United Company of Merchants of England Trading to the East Indies (1709)

The 1709 merger of the "Old" East India Company (chartered 1600) and the "English" East India Company (Dowgate Company, chartered 1698) produced the United Company — the canonical named instance of the JSC-Mercantile class (machine:joint-stock-company-mercantile-1602) for the period 1709–1858. The 1709 unification was financed via a £3.2M loan to the Crown and granted a unified monopoly on all English trade east of the Cape of Good Hope. Unlike the class card (east-india-company-1600) which covers the full 1600–1858 arc, THIS instance card focuses on what is distinctive about the 1709-onwards United Company form: (a) the quasi-sovereign Bengal territorial pivot from 1757 (Battle of Plassey) onward, (b) the opium–tea–silver triangular trade as the dominant revenue engine, (c) the institutional handover pattern (Government of India Act 1858) that transferred the company-state's administrative apparatus directly to the Crown — a unique dissolution-via-absorption rather than liquidation. Motor rationale: `flywheel` — the United Company's post-Plassey revenue structure is a flywheel: Bengal land-revenue funds sepoy army → sepoy army defends and extends Bengal sovereignty → extended Bengal sovereignty generates more land-revenue → land-revenue funds opium monopoly → opium exports to China generate silver → silver re-enters Bengal land-tax circuit. This is not pure `pull` (MM canonical) but a self-reinforcing flywheel within an MM frame. [STUB-substrate-enum-gap]: The Substrate enum lacks `institutional`; the triple [social, semiotic, cognitive] approximates the institutional substrate of the United Company (Court of Directors + Presidency bureaucracies + codified land-revenue systems). [STUB] commodity: null for opium chests, raw cotton, Indian sepoy recruitment — no Smil enum covers these flows. Revenue proxied via capital_florin for capital-flow slots. The cross-era coupling to machine:east-india-company-1600 is intentionally absent: both cards share parent_machine: MM, so any cross-reference between them is INTRA-MM → handled via `couplings`, not `cross_era_couplings`. The `notable_instances` block registers the three Presidencies as sub-instances.