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

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Th e Company-State This page intentionally left blank Th e Company-State Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India PHILIP J. STERN 1 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offi ces in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Th ailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright © 2011 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitt ed, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. 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

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