East India Company: Trade and Domestic Financial Statistics, 1755-1838

The dataset was created as part of an ESRC-sponsored study, ‘British economic, social, and cultural interactions with Asia, 1760-1833’. It contains statistics relating to the trade and domestic finances of the monopolistic English East India Company primarily between 1755 and 1834, the year in which the Company ceased to function as a commercial organization. Until now quantitative data derived from original sources has only been available in time series for the Company’s trade and some aspects of its domestic finances for the years before 1760. But many of the details, patterns, and trends of trade and finance in the decades after 1760, a most important period when the Company fully embarked on the interlinked processes of military, political, and commercial expansion in Asia, have remained unclear. In creating this dataset, the aim was thus two-fold: i) to establish for the first time a set of statistics detailing the changing value, volume, and geographical structure of the East India Company’s overseas trade for the period when the Company began to exert imperial control over large parts of the Indian subcontinent; and ii) to generate select statistics relating to the Company’s domestic finances, thereby enabling analysis to be undertaken of a range of Company interactions with Britain’s economy and society.