Short answers, pulled from the story.
The East India Company was founded on the 31st of December 1600 when Queen Elizabeth I granted its royal charter, and was formally dissolved on the 1st of June 1874 under the East India Stock Dividend Redemption Act 1873. It operated for over 270 years, transitioning from a trading company to a governing power before being nationalised following the Indian Rebellion of 1857.
At its peak, the East India Company maintained three presidency armies totalling about 260,000 soldiers, which was twice the size of the British Army at certain times. These forces were largely composed of Sepoys, locally recruited soldiers trained and equipped with European methods.
The Great Bengal Famine of 1770 was caused by policies enacted under East India Company rule, including the use of torture to extract taxes and measures that reduced much of the population to poverty. An estimated 10 million people starved to death during the famine.
In January 1773, the East India Company received government approval for a loan and unlimited access to the American colonial tea market. This gave the company competitive advantages over colonial American tea importers, leading protesters to board British ships in Boston harbour in 1773 and throw the tea overboard in what became known as the Boston Tea Party.
The East India Company began selling opium to Chinese merchants in the 1770s in exchange for porcelain and tea, causing widespread addiction outbreaks across China by around 1820. After the Qing dynasty outlawed the trade in 1796 and 1800 and destroyed tens of thousands of chests of opium, the resulting conflict escalated into the First Opium War of 1839, which ended with the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842 and the cession of Hong Kong to Britain.
The records of the East India Company are held at the British Library in London as part of the Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections, not at the National Archives at Kew where other British government records are stored. Published catalogues cover the company's ships' journals and logs from 1600 to 1834, and many records are freely available online through an agreement with the Families in British India Society.