Between Monopoly and Free Trade: The English East India Company, 1600–1757 by Emily Erikson (review)

Coffee and calicoes. Cinnamon, indigo, saltpeter, rose attar, and dragonsblood. Ships, ships’ logs, voyages, captains, and pirates. This is the profuse and captivating raw material underlying Emily Erikson’s account of the distinctive history of the English East India Company (EIC), a history spanning more than a century and a half of prosperous trading-network activity. For much of its existence, the Company was the subject of economic analysis and debate, so it is no surprise that in recounting its history, Erikson, like Adam Smith and Edmund Burke before her, makes use of that history analytically to put forward some important and timely theoretical claims. Those claims should interest historical sociologists, economic sociologists, students of organizations, and students of social-network analysis. Primary among these theoretical claims are the following. First, and simplest to state, the EIC’s success as an economic actor depended crucially on the vibrancy and openness of the commercially oriented Asian ports with which it dealt predominantly. One cannot describe the history of English trade in Asia adequately without reference to synergies between European and Asian economies, and moreover, without recognition of the sophisticated market orientation of many of the ports with which the English traded. The EIC’s success depended on its fit with preexisting, highly developed trade-oriented economies in Asia, functioning within a kind of inter-organizational network operating globally. Second, Erikson provides an illuminating discussion of economic organization in early modernity, and meditates at length on the relationship between company directors and employees. Crucially, the Company clearly benefited from the nonCompany-sponsored activity of its captains (their “private trade”), in somewhat the same way that corporations today can benefit from informal, horizontal network ties among employees—through the building of camaraderie, the exchange of information, and the development of innovations. Organizational decentralization, exhibited in the directors’ encouragement (or minimally, lack of discouragement) of private trade opportunities, yielded valuable navigational information, expanded the set of ports into which the Company could move, and Book Review 1