By the eve of the Glorious Revolution, the Company’s aggressive imperialism formed part of a wider political project to create an absolute monarchy in England and to establish an autocratic English empire overseas. The corporation sought to centralise and militarise the English presence in Asia in order both to maintain its control of England’s trade to the East and in support of Stuart absolutism. The article contends that the Company’s aggressive overseas expansion was pursued for metropolitan and pan-imperial purposes as much as for South Asian ones. This article re-examines and re-interprets this burst of imperial expansion in light of political developments in England and the wider English empire during the later Stuart era. With important exceptions, most scholarship has viewed the Company’s coercive imperialism in the later seventeenth century and the First Anglo-Mughal War as the results primarily, if not exclusively, of political and economic conditions in South Asia. During the 1670s and 1680s, the English East India Company pursued an aggressive programme of imperial expansion in the Asian maritime world, culminating in a series of armed assaults on the Mughal Empire.
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