The East India Company's lengthy history and spacious interests have long attracted historians. Until now, however, the greater part of the detailed research on the Company has been confined to the eighteenth century. Kirti Chaudhuri's major work analyzed the Company's economic performance down to 1760; Peter Marshal and others, including Huw Bowen, have investigated its political and administrative history down to the 1780s. Bowen's present study also begins in the mid-eighteenth century with the acquisition of Bengal but extends beyond the reforms of the 1780s and into the nineteenth century to the point when the Company's monopoly of trade with China was terminated in 1833. The extension is an important one because the Company's history after the 1780s is known only in outline. Moreover, the half century between the 1780s and the 1830s is one of far-reaching transition: in Britain, from the military-fiscal state, mercantilism, and patronage to the beginnings of the modern state, free trade, and a professional bureaucracy and, in India, from trade to rule and from a policy of conserving India to one that promoted development, or, in the language of the day, “improvement.”

Bowen divides his subject into a series of thematic chapters prefaced by a long introduction (chap. 1) that sets the scene and summarizes the historiography. Thereafter, the book is split into complementary themes: “relationships” examines interactions among the City, the state, and the empire and between the government and the Company (chaps. 2–3); “people” deals with investors and Company servants (chaps. 4–5); “methods” investigates the Company's administration, rule, and trade (chaps. 6–8); and “influences” assesses the effect of the Company's activities on the British economy (chap. 9). A brief afterword deals with the ending of the Company's formal commercial monopoly in 1833. The decision to organize the book thematically ensures that individual topics have a sharp focus. But it also obliges readers to return to the beginning of the period and work their way forward in each of the chapters (apart from the first one). More important still, the emphasis on particular themes renders the development of the Company as a whole less clear. It is evident that the Company of 1833 was different in important respects from the Company of 1784. But the organization of the book tends to mask break points—to the extent that they existed—and the absence of a concluding chapter leaves some leads untied.

These organizational quibbles, however, should in no way detract from Bowen's substantive achievement in greatly enlarging our knowledge of the East India Company's history during this period. After 1784, as is well known, the Company was subjected to greater official control, but Bowen has traced for the first time the steps by which the role of the directors and court was reduced and the board of control became, by the 1820s, the senior partner. Between the 1780s and the 1820s, too, the Company came to be regarded as a national asset that helped Britain to become a world power in the course of the French wars and attracted increasing support from important segments of the public. The Company became more than a safe bet, despite its growing administrative burdens: stock prices were on an upward trend after 1784; dividends were fixed at 10.5 percent from 1793. The number of stockholders and the size of their holdings increased. Foreign investors (mainly Dutch) were virtually eliminated, and provincial investors made their appearance: by 1836 they owned 18 percent of the stock. But the most striking development was the increasing representation of “gents” and esquires, based mainly in the Home Counties, who owned nearly 50 percent of the Company's stock in 1830.

As for the Company's administrative record, Bowen shows that it was a serious and generally efficient organization. The directors’ interests expanded with their responsibilities. They made increasing efforts to understand India as the period advanced; by 1830 many more of them had acquired some firsthand knowledge of the subcontinent. They were concerned primarily with financial and commercial matters, but they also supported scientific research and developed an interest in “improvement” that went beyond their specific remit. This is not to say that they were imperial expansionists. Bowen makes it clear that the directors were generally nervous regarding territorial acquisition, which was driven largely by initiatives and events on the ground. The Company made determined efforts to increase its exports and had some modest success, especially in China, but after 1814 its trade as a whole was in general decline. As the Macartney mission demonstrated in 1793, China had little need for British exports. Bowen is not concerned with the effect of the Company's presence on India or China. The wider implications of his work relate to Britain, where, he suggests, the Company had greater importance than has been recognized in generating employment at home and in the shipping trades and in giving opportunities in particular to “gents” and Scots.

Bowen remarks that his book is a “somewhat old-fashioned study of institutional change” (x), but this refreshing note of self-deprecation should not be allowed to detract from his achievement. Although the very broad outlines of the Company are known, Bowen's careful and thorough research has made available new segments of its history. His judicious judgments command assent as well as respect, and his decision to extend his research into the nineteenth century, though time-consuming, has opened up a neglected period in the Company's history. Historians can now speak with confidence about themes that were previously either passed by or treated in an overgeneralized manner. It is to be hoped that this study will inspire another historian, if not Bowen himself, to cover the years between 1833 and 1858, the final underresearched period in the Company's history.