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[MUSIC PLAYING] The East India Company's bases overseas were known as factories. The documents that they created or received

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in the normal course of their business were carefully copied, and then they were sent to the East India Company's headquarters in London, where they were added to the archive. They are now known as the series IOR/G.

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There are four main types of document formats, really, in the factory records. You get the diaries which record the day-to-day business not surprisingly.

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The consultations where colleagues met and discussed business and then signed up to the record correspondence is recorded in the factory records and you get sometimes some really lovely

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detailed collections about particular subjects. I have here a really nice example of a consultation where they're talking about rules of behaviour. And then it's signed by the people who established those.

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They were very against swearing and drinking and lying. And if you transgressed, you might end up with a fine or in the stocks all day, which in the heat in Kolkata would have been deeply unpleasant.

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So a really nice example of one of these collections is in another volume of the Factory Records. And it relates to Lord Macartney's ill-fated mission to China.

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It wasn't successful as far as diplomacy and establishing good business relations with the East India Company was concerned or at least not in particular. But we're very lucky to have that record in the archives

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at the British Library, and it includes some really beautiful drawings of China. The contents of the Factory Records are really, really varied.

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They give an amazing picture of the day-to-day life of the activities of the company's employees overseas and all the different problems and issues that they had to grapple with.

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There's a huge amount on shipping as well. So you might have information about the arrival and departure of ships, the negotiations with ships captains, and sometimes you even get the measurements

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of the ships as well. There's a lot of information about individual people in the Factory Records that are in management records, really, relating to the East India Company's employees.

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There are comments about their health. People obviously died while they were in the service of the East India Company overseas. So you might get records of that, marriage is also--

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you might get petitions and complaints. And you might also get records of misdemeanours. And I think that's perhaps not entirely unexpected, given that they felt the need to make rules as to what

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constituted good behaviour for East India Company employees. The Factory Records are really amazing source for detailed study of individual places. Every single base that the East India Company had overseas

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is like a microcosm of the company's activities. So anyone wanting to really home in on the fine detail of what was going on a day-to-day basis would want to use the Factory Records.

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But they could also use them to look at the bigger picture. So for instance, networks across the world, really, of traders and for knowledge exchange, international politics, British politics, all these things

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will find their way into the Factory Records. [MUSIC PLAYING]