Founded in 1600, the English East India Company was granted monopoly rights of eastern trade in England and quickly became one of the most successful chartered companies in early modern Europe. Despite trailing behind the Dutch in the 1600s, the English company's trade soared in the eighteenth century and laid the foundation of the British oversees empire. In Between Monopoly and Free Trade Emily Erikson discusses specific characteristics of the English East India Company that made it so unique when compared to other national monopolies that explored long-distance trade, either through chartered companies (as in the Netherlands, France, Austria, Sweden, Denmark, Scotland) or state-run organizations (as in Portugal).

First, the company's decentralized structure in the East, with no single port as the center of all operations (the Portuguese and the Dutch, for example, established headquarters in Goa and Batavia, respectively), allowed for a flexible network of outposts easily adaptable to changing market conditions. Second, unlike the Portuguese, who conquered existing trade posts, or the Dutch, who controlled the agricultural spice market, the English operations in the East were more commercial in nature and rather less militarized up to the Battle of Plassey in 1757, when territorial concerns took over. Lastly, unlike other companies the English East India Company allowed employees to engage in private trade between 1661 and 1760, which coincided with the biggest expansion of the company's business.

The book's central claim is that without employee private trade, the English company would have lacked vital local knowledge that made it able to explore new outposts and tradable goods. Erikson therefore sets out to evaluate the extent to which private trade affected the operations of the East India Company. The objective is to understand whether social networks combined with the autonomy of captains at sea allowed for the diffusion of information (about ports and merchandise) from ship to ship.

Using data from ship logs that systematically recorded the path of each voyage (including visited ports), Erikson shows in chapter 4 that the number of ports in the company's network peaked in 1760, after which private trade was outlawed. The fact of this trend is reinforced in chapter 5, with graphic analysis of the network connecting visited ports in four-year periods from 1620 to 1820. The network was much denser before the consolidation and centralization of operations of the 1760s, after which the company's network was restricted to connecting the colonial regions under British domain.

This correlation is only suggestive of the importance of private trade, so the analysis moves a step forward when Erikson traces the voyages in which captains “missed the season” and were not able to return to Europe before the monsoon. Her goal was to identify captains who were either inexperienced or preferred to pursue their own trading interests in detriment of the company's, and therefore delayed their departure from eastern ports. The network analysis is then repeated with (a) malfeasant voyages removed and (b) random voyages removed. The network density resulting from both experiments is very different and shows that opportunistic captains were indeed responsible for a wider trade network.

This analysis assumes that more employee autonomy (or more decentralization) brings more information exchange, which in turn brings commercial activities to more ports and increases the number of products traded. But the company would benefit from the malfeasant network branches only if trade in these ports were yielding profits not just to opportunistic captains but also to the company, which is never really explored in the book.

In chapter 6 Erikson introduces a typology of seven Eastern ports based on the local institutional governance of trade. The company's ships visited not only developed market societies but also ports with little commercial sophistication and unregulated trade. In chapter 7 she classifies the 264 ports ever visited by the company's ships according to the provided typology. The English were more successful in sophisticated and prosperous open cities such as Canton and Bantam, but their continued visits to other ports denounce a unique commercial strategy that pursued commercial rather than colonial ports between 1600 and 1757.

The idea that the English had no choice but to keep the ports (and trade) of no interest to the Dutch is therefore demystified, with Erikson providing two reasons. First, unlike other Europeans the English were able to create markets for new products, such as coffee, tea, and textiles, instead of engaging in the previously established spice market. And second, the English were more likely to establish factories in ports that already had other European powers than otherwise, despite the Anglo-Dutch conflicts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This strategy benefited the company that introduced new goods (especially cotton) to the mass market and ultimately led the country into the Industrial Revolution.

Erikson concludes that the success of the English company relied on the symbiotic nature between employee private trade and the company's state monopoly, none of which would have succeeded without the other. Hard to reconcile is then the abandonment of this strategy after the Battle of Plassey in 1757, which brings another set of questions to the research agenda. Was Plassey a historical accident commanded by hotheaded colonialists who could well have been Portuguese or Dutch? Was that episode similar to the uncharacteristic behavior of the English company in west Sumatra (briefly described on page 157) with the implementation of a forced system of cultivation that centralized market operations? The key issue is therefore to identify the driving forces leading to the commercial or territorial motives behind the choices of the East India Company at different points in time.

Any well-done research project opens the door to additional questions of a more difficult nature. As such, Erikson's book is an important step in the right direction.