East Tilbury is a community in the borough of Thurrock in Essex, England. The community is in two main parts, being the older village near the banks of the River Thames, and a garden village to the north which was initially called Bataville, founded in the 1930s to serve the Bata shoe factory.

East Tilbury was an ancient parish. It was abolished as a civil parish in 1936 on the creation of Thurrock Urban District, which in turn became the modern borough of Thurrock in 1974. The ecclesiastical parish has also been abolished, and the area now forms part of a Church of England ecclesiastical parish called "East and West Tilbury and Linford". East Tilbury gives its name to one of the wards of Thurrock, which covers a larger area than the old parish of East Tilbury, additionally including the separate villages of West Tilbury and Linford. At the 2021 census the ward had a population of 7,713 and the East Tilbury built up area as defined by the Office for National Statistics (which just covers the garden village part of East Tilbury) had a population of 5,750.

There is evidence of Romano-British settlement in what is now East Tilbury as far back as the 1st and 2nd centuries. The first written record of the settlement was likely in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle of 653. During the Anglo-Saxon period, it likely formed a single manorial estate of Tilbury, which subsequently fragmented into East Tilbury and West Tilbury. Coalhouse Fort on the banks of the Thames was constructed in the 1860s. From the 1930s to 1960s, the area experienced significant growth with the opening of the Bata shoe factory and the construction of Bataville to house its thousands of workers.

It is believed that East Tilbury may have first been recorded in 653, when Saint Cedd is recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as having founded and built a minister church at Tilaburg, later rendered as Tiliberia in the Domesday Book of 1086 and now Tilbury in the present day, a name it shares today with the separate settlements of West Tilbury and Tilbury Town. It is generally agreed that Cedd's original Tilbury referred to the village of East Tilbury in particular, though it has also been theorised that it may instead refer to a location in what is now West Tilbury or Tilbury Town.

Historically, East Tilbury was known as Great Tilbury to contrast it with West Tilbury, which was then known as Little Tilbury. This name is believed to have signified the seniority of East Tilbury during the Medieval period as the likely home of Cedd's original church. Today, the historic village of East Tilbury is known as East Tilbury Village to distinguish it from the newer Bataville estate built between the 1930s and 1960s, which forms the northern part of the modern community of East Tilbury.

The name Tilbury can be translated as "Tila's fort", with burgh meaning "fort" or "castle" in Anglo-Saxon Old English and Tila often understood to mean the name Tila. It has alternatively been theorised that tila in Tilaburg could derive from the Old Germanic word til and adjective tila, which mean "lowland" and "good" or "suitable" respectively, and burgh from the Old Germanic suffix burgus, meaning "a place to live in a new land", in a similar manner to Tilburg in the Netherlands. Much of the area around the three communities is on low-lying marshland.

There is evidence of Romano-British settlement in what is now East Tilbury, with three hut circles dating to the 1st and 2nd centuries discovered on the East Tilbury foreshore in 1920. Remnants of a prehistoric track from Hangman's Wood in Grays to the parish church and river bank of East Tilbury suggests the use of a ford river crossing over the River Thames with Higham on the Hoo in Kent from the prehistoric period until c. 2,000 BC, when the Thames was much lower and narrower than it is today due to lower sea levels. This crossing may have seen later use during the Roman conquest of Britain by Claudius, with the Roman historian Cassius Dio suggesting that the Britons forded the river here to flee the advancing forces of Aulus Plautius. Roman tesserae was discovered during digging works near the parish church at East Tilbury in the 18th century, suggesting that a Roman era building or villa once stood on the site. It has been posited that the road that runs down East Tilbury is most likely Roman in origin.

The first written record of East Tilbury may have been in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle of 653, when Saint Cedd was recorded as having founded and built a minister church at Tilaburg to promote his missionary work on the Pagan population, which was later corroborated by Saint Bede in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People in 731. The exact location of Cedd's church is not known, but it is believed to have been on the same site as the current East Tilbury parish church of St Catherine's which was then surrounded by tidal marshland, or alternatively further towards the East Tilbury river front or in what is now the neighbouring settlements of West Tilbury or Tilbury Town. During the Anglo-Saxon period, East and West Tilbury likely formed a single manorial estate, with East Tilbury as the namesake village of Tilbury. It is hard to distinguish between the two settlements in early records such as the Domesday Book as both are listed as a single manor under Tilbury. However, there are clear subdivisions in the Domesday Book between smaller manors with different owners, including one manor which was under the possession of Aelfric the Priest and two other manors held by freemen, which had 16 households and a fishery between them.