About Traders

Traders: the East India Company and Asia is a new permanent gallery exploring Britain’s maritime trade with Asia, focusing on the role played by the East India Company.

For over 250 years, the East India Company uniquely shaped trade between Britain and Asia. The gallery explores the influence of Company trade and power, tracing the changing relationships between Britain and Asia that this brought about.

This trade involved key commodities, different locations and many people. It had consequences that changed Britain and the world and still affect us today.

Visitor information

Hours: Open daily, 10.00–17.00 (last entry 16.30)

Location: National Maritime Museum, floor one - see floor plans

Admission: FREE

Traders: tea

The National Maritime Museum’s ‘Trade Routes’ project explored the history of tea, working with members of the Sehmi Day Centre in Plumstead, south-east London. This film is one of the results of the project and features the Juttla family.

Traders Unpacked events

The East India Company and Me: Trace Your Family Roots

Amitav Ghosh’s Man Booker-nominated novel 'Sea of...

Collections online galleries

Traders shop

Traders shop items

Traders gallery objects

Indian Mutiny Medal 1857-8
Indian Mutiny Medal 1857-58
Indian Mutiny Medal 1857-58
Indian Mutiny Medal 1857-58
Victoria Cross
Indian Mutiny Medal 1857-58
Astrolabe
Sword
Victoria Cross
Bugle
Victoria Cross
Indian Mutiny Medal 1857-8
Indian Mutiny Medal 1857-58
To Her Most Gracious Majesty Queen Victoria this Print The Signing and Sealing of the Treaty of Nanking...(signed on board H.M.S. Cornwallis 29 Sep 1842)