At the height of its power around 1800, the English East India Company controlled half of the world’s trade and deployed a vast network of political influences at home and abroad. Ye the story of the Company’s beginnings in the early seventeenth century has remained largely untold. Rupali Mishra’s account of the East India Company’s formative years sheds new light on one of the most powerful corporations in the history of the world. A Business of State illuminates how the east India Company quickly came to inhabit such a unique role in England’s commercial and political ambitions. It also offers critical insights into the rise of the early modern English state and the expansion and development of its nascent empire. Mishra’s history makes clear that, from its inception, the East India Company was embedded within–and inseparable form– the state.