Merchants
Chartered by Elizabeth I on the last day of 1600 with a monopoly on English trade east of Good Hope, the Company spent its first century and a half as a trading firm among stronger powers — elbowed out of the spice islands by the Dutch (the Amboyna executions of 1623 rankled for generations), and trading at the Mughal Empire’s sufferance from coastal footholds that grew into Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta. Its business was Indian textiles, saltpetre, and later China tea — the cargo dumped at Boston in 1773 was the Company’s.
Rulers
The Mughal collapse after Nadir Shah’s 1739 sack turned trading posts into players. At Plassey in 1757, Robert Clive — with fewer than 3,000 men and a pre-purchased treason inside the enemy command — defeated the Nawab of Bengal; within a decade the Company held the diwani, the right to tax Bengal, some 20 million people. A corporation now owned a state’s revenues: its servants returned home as “nabobs” of scandalous wealth, while under its early revenue-farming the Bengal famine of 1770 killed millions with minimal relief — a conjunction Parliament noticed. Regulation followed (Company officials, Clive included, faced parliamentary inquisition; Warren Hastings’s impeachment trial ran seven years), producing the strange mature form: a private company governing India under state oversight, its dividends capped, its armies — some 260,000 men by the 1850s, twice the British Army — conquering onward through Mysore, the Marathas, and the Sikhs, while its Chinese ledger was balanced by growing opium in India for smuggling into China: the trade behind the Opium War.
1857 and the end
Annexation policies, missionary pressure, and a hundred accumulated grievances detonated in 1857, when the Bengal army’s sepoys rose — the cartridge-grease rumour was merely the spark — and northern India burned for a year, with massacres and reprisals of lasting infamy on both sides. Parliament’s verdict dissolved the arrangement: the Government of India Act 1858 transferred India to the Crown, beginning the Raj; the hollowed Company was wound up in 1874, unmourned. Its afterlife is conceptual: the founding case study — cited from Adam Smith to modern boardrooms and courtrooms — of what happens when a corporation acquires an army, a territory, and a tax base: the original, as its historians like to say, too big to fail.