East India Company

Chartered by Elizabeth I on 31 December 1600 as a joint-stock company holding a royal monopoly on English trade with the East Indies. The joint-stock structure let many investors share the risk and return of individual voyages, then of the whole enterprise once permanent, pooled capital replaced voyage-by-voyage subscriptions in the 1650s. Over the following two centuries the Company grew from a trading concern into a quasi-governmental ruler of large parts of India, raising its own armies and administering its own courts, until the 1857 rebellion led the British Crown to assume direct rule and the Company itself was formally dissolved in 1874.