On the Indian subcontinent Glaxo's existing subsidiary was strengthened and a new one established in Pakistan in the post-war period. Among Glaxo's subsidiaries, the Indian company, H. J. Foster & Company and its successors, Glaxo Laboratories in India and Pakistan, were foremost in terms of capital employed, turnover and profits (see tables A8 and A9). They were also members of one of the largest and most important expatriate British business communities in the world. Glaxo's experiences there were part of ‘an important element in the modern economic history of mainland South Asia, and of the British imperial system as a whole’ and these experiences were not limited simply to business activity in the area.

As this chapter shows, ‘analysing the history of British expatriate firms in India raises the issue of the role of political factors in business history in a very direct way’. Glaxo's development in India, however, ran counter to that of very many other British companies. Its business was not in decline before independence in 1947, nor did it suffer ‘spectacular collapse’ after-wards. Indeed the Indian subsidiary was more remunerative than most of Glaxo's other overseas ventures and notably more remunerative than those of other British investors in India in the 1950s and 1960s. Of British multinationals heavily involved in India, in that period several companies including Brooke Bond, ICI, Vickers, Turner & Newall, Tube Investments, Hawker Siddeley and Babcock & Wilcox, had low growth rates.