The East India Company (EIC) was also known as the Honourable East India Company  (HEIC), as John Company, or in India as Company Bahadur (Hindustani bahādur, “brave”). It was a very early joint-stock company that was granted an English Royal Charter on December 31, 1600 by Elizabeth I. The British East India Company started out as a commercial trading venture, but grew so that it accouted for nearly half of all world trade and to all intents and purposes ruled India until the Indian Mutiny of 1857.

To quote from the preface to John Keay’s The Honourable Company:

The career of ‘the Grandest Society of Merchants in the Universe’ spans as much geography as it does history. To follow its multifarious activities involves imposing a chronology extending from the reign of Elizabeth to that of Victoria upon a map extending from southern Africa to north-west America. Heavy are the demands this makes on both writer and reader. (And hence perhaps the dearth of narrative histories of the Company in this post-imperial age.) But the conclusion is inescapable. The East India Company was as much about the East as about India. Its Pacific legacies would be as lasting as those in the Indian Ocean; its most successful commercial venture was in China, not India.

Freed of its subservient function as the unworthy stock on which the mighty Raj would be grafted, the Company stands forth as a robust association of adventurers engaged in hazarding all in a series of preposterous gambles. Some paid off; many did not but are no less memorable for it. Bizarre locations, exotic produce, and recalcitrant personalities combine to induce a sense of romance which, however repugnant to the scholar, is in no way contrived. It was thanks to the incorrigible pioneering of the Company’s servants that the British Empire acquired its peculiarly diffuse character. But for the Company there would have been not only no British India but also no global British Empire.

Our investigation will range widely over its history and the development of trade, technologies, the impact on India, and Great Britain), and the battles with the Dutch East India Company (VOC), interaction with China and the development of trading entrepots around South East Asia.

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