The East India Company was the first joint-stock company of the world. Being a joint-stock company, it experienced the consequences of separation between ownership (stockholders) and control (management). The separation between ownership and control leads to the principal–agent problem, which provides possibilities for opportunistic behaviour on the part of agents (management). The study of the relationship between owners and managers is now the subject matter of a specialized field of knowledge, called corporate governance. In the present paper an attempt has been made to study the East India Company purely as a corporation, to understand the nature of problems of corporate governance that it experienced.
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