FINANCIAL TIMES, OBSERVER, DAILY TELEGRAPH, WALL STREET JOURNAL AND TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 'Dalrymple is a superb historian with a visceral understanding of India ... A book of beauty' – Gerard DeGroot, The Times In August 1765 the East India Company defeated the young Mughal emperor and forced him to establish a new administration in his richest provinces. Run by English merchants who collected taxes using a ruthless private army, this new regime saw the East India Company transform itself from an international trading corporation into something much more unusual: an aggressive colonial power in the guise of a multinational business. William Dalrymple tells the remarkable story of the East India Company as it has never been told before, unfolding a timely cautionary tale of the first global corporate power.

In the early modern world, the Safavid, Ottoman, and Mughal empires sprawled across a vast swath of the earth, stretching from the Himalayas to the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea. The diverse and overlapping literate communities that flourished in these three empires left a lasting legacy on the political, religious, and cultural landscape of the Near East and India. This volume is a comprehensive sourcebook of newly translated texts that shed light on the intertwined histories and cultures of these communities, presenting a wide range of source material spanning literature, philosophy, religion, politics, mysticism, and visual art in thematically organized chapters. Scholarly essays by leading researchers provide historical context for closer analyses of a lesser-known era and a framework for further research and debate. The volume aims to provide a new model for the study and teaching of the region’s early modern history that stands in contrast to the prevailing trend of examining this interconnected past in isolation.

This is the first short history of the East India Company from its founding in 1600 to its demise in 1857, designed for students and academics. The Company was central to the growth of the British Empire in India, to the development of overseas trade, and to the rise of shareholder capitalism, so this survey will be essential reading for imperial and economic historians and historians of Asia alike. It stresses the neglected early years of the Company, and its intimate relationship with (and impact upon) the domestic British scene.

The English East India Company was the mother of the modern multinational. Its trading empire encircled the globe, importing Asian luxuries such as spices, textiles, and teas. But it also conquered much of India with its private army and broke open China's markets with opium. The Company's practices shocked its contemporaries and still reverberate today. The Corporation That Changed the World is the first book to reveal the Company's enduring legacy as a corporation. This expanded edition explores how the four forces of scale, technology, finance, and regulation drove its spectacular rise and fall. For decades, the Company was simply too big to fail, and stock market bubbles, famines, drug-running, and even duels between rival executives are to be found in this new account. For Robins, the Company's story provides vital lessons on both the role of corporations in world history and the steps required to make global business accountable today.

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

★ The East India Company ★Founded at the dawn of the seventeenth century as European nations were establishing global empires, the English East India Company would become a vital part of burgeoning British supremacy. Begun as a joint-stock company for trade with the East Indies, this organization would evolve into one of the world's first capitalistic corporations. Inside you will read about...✓ The English in the Atlantic Era and the Founding of the East India Company ✓ The 17th Century: Struggling, Building, and Growing with Violence ✓ The East India Company Enters the 18th Century ✓ The British Government Steps In ✓ China and the Opium Trade ✓ Growing British Involvement in the 19th Century ✓ The End of the East India Company And much more! Over the course of their 250+ years, the East India Company had built a global trading empire, raised an army and waged war, and conquered vast territory, including the entire subcontinent of India. Without their involvement, the British presence in India would look very different in the historical record. Though the company was dissolved by 1874, their influence on world history cannot be overstated. Series Information: The East India Companies Book 1

In Reading the East India Company, Betty Joseph offers an innovative account of how archives—and the practice of archiving—shaped colonial ideologies in Britain and British-controlled India during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Drawing on the British East India Company's records as well as novels, memoirs, portraiture and guidebooks, Joseph shows how the company's economic and archival practices intersected to produce colonial "fictions" or "truth-effects" that strictly governed class and gender roles—in effect creating a "grammar of power" that kept the far-flung empire intact. And while women were often excluded from this archive, Joseph finds that we can still hear their voices at certain key historical junctures. Attending to these voices, Joseph illustrates how the writing of history belongs not only to the colonial project set forth by British men, but also to the agendas and mechanisms of agency—of colonized Indian, as well as European women. In the process, she makes a valuable and lasting contribution to gender studies, postcolonial theory, and the history of South Asia.