East India Company Trivia
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52 free East India Company trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
The East India Company began as 218 London merchants with a fifteen-year monopoly on trade beyond the Cape of Good Hope and ended as the ruler of a subcontinent with an army twice the size of Britain's. This quiz covers the whole 274 years: Drake and the Spice Islands, Elizabeth I's charter of 31 December 1600, James Lancaster and the Red Dragon, the Amboyna setback, Sir Thomas Roe at Jahangir's court, Bombay arriving as a royal dowry, the Anglo-Mughal War, Henry Every's pirate haul, and the saltpetre and tea that made the money. The second half is the Company as a state: Clive and Plassey, the diwani of Bengal, the famine of 1770, the credit crash of 1772 and the tea that ended up in Boston harbour, sepoys and Enfield cartridges, the rebellion of 1857, the Government of India Act 1858, the last vestigial years managing tea for the government, and the London relics from East India House to Haileybury. Easy questions ask which country chartered it and what it traded; the expert tier asks for governors, acts and dates. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the East India Company, the Battle of Plassey, Robert Clive, the Boston Tea Party and the 1857 rebellion, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question. If you like this, try our quizzes on the British Empire, the Mughal Empire and Indian history.
30 of 52 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which pattern is named after the Scottish town whose weavers copied Kashmir shawls the East India Company brought to Europe?
Paisley
Paisley. The pattern surged back into fashion in the 1960s, helped along by The Beatles.
Q 02Which monarch granted the East India Company its founding charter?
Elizabeth I
Elizabeth I granted it so London merchants could break into the rich East Indies spice trade, then held by rival European powers.
Q 03Which American university takes its name from a former East India Company governor in Madras?
Yale University
Yale University. Elihu Yale, removed from office over charges of enriching himself, later sent books and goods whose sale paid for a college building.
Q 04The East India Company's first charter gave it a monopoly on English trade east of which cape?
Cape of Good Hope
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.
Q 05Whose 1577-80 voyage, which loaded cloves in the Spice Islands, made its backers a fortune?
Francis Drake
Francis Drake. The cloves were a sideshow: most of the fortune came from Spanish treasure ships he seized, such as the Cacafuego.
Q 06Which famous diamond went to the British Crown after the East India Company annexed the Punjab in 1849?
The Koh-i-Noor
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.
Q 07Which British philosopher spent almost 35 years working for the East India Company?
John Stuart Mill
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.
Q 08Which soldiers did the East India Company begin recruiting in 1815, after fighting them in the Himalayan hills?
Gurkhas
Gurkhas. Units the company raised in 1815 later served in the Indian Army, and some passed into the British Army in 1948.
Q 09Parliament's acts against cheap cotton prints imported by the East India Company were named after which cloth?
Calico
Calico, named after Calicut, the port where Europeans first bought it. The bans followed protests from British wool producers.
Q 10A mechanical tiger mauling a European man, seized by East India Company troops in 1799, belongs to which London museum?
The Victoria and Albert 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.
Q 11Which ruler, called the 'Tiger of Mysore', fought the East India Company with rocket troops until he died in 1799?
Tipu Sultan
Tipu Sultan died defending his capital when company troops stormed it, ending the last of the four Anglo-Mysore Wars.
Q 12Who was James I's ambassador to the court of Mughal Emperor Jahangir, sent to help the East India Company?
Sir Thomas Roe
Sir Thomas Roe. His mission won protection for the company's trading post at Surat and began a long relationship with the Mughal court.
Q 13Bombay came to England as part of whose dowry?
Catherine of Braganza
Catherine of Braganza. Charles II handed Bombay to the company in 1668, and it went on to become a major centre of company trade.
Q 21Whose betrayal of Siraj-ud-Daulah, Bengal's ruler, made the 1757 victory over him possible?
Mir Jafar
Mir Jafar, the army commander, promised Clive he would not fight, and was then installed as ruler and governed as a company puppet.
Q 22Which British general from the American Revolutionary War later died in India while serving as Governor-General?
Charles Cornwallis
Charles Cornwallis. The general who surrendered at Yorktown in 1781 went on to govern India twice, and died there in 1805.
Q 23Which fort's 1751 defence against a far larger army first made Robert Clive's name?
Arcot
Arcot. Clive held its crumbling fort for 52 days, and the victory helped turn the tide for the company in southern India.
Q 14At which Spice Islands trading post were ten East India Company men tortured and executed in 1623?
Amboyna
Amboyna. They were accused of plotting to seize the local fort, and the company soon turned from the Spice Islands to India.
Q 15After losing a war with the Mughals in 1690, the East India Company set up a base at which future capital?
Calcutta
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.
Q 16Which pirate's 1695 capture of the Mughal treasure ship Ganj-i-Sawai threatened English trade in India?
Henry Every
Henry Every. Despite a big bounty and what is called the first worldwide manhunt, he vanished in 1696 and was never caught.
Q 17Which Mughal emperor's death in 1707 plunged Bengal into the anarchy the company exploited?
Aurangzeb
Aurangzeb. He had reimposed the jizya, a tax on non-Muslims that Akbar had abolished.
Q 18Which powers did Charles II grant the East India Company around 1670?
To mint money and wage war
To mint money and wage war: armed with these rights, the company built fortresses, raised armies and ran its own courts, like a state.
Q 19What were the East India Company's locally raised, European-trained soldiers called?
Sepoys
A few thousand disciplined sepoys with field cannon repeatedly beat far larger Mughal armies.
Q 20The 1757 battle that opened the way to East India Company rule in Bengal was fought where?
Plassey
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.
Q 24Which Himalayan peak was thought to be the world's highest until the East India Company's survey measured Everest?
Kangchenjunga
Kangchenjunga. The higher peak was renamed after George Everest, a former Surveyor General, even though he had objected to the honour.
Q 25Which East India Company governor built public granaries after the 1770 Bengal famine to prevent another?
Warren Hastings
Warren Hastings. Years later Parliament impeached him for corruption, but after a trial lasting seven years the Lords acquitted him.
Q 26In 1842, a retreating East India Company and British army was wiped out in the snowbound passes of which land?
Afghanistan
Afghanistan. Of about 4,500 troops and 12,000 camp followers who left Kabul, only one European, Dr William Brydon, reached safety at Jalalabad.
Q 27Which classic novel begins with a British officer stealing a sacred Indian diamond during an East India Company siege in 1799?
The Moonstone
The Moonstone. In Wilkie Collins's story, three Hindu priests follow the stolen diamond to England to win it back.
Q 28Which future British commander won his first major victory at the Battle of Assaye in 1803?
Arthur Wellesley
Arthur Wellesley. The future Duke of Wellington later rated Assaye above even his defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo as his best battle.
Q 29From 1757, China let Western ships, including the East India Company's, trade at only which port?
Canton
Canton. Even there, Western traders could deal only with a guild of licensed Chinese merchants.
Q 30The East India Company's sales in China eventually led to which war in 1839?
The First Opium War
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.