Huw Bowen's The Business of Empire is an insider's history in two respects. Bowen has spent most of his career writing about the East India Company, and he steeps his story in the abundance of primary and secondary sources that have accumulated since the Company commenced business in 1600. He is also, in this book, writing specifically about the directors, clerks, and warehousemen who worked inside the Company's miniature empire in the City of London as it navigated the transition from trade to imperial governance between 1756 and 1833. With some justification, he argues that this side of the story has received short shrift compared to the sustained focus on the Company's activities in Asia. In the process, he also takes sides in the debate over whether British imperial policy during this period was mainly carried out in London or in its colonies.

Bowen divides his book into three sections, covering relationships between the Company and the British state; a social history of the Company's shareholders, directors, and clerks; and the procedures with which its directors attempted to govern its newfound empire and manage its declining trade with India. The first two sections draw heavily on existing historical accounts, although Bowen infuses these with numerous discoveries of his own; the final section brandishes a wealth of new material from the Company's archives. His analysis of Company-state relations assesses the benefits that the Company claimed to provide to the Crown via tax revenue and military assistance during Britain's recurrent wars with France. In a separate chapter, he traces the evolving relationship between the Company and the Board of Control, the state-appointed body that oversaw its affairs (but rarely dictated its policies) after 1784.

Bowen's analysis of Company shareholders reveals a major decline in Dutch investment, from 34 percent of Company stock in 1774 to 1.2 percent in 1830; and reveals much more as well about the changing social composition of investors. Although this information will be very useful for readers interested in the history of the London stock market, its relevance to Bowen's argument is undercut by his conclusion that shareholders wielded very little influence over the Company's governance from the 1790s on. Moving from shareholders to staff, a central theme that emerges is that most directors and clerks lacked firsthand experience of India throughout the period under review. Even after 1800, when more former Indian servants managed to win spots on the Board, the fact that seniority determined leadership positions meant they had to wait many years to make a difference in policy. Bowen's descriptions of the Company's staff errs on the side of equivocation: directors were narrow-minded but competent; many among the hundreds of head-office clerks were “useless time-serving drones,” but “many managers and clerks worked very hard indeed” (p. 144).

Bowen's chapters on the Company's methods of imperial governance and trade confront most directly the question of the relative influence of the metropole versus the periphery on Indian affairs. His conclusion, in brief, is that the Company's directors worked hard to impose their will on servants in India, but were stymied more often than not by intractable agency problems—not the least of which was the yearlong delay between sending instructions and receiving replies. On most issues, Bowen goes at least partway toward conceding the “peripheral” perspective taken by historian such as C. J. Bayly, which leaves him with the rather weak refrain that “those at the East India House were doing their best to tackle the near-impossible task of supervising far-distant territories and employees” (p. 217). In places, he directly criticizes some aspects of Company policy—for instance, its decision to divert Bengali cash to the China trade in 1766 on the mistaken assumption that the funds could be recovered from land taxes. Mainly, though, he gives the directors an A for effort, concluding that their ceaseless collection of information and delivery of dispatches achieved “incremental improvements” over time (p. 183).

Bowen's defense of the relevance of the East India Company's London office is on firmer ground in the book's final chapter, which tallies its various economic impacts in Britain. This chapter reinforces a truth that most British historians acknowledge but rarely spend enough time unraveling: namely, the hugely important role played by London (as opposed to the industrial north) on Britain's economy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Bowen provides richly detailed cases studies of people who supplied cloth, metal, and ships to the Company, convincingly arguing that the vast sums which the Company annually spent on goods and services left a deep mark on the local economy. Besides directly profiting from their trade with the Company, its many suppliers and shippers used their connections to rise to prominence both in the City and the provinces.

Although Bowen's approach sometimes leads to a frustratingly narrow, if not apologetic, perspective on the London side of the East India Company, the wealth of detail he has amassed will be invaluable for all who seek to reexamine the question of colonial-metropolitan influence. Likewise, his conclusions will require historians to revisit Britain's economy in the early nineteenth century with a view to including in their story one of that country's largest, and longest-lasting, commercial survivals from the early modern era.