The East India Company (EIC) (1600–1874) was an English, and later British, joint-stock company founded in 1600 and dissolved in 1874. It was formed to trade in the Indian Ocean region, initially with the East Indies (South Asia and Southeast Asia), and later with East Asia. The company gained control of large parts of the Indian subcontinent and Hong Kong. At its peak, the company was the largest corporation in the world by various measures and had its own armed forces in the form of the company's three presidency armies, totalling about 260,000 soldiers, twice the size of the British Army at certain times.

Originally chartered as the "Governor and Company of Merchants of London Trading into the East-Indies," the company rose to account for half of the world's trade during the mid-1700s and early 1800s, particularly in basic commodities including cotton, silk, indigo dye, sugar, salt, spices, saltpetre, tea, and later, opium. The company also initiated the beginnings of the British Raj in the Indian subcontinent.

The company eventually came to rule large areas of the Indian subcontinent, exercising military power and assuming administrative functions. Company-ruled areas in the region gradually expanded after the Battle of Plassey in 1757 and by 1858 most of modern India, Pakistan and Bangladesh was either ruled by the company or princely states closely tied to it by treaty. Following the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857, the Government of India Act 1858 led to the British Crown assuming direct control of present-day Bangladesh, Pakistan and India in the form of the new British Indian Empire.

The company subsequently experienced recurring problems with its finances, despite frequent government intervention. The company was dissolved in 1874 under the terms of the East India Stock Dividend Redemption Act enacted one year earlier, as the Government of India Act had by then rendered it vestigial, powerless, and obsolete. The official government machinery of the British Empire had assumed its governmental functions and absorbed its armies.

The East India Company 1784 - 1834
By C. H. Philips, M.A., Ph.D., Lecturer in India History, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London (1940) (pdf)

The East India Company at Home, 1757– 1857
Edited by Margot Finn and Kate Smith (2018) (pdf)

Oudh and The East India Company, 1785-1801
By Purnendu Basu, M.A., Ph.D. (1943) (pdf)

Memoir on the Affairs of the East India Company (1830)
A Select Committee has been appointed by each of the Houses of Parliament, to enquire into the present State of the Affairs of the East-India Company, and into the Trade between Great-Britain, and the East-Indies, and China, and to report their Observations thereon to the House. (pdf)

The Administration of the East India Company
A History of Indian Progress by John William Kaye (1853) (pdf)