A Business of State

Commerce, Politics, and the Birth of the East India Company

ISBN 9780674984561

Publication date: 05/07/2018

At the height of its power around 1800, the English East India Company controlled half of the world’s trade and deployed a vast network of political influencers at home and abroad. Yet the story of the Company’s beginnings in the early seventeenth century has remained largely untold. Rupali Mishra’s account of the East India Company’s formative years sheds new light on one of the most powerful corporations in the history of the world.

From its birth in 1600, the East India Company lay at the heart of English political and economic life. The Company’s fortunes were determined by the leading figures of the Stuart era, from the monarch and his privy counselors to an extended cast of eminent courtiers and powerful merchants. Drawing on a host of overlooked and underutilized sources, Mishra reconstructs the inner life of the Company, laying bare the era’s fierce struggles to define the difference between public and private interests and the use and abuse of power. Unlike traditional accounts, which portray the Company as a private entity that came to assume the powers of a state, Mishra’s history makes clear that, from its inception, the East India Company was embedded within—and inseparable from—the state.

A Business of State illuminates how the East India Company quickly came to inhabit such a unique role in England’s commercial and political ambitions. It also offers critical insights into the rise of the early modern English state and the expansion and development of its nascent empire.

Praise

Mishra has written an important book. This is not just a book that is extraordinarily well-researched but it also fills a major gap in the literature. The first hundred years of the Company has received very little attention from historians…More importantly, the book demonstrates the close and almost inevitable connection that existed between the English East India Company from its inception and the English state.

—Rudrangshu Mukherjee, The Wire
Original, well-conceptualized, and thoroughly researched, A Business of State is an extremely engaging and important work that offers a much-needed examination of the origins of the East India Company. Mishra reveals just how deeply this history is embedded in the political and commercial history of the early Stuart regime—and vice versa.

—Philip Stern, author of The Company-State
A striking and important work that fills a large gap in our understanding of the early history of the East India Company, one of the major institutions at the heart of the British empire. A Business of State explores the many dimensions of the political life of this important corporate body, throwing fresh light on English domestic politics, corporate and political culture, as well as on an institution crucial in the development of British imperialism.

—Michael Braddick, author of God’s Fury, England’s Fire
A Business of State is an important work of scholarship. The analysis is imaginative and meticulous, the writing authoritative and compelling. Mishra’s innovative approach to the early history of the English East India Company makes this an essential book in British and imperial history.

—Alison Games, author of The Web of Empire
This impressive volume deserves wide readership…A Business of State gives readers much to think, both about the early seventeenth century and about today.

—Robert A. Pierce, Sixteenth Century Journal