This biography, then, forthrightly reflects the available material, with little on Sandys's personal life but with great detail on his parliamentary actions and considerable detail on his investments in and direction of New World exploration through the Virginia and East India Companies.

As opposed to much economic writing about India that is preoccupied with the "colonial difference," Goody argues that the Dutch, English and other East India Companies were not only forerunners of multinationals but were also successors to "the earlier forms of partnership such as the commenda found throughout Eurasia.

Since the 1960s, both Asian and European historians have mined the rich archives of the Dutch and English East India companies (and for the earlier centuries also those of Portugal) in order to inform themselves about the Asian world within which the Europeans moved and to shift the focus of interest away from those Europeans toward the indigenous societies that were visited and influenced.