For the economic historian the archives of the English East India Company provide one of the most comprehensive sources of information for the reconstruction of the commercial history of Europe and Asia in the pre-modern age. The Company's officials, both in London and in the East Indies, were prolific writers of letters, memoranda, and diaries. These qualitative records contain almost all the secret deliberations of the decision-makers, and their inner considerations on commercial and other matters illuminate the entire economic and political environment in which the Company operated at home and in Asian countries. When the English historical sources are supplemented by the comparable material in the archives of the Dutch organisation, the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, the result is the creation of a gigantic repository of knowledge on the European expansion in Asia during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The survival of the East India Company's account books also enables us to undertake a complete quantitative analysis of its activities and to build up long time-series on the total volume and value of trade, prices of goods, fluctuations in currency values, prices of gold and silver, transport costs, and many other economic variables. But in a way the vast scale of the Company's operations and the weight of documentation have so far been a deterrent rather than a positive gift to the historians in analysing its pre-territorial activities. In spite of the obvious importance of the subject, there is no single work that deals with the whole history of the Company during the period from 1660 to 1760.