The history of the East India Company is as susceptible as any other to the perennial problem facing historians, that of reconciling the difference between static and dynamic, structure and events, analysis and description. The theoretical approach of a formal systems or economic model, if it increases clarity and perception of complex relationships through abstraction, does so at the expense of reality. For a model cannot without destroying itself take account of the passage of time which affects its structural boundaries and parameters. Yet such changes take place all the time and constitute one of the most important processes of history. The framework created by the East India Company was no exception. The work of creation was a long-drawn affair, and many modifications were required before it reached a state of comparative stability. Some of the unreality which stems from the application of a static model to phenomena that are essentially dynamic can be resolved by looking at the actual evolution of the Company's trading organisation. The main purpose of this organisation was to trade, to buy goods in the Asian markets and sell them in Europe. During the course of a century it naturally gave rise to long time-series on the Company's exports and imports, its financial balance-sheet, profits and dividends. In the language of our model, these were the inputs and outputs of the system, and their history obeyed its own separate set of rules.