Emily Erikson's book showcases how a combination of analytical sociology and wide, careful reading of history can push interdisciplinary discussion of the history of multinational business into new and fruitful terrain. In Between Monopoly and Free Trade, Erikson focuses on the English East India Company (EIC). She examines the significance of permitted private trade in altering the commercial practices of the Company. For Erikson, these employed entrepreneurs provided an innovating and well-informed commercial front line for the Company's trade in Asia that ultimately enabled the English company to succeed where its rivals from other European nations did not. But just as the EIC needed the private traders, so the private traders needed the infrastructure (both physical and juridical) that the Company provided. It was a winning symbiosis that transformed trade between Europe and Asia and, in the process, disconnected the EIC from the opprobrium later economic thinkers put on it by labelling it a “monopoly.” The Company was instead a process that channeled the best aspects of monopoly and free trade into a creative tension that often made money for all: the factors, the investors, the English state, and the Asian partners themselves. The great merit of Erikson's book is to divert attention away from the EIC's monopolistic tendencies or state-like pretentions towards the internal sociology of a complex, multidivisional form. Business historians (and others) will find much to engage with and enjoy.

A sociologist rather than a historian, Erikson has a talent for digesting and summarizing the various historical literatures of the Company and its worlds to contextualize her overall thesis. Opening background pitches about the EIC and the Industrial Revolution may appear to some historians as contrived, but these prefatory observations help to place the argument into broader perspective. These sections also usefully place the EIC at the center of debates about political economy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Erikson then begins the always-contentious process of explaining the distinctive features of the English company in comparison with rival European models: assessing its superior adaptability to consumer demand, noting the absence of private trading opportunities in rival companies, and explaining the EIC's success in developing a trade in cotton. Whether all of these will satisfy all readers is unclear, but Erikson is rightly assiduous in sustaining a comparative framework with which to ensure that assessments of the English company's performance are set against its rivals: mainly the Dutch, the French, and the Portuguese.

The empirical set pieces at the book's heart are also compelling. These build from a statistical analysis of the EIC's ship captains' movements around Asian markets. This study demonstrates the ways in which captains shared information to prioritize trade with ports that Erikson categorizes as more open to outside traders. In this way, she is able to make the Company's success the result of the approval of Asian merchants. In so doing, her comparative sociology of the EIC offers new insights to help restore an old historiographical tradition—that which saw the English company succeed in Asian commerce because it established mutually beneficial commercial relations with Asian merchants.

Erikson does not fully document the measurable connections between port choice and commercial improvements for the Company and its factors, and some historians may wish for more qualitative meat on these statistical bones. Such meat would also help to complicate and nuance her slightly mechanical argument about private interests upholding corporate ends. Further, it would challenge the simple categorization of ports that she proposes in chapter 6; to take one example, Erikson designates the port of Surat as a “market” port operating without state interference, even though correspondence from seventeenth-century English traders is replete with frustrations about local state officials intervening or sometimes suspending English trade. A firmer and broader basis in archival sources would also help Erikson shed further light on an important aspect of her argument that remains underanalyzed: How intentional was the EIC's incorporation of private trade and, therefore, the commercial interests of Asians? Indeed, where can we attribute intention within a body like the East India Company? How can we square the evidence Erikson marshals of Anglo-Indian commercial partnership with the English tendency throughout this period to seek to use a corporation's monopoly power to prevent Asians from benefiting from English capital? Glossing over the question of whether the EIC consciously incorporated private trade appears to be a part of Erikson's determination to view the Company as an example of a decentralized firm, in which (in Chandlerian terms) it separated strategy formulation from operational decision making.

Answers to these difficult questions are not easy to find—although the Company's attempts to prosecute private traders reveal defendants' influential accounts of how company trade could not function without private trade—but they would nonetheless be worth seeking. They would help to embellish the themes of private initiative, knowledge sharing, institutional innovation, and learning that for Erikson (and others) are so important to the sociology of the corporation as it jostled between monopoly and free trade and juxtaposed and then integrated contradictory interests and values in ways that developed reciprocal commerce. Overall, however, the analytical and empirical precision and the multidisciplinary perspective offered by Erikson more than make up for a slight hesitation about plunging into the Company's manuscript records.