60 Fun Facts About East India Company

In which year was the East India Company founded?

Elizabeth I granted the charter on 31 December 1600; the company lasted until 1874.

Which monarch granted the East India Company its founding charter?

The petition came from George, Earl of Cumberland, and 218 others.

What was its original chartered name in 1600?

The 1697 rival was the English Company; the 1708 merger produced the United Company.

For how many years did the original charter grant the company a monopoly on English trade east of the Cape of Good Hope?

Unlicensed traders faced forfeiture of ship and cargo and imprisonment at the royal pleasure.

Roughly how large were the company's three presidency armies at their peak?

That was twice the size of the British Army at certain times.

Whose 1577-80 voyage to the Spice Islands, returning a 5,000 percent profit, helped inspire English trade with the East?

Drake obtained cloves and nutmeg from Sultan Babullah in the Moluccas.

Which Portuguese carrack, captured in 1592, was the largest vessel ever seen in England and galvanised the East Indies trade?

Its rutter, or mariner's handbook, revealed the routes to China, India and Japan.

Who was named the company's first governor in the 1600 charter?

Business was first transacted at the Nags Head Inn in Bishopsgate before East India House on Leadenhall Street.

Who commanded the company's first voyage in 1601, and aboard which ship?

He seized a Portuguese carrack in the Malacca Straits and set up factories at Bantam and in the Moluccas.

The EIC's early struggles in the spice trade were mainly due to competition from which rival?

The Dutch stronghold in the islands drove the English to focus on India instead.

Which 1612 naval victory over the Portuguese, near Surat, encouraged the company to seek a foothold on the Indian mainland?

It was fought at Suvali in Gujarat.

Where was the company's first Indian factory established in 1611?

It was on the Andhra coast of the Bay of Bengal; Surat followed in 1615.

Which English ambassador negotiated trading rights for the company at the court of the Mughal Emperor Jahangir?

Jahangir wrote to James I promising the English "free liberty without any restraint".

Bombay came to England as part of whose dowry?

Portugal ceded it on her marriage to Charles II.

A Dutch attack on which company factory in 1623 pushed the English to abandon the Spice Islands for Bengal?

The company then spent a century cultivating the Mughal dynasty and trading peacefully.

How did the Anglo-Mughal War of 1686-1690 end for the company?

Its envoys had to prostrate themselves before Aurangzeb and pay a large indemnity.

The pirate Henry Every's 1695 capture of which Mughal treasure ship nearly ended English trade in India?

Its loot of up to 600,000 pounds is called the richest ship ever taken by pirates, and it triggered the first worldwide manhunt.

Which Mughal emperor's death in 1707 plunged Bengal into the anarchy the company exploited?

Delhi was soon routinely controlled by Maratha, Afghan or usurper armies.

Which powers did Charles II grant the company in a series of acts around 1670?

These rights turned a trading firm into a proto-state.

What were the company's locally raised, European-trained soldiers called?

A few thousand disciplined sepoys with field cannon repeatedly beat far larger Mughal armies.

The 1757 battle that opened the way to company rule in Bengal was fought where?

Robert Clive beat Nawab Siraj-ud-Daulah after bribing his commander Mir Jafar.

Whose betrayal of Nawab Siraj-ud-Daulah made the 1757 victory over him possible?

Clive promised to make him Nawab of Bengal in return.

What was Robert Clive's official position, which made him the founder of company rule in eastern India?

He is known as Clive of India and was made a baron.

Clive's defence of which fort in 1751, with only about 500 men, made his name?

Madras could spare him just 200 Europeans, 300 sepoys and three small cannons.

In 1765 Clive obtained a firman granting the company the diwani, or revenue rights, of which three regions?

The grant came from the Mughal emperor Shah Alam and effectively handed the company Bengal.

The Great Bengal Famine under company rule in 1770 is estimated to have killed how many people?

The company used torture to extract taxes and reduced much of the population to poverty.

Which primary gunpowder ingredient did the company sell to the Crown "by the candle" in the 1670s?

Bidding at those auctions ran as long as an inch of candle stayed alight.

Which Mughal emperor first extended hospitality to English traders in Bengal, the richest region of his empire, in 1634?

By 1717 customs duties for the English in Bengal had been waived entirely.

A rival "parallel" East India Company was floated by Parliament in which year, before the two merged in 1708?

The old company's stockholders quickly bought 315,000 pounds of the new one and dominated it.

By 1720 roughly what share of British imports came from India, almost all through the company?

The figure reasserted the influence of the company's parliamentary lobby.

The company began trading with which country in 1699, opening a permanent factory at Canton in 1715?

By the 1770s it was selling opium there in exchange for tea and porcelain.

The company's drug sales to China eventually led to which war in 1839?

The Treaty of Nanjing then ceded Hong Kong to Britain.

The company established a short-lived trading house in Japan in 1613 at which port?

Captain John Saris of the Clove got permission with help from the English sailor William Adams; the factory closed in 1623.

Which banker's loss of 300,000 pounds shorting company stock in June 1772 helped set off a Europe-wide banking collapse?

Twenty to thirty banks failed, and the Bank of England then refused to renew the company's loan.

How much tea did the company have sitting unsold in British warehouses in 1773?

Selling it fast in America looked like the answer to its finances.

On what date did protesters throw company tea into Boston Harbor?

They boarded the Dartmouth disguised as American Indians and dumped about 342 chests.

Which 1773 act let the company export tea directly to the American colonies for the first time?

It kept the threepenny Townshend duty, which the Sons of Liberty refused to swallow.

Which act of Parliament abolished the company's trade monopoly with India?

The China monopoly ended in 1833, leaving the company purely administrative.

Where did the 1857 rebellion against the company begin, as a mutiny of the company's Indian soldiers?

It broke out on 10 May 1857, about 40 miles northeast of Delhi.

Rumours about the greased cartridges of which new rifle helped spark the 1857 uprising?

Soldiers tore the paper cartridges with their teeth, and the fat was rumoured to be cow and pig.

Which 81-year-old ruler did the rebels of 1857 proclaim Emperor of Hindustan?

He was the last Mughal emperor and was exiled after the rebellion was crushed.

Which act transferred the company's Indian territories and armies to the British Crown?

It was passed on 2 August 1858 and created the office of Secretary of State for India.

What guaranteed annual dividend did shareholders accept in 1833 when the company gave up its commercial assets?

The debts were serviced from Indian tax revenue and only extinguished during the Second World War.

What residual role did the company keep until 1874?

It also kept supplying the island of Saint Helena.

On what date was the East India Company formally dissolved?

The Times said no other trading company had ever attempted such a work "in the whole history of the human race".

On which London thoroughfare stood East India House, the company's headquarters?

It was demolished in 1861-62, and the Lloyd's building now stands on the site.

The company's training college for its clerks or "writers", founded in 1806, later reopened as which public school?

The Addiscombe seminary trained its army officers, and the East India Club still exists in St James's Square.

The company's ensign of red and white stripes with a canton was, at the time of the American Revolution, nearly identical to what?

Historian Charles Fawcett argued it inspired the Stars and Stripes.

What were the company's ships called?

Their names were sometimes prefixed HCS, for Honourable Company's Ship.

What was the name of the company's own navy?

Its warships accompanied the Royal Navy on operations such as the invasion of Java.

Which institution holds the East India Company's records, unlike other UK government records?

They form part of the British Library's Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections.

Which rival, established in 1602 and paying its shareholders a 40 percent annual dividend, was the wealthiest commercial operation in the world in the early 1600s?

With 50,000 employees and 200 ships it was the wealthiest commercial operation on earth in the early 1600s.

Which insurance market's headquarters now occupies the Leadenhall Street site of East India House?

The headquarters, rebuilt in 1726–29 and again in 1796–1800, was vacated in 1860 and pulled down the following year.

Where on the Thames did the company build its own shipyard, fully operational by 1617?

It had outgrown a leased yard at Deptford; the Blackwall site later became part of the East India Docks, which closed in 1967.

Where did the company found a military seminary in 1809 to train its young officers?

The government took it over in 1858 as the Royal Indian Military College and closed it three years later.

What Latin motto appeared on the company's original 1600 coat of arms?

It means 'Where God leads, nothing harms'; the crest above bore a zodiac-girdled sphere with the words 'Deus indicat'.

The company's heart-shaped merchant mark is the central emblem of which early postage stamps?

The same mark, with the initials EIC inside a saltire, was the central motif of the company's coinage.

At the Battle of Pulo Aura, which commodore led a convoy of Indiamen to drive off a French squadron?

Sailing aboard the Warley, he won what was probably the company's most notable naval victory.

Which knight received a licence from Charles I in 1635 to trade with the East wherever the company had no presence?

The rivalry with the Dutch was fiercer still, boiling over into four Anglo-Dutch wars between 1652 and 1784.

In which year did the company finally end its involvement in the slave trade?

Its archives record a 1684 order to ship 250 enslaved people from Madagascar to St Helena; the West Africa Squadron found evidence of illegal trading.