Company
DissolvedThe East India Company
London · 1600 – 1874
After the 1857 rebellion the crown took the company's territories. The company itself was dissolved in 1874.
Elizabeth I chartered the Governor and Company of Merchants of London Trading into the East Indies on the last day of 1600. A group of merchants received a monopoly on English trade east of the Cape of Good Hope, and the right to govern themselves while they exercised it.
For a century and a half it was a trading firm that fought the Dutch, ran factories in India, and paid irregular dividends. After Plassey in 1757 it was also a government. It collected the land revenue of Bengal. It kept an army. It still called itself a company.
From warehouse to territory
The early jobs were supercargo, writer, and factor, the young men sent out to buy cloth and pepper and live above the warehouse. The later jobs were collector, judge, and sepoy officer. The company's own clerks in Leadenhall Street administered an empire by correspondence. A writer who survived the climate could become wealthy on private trade the company half-forbade and half-depended on. The line between merchant and official disappeared, which was the corruption Parliament kept investigating and could not define away.
The crown takes the territory
The 1857 rebellion ended the arrangement. The Government of India Act 1858 transferred the territories to the crown. The company lingered, a legal shell, until the East India Stock Dividend Redemption Act dissolved it in 1874. The museum keeps it as the proof that a joint-stock company can become a state, and that a state, once it notices, will eventually take the company back.
The work it organized
- Writer
- Factor
- Sepoy
- London clerk
On the timeline
Related
- The Dutch East India CompanyDissolved