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The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India

Author

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  • Stern, Philip J.

    (Duke University)

Abstract

The Company-State rethinks the nature of the early English East India Company as a form of polity and corporate sovereign well before its supposed transformation into a state and empire in the mid-eighteenth century. Taking seriously the politics and political thought of the early Company on their own terms, it explores the Company's political and legal constitution as an overseas corporation and the political institutions and behaviors that followed from it, from tax collection and public health to warmaking and colonial plantation. Tracing the ideological foundations of those institutions and behaviors, this book reveals how Company leadership wrestled not simply with the bottom line but with typically early modern problems of governance, such as: the mutual obligations of subjects and rulers; the relationship between law, economy, and sound civil and colonial society; and the nature of jurisdiction and sovereignty over people, commerce, religion, territory, and the sea. The Company-State thus reframes some of the most fundamental narratives in the history of the British Empire, questioning traditional distinctions between public and private bodies, "commercial" and "imperial" eras in British India, a colonial Atlantic and a "trading world" of Asia, European and Asian political cultures, and the English and their European rivals in the East Indies. At its core, The Company-State offers a view of early modern Europe and Asia, and especially the colonial world that connected them, as resting in composite, diffuse, hybrid, and overlapping notions of sovereignty that only later gave way to more modern singular, centralized, and territorially- and nationally-bounded definitions of political community. Given growing questions about the fate of the nation-state and of national borders in an age of "globalization," this study offers a perspective on the vitality of non-state and corporate political power perhaps as relevant today as it was in the seventeenth century. Available in OSO: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/history/9780195393736/toc.html

Suggested Citation

  • Stern, Philip J., 2011. "The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, number 9780195393736.
  • Handle: RePEc:oxp:obooks:9780195393736
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    Cited by:

    1. Dan Bogart, 2016. "The East Indian Monopoly and the Transition from Limited Access in England, 1600–1813," NBER Chapters, in: Organizations, Civil Society, and the Roots of Development, pages 23-49, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    2. Joseph P. Garske, 2018. "Anglophone and Civilian Legal Cultures: Two understandings of human trust for the global age," Academicus International Scientific Journal, Entrepreneurship Training Center Albania, issue 18, pages 34-41, February.
    3. Roy, Tirthankar, 2019. "State capacity and the economic history of colonial India," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 100723, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    4. Thomas Leng, 2016. "Interlopers and disorderly brethren at the Stade Mart: commercial regulations and practices amongst the Merchant Adventurers of England in the late Elizabethan period," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 69(3), pages 823-843, August.
    5. Lilian Kemunto Mogikoyo & Peterson Obara Magutu & Alvin B. Dolo, 2017. "The Link between Supplier Evaluation Attributes and Supply Chain Performance of Government Owned Entities: Perspectives from Commercial State Corporations in Kenya," Noble International Journal of Economics and Financial Research, Noble Academic Publsiher, vol. 2(1), pages 1-20, January.
    6. Nogues-Marco, Pilar, 2020. "Measuring Colonial Extraction: The East India Company’s Rule and the Drain of Wealth (1757-1858)," CEPR Discussion Papers 15431, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    7. Nogues-Marco, Pilar, 2020. "Measuring colonial extraction: the east India company's rule and the drain of wealth (1757-1858)," Working Papers unige:144406, University of Geneva, Paul Bairoch Institute of Economic History.
    8. Douglas Howland, 2019. "Sovereign Claims and Possessions – The Beginnings of the Territorial State," International Journal of Social Science Studies, Redfame publishing, vol. 7(6), pages 71-84, November.
    9. Anandaroop Sen, 2018. "Early years of East India Company rule in Chittagong: Violence, waste and settlement c. 1760–1790," The Indian Economic & Social History Review, , vol. 55(2), pages 147-181, April.
    10. Mama D. Ujuaje & Marina Chang, 2020. "Systems of Food and Systems of Violence: An Intervention for the Special Issue on “Community Self Organisation, Sustainability and Resilience in Food Systems”," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 12(17), pages 1-30, August.
    11. Tamina M. Chowdhury, 2016. "Raids, annexation and plough: Transformation through territorialisation in nineteenth-century Chittagong Hill Tracts," The Indian Economic & Social History Review, , vol. 53(2), pages 183-224, April.
    12. Richard J. Blakemore, 2017. "Pieces of eight, pieces of eight: seamen's earnings and the venture economy of early modern seafaring," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 70(4), pages 1153-1184, November.

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