In the half-century after 1756 Britain established a large territorial empire in South Asia, and by the beginning of the nineteenth century many contemporaries considered India to have become the richest jewel in the imperial crown. Yet, remarkably, Britain's Indian empire was not created and expanded as part of any state-sponsored imperial project but through the actions of the East India Company, a private commercial organisation that held a monopoly of British trade conducted east of the Cape of Good Hope. In a few short years the Company ceased to be simply a trading company and it developed into a powerful imperial agency exercising control over territories containing millions of people. No commercial body has ever extended its reach so far or become so fully preoccupied with the business of empire.

The causes, course, and consequences of the East India Company's expansion in South Asia have received considerable attention from successive generations of historians, and this has helped to establish a reasonably clear picture of how and why the Company was able to achieve military and political supremacy, first in Bengal and then elsewhere on the subcontinent. Much is also known about how territorial expansion in Asia had significant political consequences in Britain, where unease about events in India interacted with concerns about recurring financial crisis to cause the reform, regulation, and control of the Company; and much is known about how changing economic outlooks in Britain eventually forced the Company to surrender its India and China trade monopolies in 1813 and 1833 respectively.