This book provides a rare overview of the East India Company's operations in England and in Asia from the early seventeenth century to the mid nineteenth century from a variety of perspectives: economic, cultural, political, sociological, as well as commercial. It shows how the Company's story was shaped by cross-cultural interactions involving British and Indian peoples.

List of abbreviations Acknowledgement Introduction: The Different East India Companies and the Variety of Cross Cultural Interactions in the Corporate Setting Part I: The Regulatory Worlds of the East India Company 1.The Failure of the Cloth Trade to Surat and the Internationalisation of English Mercantilist Thought, 1614-1621 2. Asian influences on the Commercial Strategies of the English East India Company 3. The East India Company and the shift in Anglo-Indian Commercial Relations in the 1680s 4. Indian merchants, company protection and the development of the Bombay shipping pass regime Part II: Religion, Society, Ethnographic Reconnaissance, and Inter Cultural Encounters 5. 'God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem'- The Religious Governance, Religious Sufferance and the Corporate Chaplain in India 1610-1701 6. Maritime Society in an Early Modern Port City: Negotiating family, religion and the English Company in Madras 7. Domesticity' in Early Colonial Bengal 8. The Travellers' tales: The Travel Writings of Itesamuddin and Abu Taleb Khan Part III: Diplomacy, Power, and the Company State - 222 - 322 9. Jahangir's Paintings 10. The Contested State: Political Authority and the Decentred Foundations of the Early Modern Colonial State in Asia 11. Messing, caste, and resistance: the production of 'jail-scapes' and penal regimes in the early 1840s 12. A Case of Multiple Existences: The Loyal Bombay Purbaiya and his rebellious cousin in Bengal Index