Empire Incorporated: The Corporations that built British Colonialism, 2023

For those familiar with Philip J. Stern’s highly acclaimed book, The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India, published in 2011, Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations that Built British Colonialism will seem like a logical sequel. In his first book, Stern convincingly demonstrated that the English East India Company (EIC) was as much a governmental as a commercial and economic enterprise. From this perspective, the state, which was developing at the same time as chartered companies – was but one corporation among many, one whose interests companies sometimes complemented and, at other times, competed with. Empire, Incorporated deepens several of the historiographical interventions made in The Company-State – notably the impossibility of trying to separate public and private, the entangled relationship between companies and states, and the necessity of bridging traditional historiographical divides, such as that between “premodern” and “modern” Empires or between forms of European colonialism in Asia/ the Indian Ocean and the Americas/ the Atlantic. Empire, Incorporated adopts, however, a much more expansive canvas, encompassing the globe and covering four centuries. The result is a book that promises to be as influential on future research directions as Stern’s previous study.

Empire, Incorporated is part of a growing tendency among scholars of the British Empire to adopt empire-wide frameworks and multi-scale approaches to discern broader imperial patterns1. In Stern’s case, he centers a traditionally “supporting character” – the corporation – not to “replace old dominant accounts with an equally problematic new one” but because “the history of empire demands many different, often conflicting narrative possibilities at once” (12). Although the book focuses, as its subtitle suggests, on the critical role corporations played in British colonialism, the author adopts a transnational frame, highlighting how projects and their promoters, capital, and shareholders circulated among European nations and empires as well as between European and non-European spaces. This framework contributes to recent scholarly approaches to early modern chartered companies that emphasize “company-crossings” (i.e. the links that developed transnationally beyond nations and Europe, and the permeability of companies as institutions, whether in terms of personnel, structure or capital formation) and the crucial role of non-European actors in shaping European companies2.

Stern argues that “corporate” or “venture colonialism” – the belief that “the public business of empire was and always had been best done by private enterprise” – was a driving force behind the construction, development, and ultimate end of the British Empire (1). At the heart of corporate colonialism lay two long-standing concepts, innovatively combined in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: the joint-stock, which was divided into shares and which allowed a large number of investors, many of whom were strangers to one another, to pool their capital; and the corporation, a sort of artificial person that could sue and be sued, possess property and privileges, and govern itself. Stern’s argument is nicely summarized in the following passage: “Like empire itself, [the corporation] was a powerful paradox: person and group; public and private; commercial and political; mercantilist and capitalist; sycophantic and rebellious; regional and global; immortal and fragile; smugly patriotic and belligerently cosmopolitan; and the cornerstone of a British Empire never fully owned or operated by Britain as such” (2). Despite – or, indeed, because of – their paradoxical nature, corporate colonies and joint-stock corporations were an extremely durable form. The source of such longevity was found in the mutually reinforcing constellation of jurisdictions, powers, and privileges corporations amassed in both Britain and overseas. The portrait that emerges from following a variety of corporations – ranging from joint-stock commercial companies to banks, and from land companies to telegraph and railway companies – across a broad temporal and geographical span is one of continuity in corporate colonialism’s role in British empire formation.

Empire, Incorporated is a narrative history as well as “an experiment in collective legal, intellectual and institutional biography” (12). As such, Stern’s goal is not to identify definitive features of corporate overseas enterprises, but, rather, to trace the degree and substance of their evolution over time by analyzing the interplay between economic, philosophical, and legal arguments for and against and their “institutional and organizational structures” (12). In keeping with this approach, the book consists of six chapters organized chronologically, along with an introduction and an epilogue. Chapter 1, “Initial Public Offerings,” focuses on the earliest patents granted to the likes of Sebastian Cabot, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Thomas Smith and Walter Ralegh for both Ireland and America as well as joint-stock ventures in the Mediterranean, the Ottoman Empire and the Indian Ocean, notably the Levant and East India Companies. By the opening of the seventeenth century, joint-stock and corporate forms had become a model for financing and organizing overseas commerce. In chapter 2, “Municipal Bonds,” the increasing number of patents granted by the Crown, including to plantation companies in America, raised several questions, from what constituted a monopoly to the process by which the Crown could cancel a charter. As chapter 3, “Corporate Finance,” shows, the period from the Restoration (1660) to the 1720s saw an important evolution in the Crown’s and Parliament’s relations with corporations. If the Crown directly participated in ventures like the Royal Adventurers to Africa, it was companies’ new role as managers of state debt, especially the EIC, that henceforth tied corporations closely to the developing state and empire.

Chapter 4, “Hostile Takeovers,” which takes the story to the end of the eighteenth century, centers on the vexed question of colonial corporations’ status vis-à-vis the king. If corporations were artificial persons, they had to be created by a higher power like the Crown; if, however, they were first and foremost a contract among members on which the Crown conferred a particular legal status, they were autonomous. Twenty-year reviews of the EIC charter exposed the lack of clarity in the relationship between Parliament/ the Crown and corporations, a situation that both the Regulating Act of 1773 and the India Act of 1784 aimed to resolve. The opening to chapter 5, “Corporate Innovations,” traces the ultimate end of the EIC’s commercial dimension, leaving only its territorial administration remaining. If this development seemed to confirm the early nineteenth-century trend towards a more unitary “imperial legal order,” projects for chartered companies and joint stocks, now including both public and private banks, continued unabated, this time focusing particularly on Latin America, Australia, and New Zealand (194). The South Australian Company, founded by Edward Gibbon Wakefield, one of the era’s most prominent projectors, exemplified “the new breed of colonial company…whose business was more about government than commerce” (223). The final chapter, “Limiting Liabilities,” traces the impact of the Companies Acts, which effectively obviated the need for a Crown charter or parliamentary act, requiring instead that companies be registered at a registry office. Neither these new limited companies nor the forced surrender of the EIC’s and Hudson Bay Company’s (HBC) charter to the Crown lessened the desire for charters. Consequently, “the ‘new’ imperialism…could look quite old indeed” (243). It became common practice to found a registered company and then obtain a royal charter, giving rise to complex sets of concessions from British and foreign governments and of sub-joint-stock companies for various sectors from mining to telegraphy. One such enterprise, the North Borneo Company became, along with the EIC, the model for corporate colonialism in late-nineteenth-century Africa, e.g. the Imperial British East Africa Company. The epilogue closes the book with a discussion of the appropriate terms of compensation for the few remaining “private” corporate enterprises, including the IBEAC, at the turn of the twentieth century, the newest form of corporate colonialism – the public corporation (e.g. BBC) – and, finally, the role of corporations in decolonization and postcolonial states.

The cumulative effect of this institutional biography is to underscore the ubiquity, durability, continuity and malleability of overseas joint-stock and corporate enterprises as instruments of colonialism. No corporation was singular or coherent; rather, each was like a taproot, spawning further root networks in the form of sublicences, subsidiary joint-stocks, and individual and corporate concessionaries. They came in various sizes and had varied outcomes, some failed before they started, others lasted for a time or for centuries, while yet others were repurposed with surprising facility (e.g. the Sword Blade Company that became a bank!). Companies, big and small, were also porous, affected by and dependent on rivals, allies, and private traders. Despite certain evolutions in corporate and joint-stock forms and the increase in government regulations, the arguments wielded by proponents and detractors alike remained remarkably constant, and the history of corporate colonialism itself became a rhetorical weapon. Indeed, regardless of the century, Britons were mad for companies.

What will be of particular interest to members of this Assocation is the contextualization of the history of colonialism in what is now Canada in a broad geographical and temporal frame. Looking at the East India and Hudson Bay Companies alongside each other highlights both their common and particular histories. For example, while they both faced increasing pressures to give up their charters in the mid-nineteenth century, their fates were different: while the Crown took over government in India, effectively dissolving the EIC, it nevertheless lived on, its shareholders receiving annuities until 1873; in the HBC’s case, while it surrendered its charter to the Crown, it was bought out and remained (and remains) a commercial enterprise. Canadian companies, their projectors, and key figures in British North America and the Dominion of Canada crop up as models elsewhere or were part of projects in other parts of the empire. For example, the Canada Land Company became a model for an enterprise in the British Cape Colony.

As a specialist of British India, Stern does not offer new interpretations specific to the history of colonialism in what is now Canada or the companies and individuals at its heart. Indeed, this history is largely, though not exclusively, told through the HBC. One area in which greater engagement with northern North America would have strengthened the book is in relations among Indigenous peoples, the empire/colonial state, and companies. While Stern notes the convergence of economic and racialist arguments as well as land companies’ role in Indigenous dispossession, this point is simply restated later rather than further developed. Brian Gettler’s book, for example, shows how treaty payments helped imperial and colonial states lay claim to lands3. Stern’s book nevertheless provides the opportunity for Canadian specialists to respond to the global imperial portrait painted here.

If Stern takes care to specify that “corporate empire is [not] at its root a national enterprise [n]or an especially British one,” I would hazard that an equally geographically and chronologically expansive study of the role of French corporate forms in empire formation would reveal another trajectory, one that both overlapped with and departed from the British one (12). Indeed, while both empires had continuous recourse to the company form, the company had its own legal, political and social history in France. In New France, for example, there is not the same fervour to incorporate as in English North American colonies. Moreover, all types of corporations were abolished during the French Revolution.

Along similar lines, while Stern adopts a transnational perspective, there are missed opportunities to situate these British corporations in the context of their European counterparts. It would have been instructive to connect the debates over the EIC in the late eighteenth century to the more general reconfiguration of relationships among European states and companies. The French Compagnie des Indes, for example, although professed to be “purely commercial,” played a key role in rebuilding the diplomatic relationship between France and Britain following the American Revolution4.

These reflections do not detract from what is undeniably an impressive book, supported by extensive archival and secondary sources. On the latter point, the press’ decision to forego a bibliography is regrettable. While I would have liked more development of the argument in the book’s chapters, Empire, Incorporated is an enjoyable, engaging read, a book that wears its erudition lightly. Lastly – and surely a sign of success for any book – I found myself thinking more consciously and critically of any corporations that I encountered (directly or indirectly) following my reading of the book.

• 1

  To name just one other recent strong example, Elizabeth Elbourne,Empire, Kinship and Violence: Family Histories, Indigenous Rights and the Making of Settler Colonialism, 1770-1842 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2023).

• 2

  Felicia Gottmann and Philip Stern, “Introduction: Crossing Companies,”Journal of World History, special issue, 31.3 (2020): 477-488, quotation 482; William A. Pettigrew and David Veevers, “Introduction,” in William Pettigrew and David Veevers, eds., The Corporation as a Protagonist in Global History, c. 1550-1750 (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 1-39.

• 3

  Brian Gettler, Colonialism’s Currency: Money, State, and First Nations in Canada, 1820-1950 (Montréal/Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020).

• 4

  Elizabeth Cross, “India and the Compagnie des Indes in the Age of French Revolution,” French Historical Studies 44.3 (August 2021): 455-476.