East India Company, also called English East India Company, formally (1600–1708) Governor and Company of Merchants of London Trading into the East Indies or (1708–1873) United Company of Merchants of England Trading to the East Indies, English company formed for the exploitation of trade with East and Southeast Asia and India, incorporated by royal charter on December 31, 1600. Starting as a monopolistic trading body, the company became involved in politics and acted as an agent of British imperialism in India from the early 18th century to the mid-19th century. In addition, the activities of the company in China in the 19th century served as a catalyst for the expansion of British influence there.

East India House, London The East India House in Leadenhall Street, London, drawing by Thomas Hosmer Shepherd, c. 1817. Thomas Hosmer Shepherd

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The company was formed to share in the East Indian spice trade. That trade had been a monopoly of Spain and Portugal until the defeat of the Spanish Armada (1588) by England gave the English the chance to break the monopoly. Until 1612 the company conducted separate voyages, separately subscribed. There were temporary joint stocks until 1657, when a permanent joint stock was raised.

The company met with opposition from the Dutch in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) and the Portuguese. The Dutch virtually excluded company members from the East Indies after the Amboina Massacre in 1623 (an incident in which English, Japanese, and Portuguese traders were executed by Dutch authorities), but the company’s defeat of the Portuguese in India (1612) won them trading concessions from the Mughal Empire. The company settled down to a trade in cotton and silk piece goods, indigo, and saltpetre, with spices from South India. It extended its activities to the Persian Gulf, Southeast Asia, and East Asia.

Beginning in the early 1620s, the East India Company began using slave labour and transporting enslaved people to its facilities in Southeast Asia and India as well as to the island of St. Helena in the Atlantic Ocean, west of Angola. Although some of those enslaved by the company came from Indonesia and West Africa, the majority came from East Africa—from Mozambique or especially from Madagascar—and were primarily transported to the company’s holdings in India and Indonesia. Large-scale transportation of slaves by the company was prevalent from the 1730s to the early 1750s and ended in the 1770s.

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After the mid-18th century the cotton-goods trade declined, while tea became an important import from China. Beginning in the early 19th century, the company financed the tea trade with illegal opium exports to China. Chinese opposition to that trade precipitated the first Opium War (1839–42), which resulted in a Chinese defeat and the expansion of British trading privileges; a second conflict, often called the Arrow War (1856–60), brought increased trading rights for Europeans.

official of the East India Company riding in an Indian procession Official of the East India Company riding in an Indian procession, watercolour on paper, c. 1825–30; in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Photos.com/Getty Images

The original company faced opposition to its monopoly, which led to the establishment of a rival company and the fusion (1708) of the two as the United Company of Merchants of England trading to the East Indies. The United Company was organized into a court of 24 directors who worked through committees. They were elected annually by the Court of Proprietors, or shareholders. When the company acquired control of Bengal in 1757, Indian policy was until 1773 influenced by shareholders’ meetings, where votes could be bought by the purchase of shares. That arrangement led to government intervention. The Regulating Act (1773) and William Pitt the Younger’s India Act (1784) established government control of political policy through a regulatory board responsible to Parliament. Thereafter the company gradually lost both commercial and political control. Its commercial monopoly was broken in 1813, and from 1834 it was merely a managing agency for the British government of India. It was deprived of that role after the Indian Mutiny (1857), and it ceased to exist as a legal entity in 1873.