The East India Company
31 Dec 1600 O.S. – 1 Jun 187453 items
businesscolonialismA trading company that became a state
On the last day of 1600 Elizabeth I chartered a company of London merchants to trade east of the Cape of Good Hope. It came for pepper, lost the spice islands to the Dutch, and settled for cotton, indigo and tea from a string of fortified warehouses in India. After Plassey in 1757 it collected the taxes of Bengal and ran an army larger than Britain’s. Parliament then took it apart piece by piece: its trade in 1813 and 1833, its government in 1858, and the company itself on 1 June 1874.
Four bands frame the story: trading company, territorial power, administrator and winding up. Shorter bands mark the wars, the famine and the trials inside them. Filter by stocks for the money, trade, tea and opium for the cargoes, war for the conquests and regulation for Parliament’s slow takeover.
Two calendars
England kept the Julian calendar until 2 September 1752, so every English-dated event before then is shown Old Style, as the Company’s clerks wrote it. The charter of 31 December 1600 was 10 January 1601 in Rome and Amsterdam. The English year also began on 25 March, so Sir Thomas Roe dated his first audience with Jahangir “10 January 1615”; the timeline puts it in 1616. The Dutch, like most of Europe, already counted Gregorian, so Amboyna is shown in their dates.
The government of an exclusive company of merchants is, perhaps, the worst of all governments for any country whatever. — Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776
Items
Elizabeth I charters the Company
A factory at Bantam
Battle of Swally
A factory at Surat
Sir Thomas Roe before Jahangir
The Amboyna executions
Land granted at Madraspatnam
The Company moves to Leadenhall Street
Cromwell’s charter: a permanent joint stock
Charles II leases Bombay to the Company
Job Charnock lands at Sutanuti
Old and new companies merge
A trading post at Canton
Farrukhsiyar’s farman
Siraj ud-Daulah takes Calcutta
Battle of Plassey
Battle of Buxar
The diwani of Bengal
The Company asks for a bailout
The Tea Act
The Regulating Act
A monopoly on Bengal opium
Tea into Boston Harbor
The Wealth of Nations
Pitt’s India Act
The Permanent Settlement
The fall of Seringapatam
General Lake takes Delhi
The East India College opens
Charter Act ends the India monopoly
Raffles founds Singapore
Charter Act ends the Company’s trade
Lin Zexu destroys the opium
Nemesis at Chuenpi
Treaty of Nanking
Awadh annexed
Mutiny at Meerut
Bahadur Shah proclaimed in Delhi
The Bibighar killings
Delhi retaken
Government of India Act
The Company is dissolved