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By the time the remarkable Job Charnock established the headquarters of the East India Company at Sutanuti on the east bank of the Hooghly in 1690, the riverside was already dotted with trading communities from European countries. Besides the British, previously based at Hooghly on the west bank, there were the French at Chandernagore, the Dutch and Armenians at Chinsurah, the Danes at Serampore, the Portuguese at Bandel, and even Greeks at Rishra and Prussians at Bhadeshwar.

Supported by Armenian funds, the East India Company bought land around Sutanuti, and in 1699 completed their first fort in the area - Fort William . A few years later the East India Company amalgamated Sutanuti and two other villages to form the town of Calcutta . Although several theories exist, the name may well derive from Kalikutir , the house or temple of Kali - a reference to the temple of Kalighat . Job Charnock, the town's first governor, married an Indian woman who had been rescued from committing sati on her first husband's funeral pyre. With trading success came ambitious plans for development; in 1715 a delegation to the Moghul court in Delhi negotiated trading rights, along with several villages and towns on both banks of the Hooghly, to create a territory that was around 15km long. The company built a moat around the perimeter to ward off possible Maratha attacks; known as the Maratha Ditch , it is marked by today's Circular Road. Later, the company entangled itself in the web of local power politics, with consequences both unforeseen - as with the Black Hole - and most assiduously desired - as when the Battle of Plassey in 1758 made the British masters of Bengal. Recognized by parliament in London in 1773, the company's trading monopoly led it to shift the capital of Bengal here from Murshidabad, and Calcutta became a clearing house for a vast range of commerce, including the lucrative export of opium to China.

At first, the East India Company brought young bachelors out from Britain to work as servants. Referred to as "writers", they lived in spartan conditions in communal mud huts, until the Writers' Building was eventually erected for their convenience. As they took to indigenous ways, and cohabited with local women, they were responsible for the emergence of the new Eurasian community. In time, parliament rescinded the company's monopoly; when the doors of trade were thrown open, merchants and adventurers flocked in from far and wide, including Parsis, Baghdadi Jews, Afghans and Indians from other parts of the country. By 1857, such splendid buildings as the Court House, Government House and St Paul's Cathedral, had earned Calcutta the sobriquet "City of Palaces". In reality, the humid and uncomfortable climate, putrefying salt marshes and the hovels that grew haphazardly around the city created unhygienic conditions that were a constant source of misery and disease.

The city's affluent elite - Bengali merchants included - came to be known as the " bhadra log ", the good people. Although the term was lampooned by Kipling in his depiction of the Bandar Log or "Monkey People" in The Jungle Book , they were responsible for the great flowering of cultural and artistic expression known as the Bengali Renaissance . The decline of Calcutta as an international port came with the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, the emergence of Bombay, and the end of the opium trade. In 1911, the days of glory came to a definitive end; the imperial capital of India was transferred to Delhi.