Learning to trade: the English East India Company’s business strategy and activities in Tonkin (1672–1697)

This article analyses primary materials relating to the English Tonkin factory in the British Library to argue that the East India Company created a trading innovation by using Tonkin to connect with the potential markets of mainland China and India, rather than having to go through existing trading links. Their adaptations of business strategy and daily trade enabled them to learn and improve in the seventeenth century – a precursor to becoming a hugely powerful commercial organization in the next century. In this sense, the Tonkin factory represents a formative stage in the East India Company’s evolution: an early laboratory of commercial innovation where lessons learned from navigating environmental, political and competitive challenges laid the foundation for the Company’s emergence as a dominant global trading enterprise in the eighteenth century. By highlighting the interplay between local engagement, strategic experimentation and long-term organizational learning, this study contributes to a deeper understanding of how early modern European trading companies constructed commercial power in Asia.