The company-state: corporate sovereignty and the early modern foundations of the British Empire in India

315 Pages·2012·5.948 MB·English

by  Stern, Philip J

Th e Company-State
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Th e Company-State
Corporate Sovereignty and the
Early Modern Foundations of the
British Empire in India
PHILIP J. STERN
1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Stern, Philip J.
Th e company-state: corporate sovereignty and the early modern foundations
of the British Empire in India /Philip J. Stern.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-539373-6
1. East India Company—History.
2. Corporations, British—India.
3. India—History—British occupation, 1765–1947. I. Title.
HF486.E6S73 2011
382 ′ .094205—dc22
2010032527
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
CONTENTS
Preface vii
N ote on Spelling and Dates xiii
Introduction: “A State in the Disguise of a Merchant”
3
PART ONE FOUNDATIONS
1 “Planting & Peopling Your Colony”: Building a
Company-State
19
2 “A Sort of Republic for the Management of Trade”:
Th e Jurisdiction of a Company-State
41
3 “A Politie of Civill and Military Power”: Diplomacy, War,
and Expansion
61
4 “Politicall Science and Martiall Prudence”: Political Th ought
and Political Economy
83
5 “Th e Most Sure and Profi table Sort of Merchandice”: Protestantism
and Piety
100
PART TWO TRANSFORMATIONS
6 “Great Warrs Leave Behind them Long Tales”: Crisis
and Response in Asia aft er 1688
121
7 “Auspicio Regis et Senatus Angliae” : Crisis and Response in Britain aft er
1688
142
8 “Th e Day of Small Th ings”: Civic Governance in the New Century
164
9 “A Sword in One Hand & Money in the Other”: Old Patt erns,
New Rivals
185
Conclusion : “A Great and Famous Superstructure”
207
A bbreviations 215
N otes 217
Glossary 285
Index 289
PREFACE
Over the decade that has spanned from the fi rst conception of this project to its
ultimate conclusion in this book, the East India Company has enjoyed a posthu-
mous quartercentenary, museum exhibits, specialist and general histories, and
collected volumes. Its name has been att ached to a line of tropical clothing and
the Company itself resurrected in a London shop selling high-end foodstuff s
including, of all things, tea. Th ere is now an East India Company video game,
and the Company was cast as the corporate archvillain in the fi nal two block-
buster P irates of the Caribbean movies. In the meantime, the Company, long of
interest to British imperial historians, has experienced an academic resurgence,
from the history of British domestic culture to its diff usion in the Atlantic and
elsewhere.1
C learly, given the great contemporary concerns, both political and historio-
graphical, with globalization, multinational corporations, private mercenaries
and outsourced warfare, colonialism and neocolonialism, and, of course, pirates,
the renewed interest in the Company should be unsurprising. Yet, amid all this
publicity, there still seems to be one fundamental assumption about the Com-
pany itself that has been near impossible to shake: that it was essentially a trading
corporation, which became an empire only with its acquisition of territory in the
middle of the eighteenth century. Th e understanding of its early history as an
institution has thus tended to be focused on its roles in commerce or domestic
politics, its driving motivations and institutional culture summarized in the
words utt ered by the Company’s fi ctive representative in that fi nal P irates of the
Caribbean fi lm, just before he was blown to bits: “It’s nothing personal . . . It’s just
good business.” Th is vision of the Company is rooted in, and reinforces, some
deeply seated and enduring chronological, geographical, and conceptual divi-
sions in the historiography of the British Empire, between a “trading” and
“ imperial” period in British India, “fi rst” and “second” British empires, a colonial
Atlantic and a commercial Asia, and the state, on the one hand, and the variety
vii
viii Preface
of other bodies politic that governed over people, places, and things across the
early modern world. Perhaps most fundamentally, it refl ects the remarkable
ideological power the modern state has had in shaping our historiographical and
political imagination. Th at the national form of state is, and has been, the fi nal
and ultimate form of sovereignty and political community has underscored
some fundamental distinctions—between nations and empires, politics and
commerce, companies and states—that increasingly seem neither intuitive nor
tenable.
Th is is thus a book about a “trading” corporation that has much less to say
about trade and far more to say about corporations. Great amounts of ink have
been spilt on the early Company’s commerce in Asia as well as its role in shaping
British history, much of it quite good and useful. However, this book approaches
the early Company diff erently: as a form of government, a corporation, a juris-
diction, and a colonial proprietor. In exploring the constitutional, institutional,
and ideological foundations for this Company-State, it suggests a vision of early
modern overseas activity driven by a variety of forms of political community
that were only later incorporated into its ally and competitor, a national state and
empire, which itself was only in the process of formation. Th e Company-State is
thus a proposition and an experiment in the notion that companies, corpora-
tions, and other non-national bodies oft en act as political communities in their
own rights, and their motivations, allegiances, and even ideologies can only be
understood when we take seriously the possibility that they have intellectual and
political histories as institutions on their own terms.
Th e best argument for seeing the East India Company as a state is actually one
that sits behind rather than inside this book, namely, the vast archive it has left
behind. Even within a decade of its creation, Samuel Purchas noted the count-
less hours he had to spend transcribing Company records for his P ilgrims , “the
tediousnesse of which,” he complained, “wearied me.” 2 Two centuries later,
James Mill found the Company’s library to be “appalling by its magnitude, that
many years appeared to be inadequate to render the mind familiar with it.”3
While aspiring to render my mind familiar with only one part of this archive, and
to write about it, I inevitably have incurred innumerable debts, for which this
book is hardly adequate compensation. Th ankfully, unlike Purchas, I was not left
to my own devices and received indispensible assistance from staff at a variety of
archives and libraries, including the British Library, Guildhall Library, Lambeth
Palace Archives, Library of Congress, Oxford University’s Bodleian Library,
Scott ish National Archives, Scott ish National Library, Royal Bank of Scotland,
UK Parliamentary Archives, the UK National Archives, Yale University’s
Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library and University Manuscripts
and Archives; particular gratitude must also go to the various kind souls over
the years behind the book delivery desk in the Oriental and India Offi ce (now
Preface
ix
Asian & African Studies) reading room, as well as archivists Antonia Moon,
Penny Brook, Margaret Makepeace, Andrew Cook, and Anthony Farrington, all
of whom, though they will not remember it, have set me straight on several
matt ers at many crucial points. Staff at the British Library, British Museum,
National Maritime Museum, Bodleian Library, and Duke University Libraries
were remarkable in helping to locate and secure permission to reprint the images
in this book. At various points, research, writing, and thinking was made pos-
sible by funding, fellowships, and support from Columbia University, the U.S.
Department of Education, the Huntington Library, American University, and
Duke University. My year at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell Univer-
sity deserves particular mention as a remarkable experience, without which this
book and its related work would never have taken its present shape. I am eter-
nally grateful for the support and friendship of Brett DeBary, Tim Murray, the
Society’s staff , and all of my fellow fellows. Th is work has also been presented in
parts to scores of conferences, symposia, and colloquia, and all the co-panelists,
commentators, and audiences at these have had a hand in shaping the fi nal prod-
uct; I wish I had the space to thank them all appropriately here. I must, however,
single out my particular appreciation for the Duke University Franklin Human-
ities Institute, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, Srinivas Aravamudan, Ian
Baucom, and all the other participants in the discussion of this manuscript, in its
embarrassingly engorged form, at the Fall 2009 FHI faculty book manuscript
workshop. Although no one chapter or section has been reprinted, some ideas,
quotations, and possibly inadvertently turns-of-phrase strewn throughout have
appeared previously in articles in the William and Mary Quarterly (October
2006), Journal of British Studies (April 2008), Journal of Imperial and Common-
wealth History (March 2007), and book chapters in Sameetah Agah and Elizabeth
Kolsky, eds., Th e Fringes of Empire (Oxford University Press, 2009), and Rafael
Torres Sánchez, ed., War, State, and Development: Fiscal-Military States in the
Eighteenth Century (Eunsa, 2007). My great thanks go to all of the readers,
editors, and other interlocutors who helped shaped these pieces, and thus inev-
itably this book. Where drawn upon, these have been cited in appropriate places
in the text.
A stunning number of colleagues, friends, and confi dants have contributed,
willingly or not, knowingly and not, to this project, in reading articles, chapters
and even the manuscript at various points, or in off ering their own work and
work-in-progress, perspectives, references, research, suggestions, comfortable
guest rooms, moral support, fi ne meals, strong drinks, and smirking indul-
gence of yet another conversation about how companies can be states. So,
thank you: Ed Balleisen, Lauren Benton, Shailen Bhandare, Bill Bulman, Trevor
Burnard, Huw Bowen, Dirk Bonker, Margaret Brill, Laurent Dubois, Kumkum
Chatt erjee, Partha Chatt erjee, Matt Cook, Duane Corpis, Emily Erikson, Jan