David Howarth, Adventurers: The Improbable Rise of the East India Company: 1550-1650 New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2022. 480 pp. ISBN:978-0300250725

s lively and engaged study of the early years of the English East India Company provides an encyclopedic view of the major events and personalities who were drawn together to formulate Tudor England's exploration of the Early Modern World.By tracing some of the major figures of London's late 16 th Century political, commercial, and social circles, Howarth has shown how the activities of seemingly disparate men from a range of professions came together to support and oversee the rise of the East India Company.Adventurers not only traces these individuals but gives a clear account of the different voyages undertaken by the Company and their importance as experiments in trade and diplomacy.Some failed miserably, others showed far greater success, the factors governing these outcomes were sometimes organizational and sometimes based on the individual personnel dispatched to man them.Furthermore, at times the Company's voyages met with unexpected hazards or situations which curtailed what might otherwise have been commercially successful ventures.The book is mostly concerned with the internal operation of the Company from its foundation in 1601 in the dying days of the Elizabethan era.This was a time when England's engagement in international trade was taking off, with missions to Muscovy, the Ottoman Empire, and the New World under the auspices of different private companies, were taking English goods and merchants across the globe.Into this constellation of new trading initiatives came the EIC, which was headed by the redoubtable Thomas Smythe as its first governor.Smythe was able to navigate the Company through the maze of political and commercial difficulties that arose thanks to his long experience as both a merchant and diplomat in his own right.The survival of the Company hinged upon Smythe's early management and his association and familiarity with the exploits of England's foremost mariners, be that Drake and Hawkins' piratical voyages against the Spanish or the scholarly and legal pursuits of Mun and Purchas.Howarth presents us with a worldview that point inexorably towards the Company having come at a time when England, defined especially through London's mercantile and political elite, was ready for it.Not only this, but that earlier developments in cartography and the Iberian experiences of long voyages and the profits available from a global trade, allowed for English merchants and travelers, like Thomas Coryate to move more freely than would previously have been possible.Howarth equally explores the important differences between the English and Dutch entries into the trading networks of the Indian Ocean and Asia.Where the Dutch were motivated by a military imperative to dispossess the