During the late eighteenth century the English East India Company, a private trading organisation, established a vast territorial empire on the Indian subcontinent. As the Company extended its power and influence far beyond its coastal trading settlements at Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras, it was transformed into an imperial power, backed by a large army, and it began to exercise administrative control over millions of Indians. The nature and completeness of this extraordinary institutional transformation was such that when the Company lost its last remaining commercial privileges in 1833 it continued to exercise British rule over much of South Asia. Only after the great Indian mutiny of 1857 was it was supplanted on the subcontinent by the representatives of the British Crown.

This book examines how the acquisition and expansion of an empire in India affected the development of the East India Company in Britain. It also looks at how the Company interacted with the world around it and, as such, it focuses on what is sometimes described rather crudely as the domestic ‘impact’ of empire. The book does not pretend to discuss how the British empire was first established and then developed in India; nor, it has to be said, does it endeavour to cover each and every aspect of the Company's tangled domestic affairs. Instead, through a series of linked thematic studies, it looks inside the Company to see how those in London responded to the unparalleled events that were unfolding in Asia, and it looks beyond the Company to establish the extent to which the influences of the East India trade and Indian empire were felt within Britain's economy and society.