In A Business of State: Commerce, Politics, and the Birth of the East India Company, Rupali Mishra explores the establishment of the English East India Company and its initial twenty to thirty years of existence. The book is organized into two parts; the first focuses on the company's governance and the second on the relationship between the company and the English state. Each part consists of several chapters connected by the central topic.

In part one, chapter 1 covers the company's charter and the privileges this constituted. Chapter 2 focuses on the internal governance of the company, especially membership, internal elections and procedures. Chapter 3 considers membership in greater detail, focusing specifically on the company's interest in the recruitment of influential figures from the gentry, royal court, and state institutions, while at the same time keeping the monarch from joining the company. Chapter 4 looks at internal politics, particularly election disputes and attempts to reform internal procedures of the East India Company. Chapter 5 focuses on the public perception of the company, the debate between external critics and company writers about private interests and interests of the commonwealth.

In part two, chapters 6 to 10 consider the company in relation to the English state and its goals. Chapter 6 focuses on the evolution of the company's charter in view of the internal and external challenges faced by the Privy Council and the king. Chapter 7 studies the company's military engagements abroad and the questions this raised in England. Chapter 8 examines the effects of rivalry between the English and Dutch East India Companies, especially the effects of the death of East India Company's English factors, that is, its employees, at the order of the governor of the Dutch East India Company at Amboyna. Chapter 9 explores the effects of petitions supporting and opposing the company's activities on its relationship with the king, the Privy Council, and the Parliament. Chapter 10 follows the breakdown of the relationship between King Charles I and the East India Company, focusing on his attempts to reorganize the East Indies trade.

Mishra's central argument is that the Stuart state was concerned with the English merchants’ overseas enterprise, and as regular trading activity with Asia proved impracticable on an ad hoc basis, it gave its support to the East India Company. The basis of such support was a letter of patent from the monarch, which effectively granted the company monopoly for trade in Asia, incorporation, self-governance, and limited liability. This privilege, Mishra argues, was not static but changed in relationship to internal and external policies. Mishra, thus effectively shows the company both as an agent active in the public sphere and as shaped by its external environment.

Business of State is excellent in the amount of historical detail it offers. Mishra is particularly effective in illustrating its central point that merchants, and the company with them, were active agents in government. This is supported by the observation that merchants regularly appealed to the Privy Council and the monarch. The very detailed account of the ways in which the company's internal governance in England worked during the 1600s to 1620s will be of great interest to the historians of the company and the corporate world. Moreover, Mishra relies on the case of the company for exploring the ways publicity and politics of information functioned in the early seventeenth century, thus expanding our understanding of the role of corporate bodies in shaping the public sphere. The monograph is also a first-rate source of information for scholars of mercantilism as it shines light on the ways mercantilist policies were implemented on day-to-day basis. Lastly, Mishra's wider historical argument, which emphasizes the deeply connected nature of English territorial expansion in the Atlantic world and commercial expansion in the East Indies, gives a new direction for the study of the British Empire.

Business of State works perfectly as a political history of the first thirty years of the East India Company's existence in the English realm. It fills in an empty space in the historiography by expanding our understanding of the early history of the East India Company, its governance and relationship to the English state and its main agents. Yet Mishra is largely silent on trade with India, management strategies, and business enterprises outside of Europe; she presents the company solely as a political actor, and therefore the book needs to be read alongside other books on the East India Company if a comprehensive understanding of the its activities is to be gained. Questions of profit, whether private or profits derived from tariffs accruing to the state, were constantly in the background of public and legislative debates about the company. Without economic success, the East India Company's history would have been short-lived. Most importantly, the company's trading activities in Asia took place in competition with other European merchants and merchants of the Indian Ocean world, where the East India Company was a price-taker rather than a price-maker.

Lastly, the fact that book does not have a bibliography of secondary literature will likely be seen as a major shortcoming for both students and researchers. This book is an excellent entry point for students of the East India Company for whom a concise bibliography would have been an asset. This conspicuous omission, coupled with the fact that the book uses endnotes rather than footnotes, makes the tracking the research that underpins the book even more tiresome.