The book works best when it grounds itself in two compelling figures: Thomas Smythe and Thomas Rowe. Britain became addicted to trade, visible from the changing fashions of London haberdashers to the “positive soufflé” of culinary literature incorporating exciting new spices.

By the Stuart accession in 1603, the company had become “part of the culture of the realm”. Howarth shows England, long dwarfed by Iberian monopolies, rising to “pre-eminence over the glassy medium” in the latter 16th century. It funded everything from the earliest probings towards the north-west passage (a dream that would remain unrealised for over 300 years) to the import of Japanese erotica, which caused such a scandal in London that company man John Saris was forced to burn it publicly. If he tends towards digression, this is forgivable given the scope of the company’s activity.

Howarth does well to transform bills, logs and itineraries into gripping reading.

They are, for the most part, very tedious. I’ve seen many of the East India papers that underpin Howarth’s work. While its foreign “factories” (free trade zones that functioned as dependencies) laid the groundwork for colonisation, Howarth shows how it started out as “a parlous, improbable institution”, struggling among the many European trading interests that shaped global commerce for good and ill. Tales of rickety ships, weevil-ridden supplies and a general ill-preparedness permeate David Howarth’s Adventurers, which details the early years of what would become the world’s biggest corporation.

The profits were colossal enough to justify the risks and balm those irritated by poor management, including Queen Elizabeth, who expressed “mislike of the slackness of the Company”. On his return from the East Indies two years later, ships laden with foreign goods, he was knighted by a new king of England, for ushering in a new era of English commerce. In a panic he dashed down to Gravesend, purse in hand, and bought the “Gift”, the biggest ship that looked as though it would float, for a whopping £300. Already days behind schedule, he arrived in port to find one of his ships so overstuffed with goods that “it would be lucky if it made Greenwich before sinking”. He had been placed in charge of the first, small fleet of a new trading venture called the East India Company. On February 18 1601, Sir James Lancaster, already an experienced privateer, was facing a major problem.

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