Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
"With great skill, Stern has extracted from the archives a cogent and highly engaging narrative of events that even participants found highly tremendously confusing. He deftly conveys the world of the East India company, marshaling striking visual materials and wonderfully evocative quotations from a wide array of Company documents." --Radical History Review
"A thought-provoking reinterpretation [that] will compel us to reexamine assumptions about colonial companies in general." --H-Net
"In a work of deep erudition and striking originality Philip Stern deftly demolishes many of the categories by which we try to organize our work: are states and companies really different animals, were the early modern Atlantic and Indian Oceans distinct worlds, what, if anything, was new about the post-Plassey British Indian empire? We are politely but firmly directed back to the drawing board."-P. J. Marshall, King's College London
"In The Company-State, Philip Stern has made an important contribution not only to studies of empire, but to early modern history in general. This is an important and innovative reconsideration of the East India Company as a political actor in the first phase of its career. This incisively crafted book will be widely read, cited, and debated."-Sanjay Subrahmanyam, University of California, Los Angeles
"A bracing re-thinking of the early modern East India Company and its role in shaping English practices of empire, governance, 'trade,' and polity, Philip Stern's book will replace all previous studies on the topic."-Kathleen Wilson, Stony Brook University
"Stern's rich portrait of the East India Company as a sovereign entity transforms our vision of politics and culture in the early British Empire. Masterfully researched and written with flair, the book places conflicts over corporate sovereignty at the center of a vast and variegated imperial field. The Company-State significantly advances new narratives of global empire."-Lauren Benton, New York University
"In this forcefully argued and prodigiously researched book, Philip J. Stern overturns long-standing assumptions about the English East India Company, the British Empire, and early modern empires. Stern's innovative reassessment of the East India Company's first century builds a new foundation for the British empire and his model of composite, decentralized empires has broad resonance across the early modern world. Historians will be coming to terms with the wide-ranging implications of Stern's important and provocative work for years to come."-Alison Games, author of Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560-1660
"A thought-provoking reinterpretationEL[that] will compel us to reexamine assumptions about colonial companies in general." - LIlya Vinkovetsky, H-Net
Synopsis
Almost since the event itself in 1757, the English East India Company's victory over the forces of the
nawab of Bengal and the territorial acquisitions that followed has been perceived as the moment when the British Empire in India was born. Examining the Company's political and intellectual history in the century prior to this supposed transformation,
The Company-State rethinks this narrative and the nature of the early East India Company itself.
In this book, Philip J. Stern reveals the history of a corporation concerned not simply with the bottom line but also with the science of colonial governance. Stern demonstrates how Company leadership wrestled with typical early modern problems of political authority, such as the mutual obligations of subjects and rulers; the relationships among law, economy, and sound civil and colonial society; the constitution of civic institutions ranging from tax collection and religious practice to diplomacy and warmaking; and the nature of jurisdiction and sovereignty over people, territory, and the sea. Their ideas emerged from abstract ideological, historical, and philosophical principles and from the real-world entanglements of East India Company employees and governors with a host of allies, rivals, and polyglot populations in their overseas plantations. As the Company shaped this colonial polity, it also confronted shifting definitions of state and sovereignty across Eurasia that ultimately laid the groundwork for the Company's incorporation into the British empire and state through the eighteenth century.
Challenging traditional distinctions between the commercial and imperial eras in British India, as well as a colonial Atlantic world and a "trading world" of Asia, The Company-State offers a unique perspective on the fragmented nature of state, sovereignty, and empire in the early modern world.
About the Author
Philip J. Stern is Associate Professor of History at Duke University.
Table of Contents
Introduction: "A State in the Disguise of a Merchant"
Part I: Foundations
Chapter 1 "Planning and Peopling Your Colony": Building a Company-State
Chapter 2 "A Sort of Republic for the Management of Trade": The Jurisdiction of a Company-State
Chapter 3 "A Politie of Civill and Military Power": Diplomacy, War, and Expansion
Chapter 4 "Politicall Science and Martiall Prudence": Political Thought and Political Economy
Chapter 5 "The Most Sure and Profitable Sort of Merchandice": Protestantism and Piety
Part II: Transformations
Chapter 6 "Great Warrs Leave Behind them Long Tales": Crisis and Response in Asia after 1688
Chapter 7 Auspicio Regis et Senatus Angliae": Crisis and Response in Britain after 1688
Chapter 8 "The Day of Small Things": Civic Governance in the New Century
Chapter 9 "A Sword in One Hand and Money in the Other": Old Patterns, New Rivals
Conclusion "A Great and Famous Superstructure"
Abbreviations
Glossary
Notes
Index