East India Trading Company
East India Company This article is about the 16th–19th-century English and British trading company. For the current East India Company (founded 2010), see Sanjiv Mehta (British businessman) . For other uses, see East India Company (disambiguation) . For other uses of "HEIC", see HEIC (disambiguation) . The East India Company ( EIC ), also known as the Honourable East India Company ( HEIC ), East India Trading Company ( EITC ), the English East India Company or the British East India Company , and informally known as John Company , [2] Company Bahadur , [3] or simply The Company , was an English and later British joint-stock company . [4] It was formed to trade in the Indian Ocean region , initially with the East Indies (India and South East Asia), and later with Qing China . The company ended up seizing control of large parts of the Indian subcontinent , colonised parts of Southeast Asia and Hong Kong after the First Opium War , and maintained tra