52 Fun Facts About East India Company

Which pattern is named after the Scottish town whose weavers copied Kashmir shawls the East India Company brought to Europe?

Paisley. The pattern surged back into fashion in the 1960s, helped along by The Beatles.

Which monarch granted the East India Company its founding charter?

Elizabeth I granted it so London merchants could break into the rich East Indies spice trade, then held by rival European powers.

Which American university takes its name from a former East India Company governor in Madras?

Yale University. Elihu Yale, removed from office over charges of enriching himself, later sent books and goods whose sale paid for a college building.

The East India Company's first charter gave it a monopoly on English trade east of which cape?

Cape of Good Hope. The company's first fleet rounded it in 1601 and went on to set up its first trading post at Bantam on Java.

Whose 1577-80 voyage, which loaded cloves in the Spice Islands, made its backers a fortune?

Francis Drake. The cloves were a sideshow: most of the fortune came from Spanish treasure ships he seized, such as the Cacafuego.

Which famous diamond went to the British Crown after the East India Company annexed the Punjab in 1849?

The Koh-i-Noor. Its old cut disappointed crowds at the 1851 Great Exhibition, so it was recut, shrinking it from 186 to about 106 carats.

Which British philosopher spent almost 35 years working for the East India Company?

John Stuart Mill. He joined at 17 as a junior clerk under his father, and left only when the Crown took over the company's rule in India.

Which soldiers did the East India Company begin recruiting in 1815, after fighting them in the Himalayan hills?

Gurkhas. Units the company raised in 1815 later served in the Indian Army, and some passed into the British Army in 1948.

Parliament's acts against cheap cotton prints imported by the East India Company were named after which cloth?

Calico, named after Calicut, the port where Europeans first bought it. The bans followed protests from British wool producers.

A mechanical tiger mauling a European man, seized by East India Company troops in 1799, belongs to which London museum?

The Victoria and Albert Museum. It first went on show in the company's own museum at East India House, and moved to the V&A when that collection was split up.

Which ruler, called the 'Tiger of Mysore', fought the East India Company with rocket troops until he died in 1799?

Tipu Sultan died defending his capital when company troops stormed it, ending the last of the four Anglo-Mysore Wars.

Who was James I's ambassador to the court of Mughal Emperor Jahangir, sent to help the East India Company?

Sir Thomas Roe. His mission won protection for the company's trading post at Surat and began a long relationship with the Mughal court.

Bombay came to England as part of whose dowry?

Catherine of Braganza. Charles II handed Bombay to the company in 1668, and it went on to become a major centre of company trade.

At which Spice Islands trading post were ten East India Company men tortured and executed in 1623?

Amboyna. They were accused of plotting to seize the local fort, and the company soon turned from the Spice Islands to India.

After losing a war with the Mughals in 1690, the East India Company set up a base at which future capital?

Calcutta. Job Charnock landed there in August 1690, though in 2003 a court ruled that no single person or date marks the city's founding.

Which pirate's 1695 capture of the Mughal treasure ship Ganj-i-Sawai threatened English trade in India?

Henry Every. Despite a big bounty and what is called the first worldwide manhunt, he vanished in 1696 and was never caught.

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

Aurangzeb. He had reimposed the jizya, a tax on non-Muslims that Akbar had abolished.

Which powers did Charles II grant the East India Company around 1670?

To mint money and wage war: armed with these rights, the company built fortresses, raised armies and ran its own courts, like a state.

What were the East India 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 East India Company rule in Bengal was fought where?

Plassey. Clive's army of about 3,000 routed a Bengal force of around 50,000, and he went on to become Governor of Bengal.

Whose betrayal of Siraj-ud-Daulah, Bengal's ruler, made the 1757 victory over him possible?

Mir Jafar, the army commander, promised Clive he would not fight, and was then installed as ruler and governed as a company puppet.

Which British general from the American Revolutionary War later died in India while serving as Governor-General?

Charles Cornwallis. The general who surrendered at Yorktown in 1781 went on to govern India twice, and died there in 1805.

Which fort's 1751 defence against a far larger army first made Robert Clive's name?

Arcot. Clive held its crumbling fort for 52 days, and the victory helped turn the tide for the company in southern India.

Which Himalayan peak was thought to be the world's highest until the East India Company's survey measured Everest?

Kangchenjunga. The higher peak was renamed after George Everest, a former Surveyor General, even though he had objected to the honour.

Which East India Company governor built public granaries after the 1770 Bengal famine to prevent another?

Warren Hastings. Years later Parliament impeached him for corruption, but after a trial lasting seven years the Lords acquitted him.

In 1842, a retreating East India Company and British army was wiped out in the snowbound passes of which land?

Afghanistan. Of about 4,500 troops and 12,000 camp followers who left Kabul, only one European, Dr William Brydon, reached safety at Jalalabad.

Which classic novel begins with a British officer stealing a sacred Indian diamond during an East India Company siege in 1799?

The Moonstone. In Wilkie Collins's story, three Hindu priests follow the stolen diamond to England to win it back.

Which future British commander won his first major victory at the Battle of Assaye in 1803?

Arthur Wellesley. The future Duke of Wellington later rated Assaye above even his defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo as his best battle.

From 1757, China let Western ships, including the East India Company's, trade at only which port?

Canton. Even there, Western traders could deal only with a guild of licensed Chinese merchants.

The East India Company's sales in China eventually led to which war in 1839?

The First Opium War. It ended with the 1842 Treaty of Nanjing, which forced China to open up more trade and cede Hong Kong Island to Britain.

William Adams, who helped the East India Company open a trading post in Japan, inspired which James Clavell novel?

Shōgun. Adams reached Japan as a ship's pilot and became an adviser to Tokugawa Ieyasu, and Clavell turned him into John Blackthorne.

In 1819, Stamford Raffles signed a treaty letting the East India Company open a trading post at which port?

Singapore. The trading post grew into a hub for shipping between Europe and Asia, one of the great cities the company helped build.

Which East India Company policy annexed Indian states whose rulers died without a natural male heir?

The Doctrine of Lapse. Jhansi was annexed under it, and its widowed Rani became a leading figure of the 1857 rebellion.

Protesters who dumped East India Company tea into Boston Harbor in 1773 were disguised as members of which people?

Mohawk. Protest went beyond Boston: in New York, Philadelphia and Charleston, the company's tea agents resigned.

After protesters destroyed East India Company tea in Boston, Parliament passed punishing laws that colonists nicknamed what?

The Intolerable Acts. Among other things they closed Boston's port until the tea was paid for and cut back self-government in Massachusetts.

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

The Charter Act 1813. It also required the company to spend 100,000 rupees a year promoting learning and science in India.

Where did the 1857 rebellion against the East India Company begin, as a mutiny of its Indian soldiers?

Meerut. The mutiny broke out there on 10 May 1857 and spread across northern India, and the rebellion went on to end the company's rule.

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

The Enfield. Soldiers bit its paper cartridges open, and rumour said the grease was cow and pig fat, offensive to both Hindus and Muslims.

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

Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal emperor, was tried by the British after the revolt and exiled to Rangoon, where he died in 1862.

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

The Government of India Act 1858. The 1857 rebellion forced Parliament's hand, and from then on India was governed in the Crown's name.

Junior clerks of the East India Company, as Robert Clive once was, held which job title?

Writers. Clive started as one in Madras with no formal military training, then switched to soldiering and rose fast.

What nickname did Britons give East India Company men who came home from India enormously rich?

Nabobs, a twist on the Indian title nawab. Robert Clive himself was denounced in Parliament as a corrupt nabob.

Whose 1835 Minute on Indian Education pushed the East India Company's government to teach in English?

Thomas Macaulay. He hoped to form a class of interpreters between the British and the millions they governed: 'Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste'.

At the time of the American Revolution, the East India Company's striped flag was nearly identical to which flag?

The Continental Union Flag. It paired red and white stripes with a British union in the corner, and some argue the company's flag inspired it.

What did the East India Company call its overseas trading posts?

Factories. The name came from 'factors', the merchants who lived and traded there, not from making goods.

What was the name of the East India Company's own navy?

The Bombay Marine. The company kept its own small navy to protect its trade routes, even with the Royal Navy patrolling much of the Indian Ocean.

Unlike other UK government records, the East India Company's archives are held by which institution?

The British Library received them in 1982, when the India Office's archive, including the company's records, moved there as one collection.

Which rival company, founded in 1602, seized control of the world's nutmeg supply by force?

The Dutch East India Company. On the Banda Islands, the only place nutmeg grew, it killed or enslaved much of the population to take control.

Which City institution's headquarters now occupies the Leadenhall Street site of East India House?

Lloyd's of London. Its 1986 tower puts lifts and other services on the outside, leaving an open atrium at its heart.

While Britain held Java, which Buddhist temple did East India Company official Stamford Raffles bring to world attention?

Borobudur. It lay hidden under volcanic ash and jungle, and the surveyor Raffles sent had to clear away the vegetation before it could be recorded.

In 1746, which rival European power captured the East India Company's settlement at Madras?

France. Britain got Madras back at the 1748 peace only by handing over Louisbourg, the fortress it had captured in North America.

Which spice was the East India Company's first big money-earner?

Pepper. The first voyage came home rich, partly from a pepper-laden Portuguese ship it seized, and James I knighted its commander, James Lancaster.