HIST363: Global Perspectives on Industrialization

This is the juncture at which the field largely arrives today: a need to converge the diverse enquiries of Global History with the local, regional or national histories of other fields. Far from subsuming these categories, a 'New Global History' must confront and adapt these traditional narratives, especially those of a national perspective. Indeed, the current nationalist renaissances in places such as the United States and Britain are predicated on the false conceptualisation of globalisation as an unwanted interloping force in modern society. And yet, the very intensity of the emergence of the nation-state and national histories from the nineteenth century onwards were themselves products of increasing global connections and comparisons. As the late C. A. Bayly argued, 'all local, national or regional histories must, in important ways … be global histories'.⁴² But global histories ought not to lose sight of the significance of local, regional, as well as national identities and institutions to the way in which the globe was experienced and imagined. Global trading opportunities have often been sought to advance national interests, and national concerns have more often compelled states to place barriers across global trade.

No single institution integrates the local, regional, national, and global settings more than the trading corporation. If global history continues to focus on global comparisons, connections, and globalisation, the corporation ought to be a protagonist in global history. These bodies have long been of great interest to historians of various sub-disciplinary persuasions. For historians of empire, trading corporations have been depicted as innocent commercial prefaces to full-blown state-sponsored empire – as self-financing dress rehearsals for the deployment of colonial power without the need for state subsidy.⁴³ Business historians – whose primary chronological focus has been the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – have occasionally looked back to the seventeenth and eighteenth century trading corporation for evidence of the early modern inspiration for modern joint stock corporations.⁴⁴ As such, they have anachronistically projected modern governance arrangements – board room power – onto more complex and decentred institutions and have overstated false distinctions between centre and periphery. They have also written histories of separate firms – rather than comparative histories of the corporate type. Both liberal and Marxian strains in economic history have – following Adam Smith – used trading corporations as evidence of the capitalist desire to siphon economic opportunities into privileged silos. As such, they have grossly over-emphasised the extent to which the trading corporations were monopolies that had to be liberated by free trade.⁴⁵ Historians of corporations in general have too often reduced the meaning and significances of corporate activity to the corporations' own mercantilist posturing in print.⁴⁶ The propaganda of the companies simplifies and obscures their complex global dynamics. Legal historians have been the most resourceful in noting the similarities between the trading corporations and their municipal forbears, but they have been myopic in using narrow and strictly juridical interpretations of corporations that limit these complex institutions to their charter provisions or the initiatives of their directors – ignoring the corporation's unique aptitude for relationship formation.⁴⁷

Despite its significance in managing and governing Europe's overseas trade, the corporation has been analysed and understood within a predominantly national context: as Dutch, or English, or French companies, competing around the world for a slice of the mercantilist spoils.⁴⁸ Interest in Europe's East India Companies, for example, has never been stronger, and yet with every new monograph the gulf between what were essentially common (and often interlocked) models of overseas monopoly becomes wider and more nationally-focused.⁴⁹ Even more narrowly, the various corporations of any particular nation, and especially those of the English, have largely been understood as individual entities, following separate developmental trajectories in different cities, regions, and oceanic basins. For example, Phil Withington's powerful study of the enfranchisement of corporations in early modern England focuses on the role of civic corporations and livery companies, but hardly mentions overseas corporations, whose own enfranchisement had arguably the biggest impact on state formation, the Crown, and political economy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.⁵⁰ More crucially, the global enfranchisement of overseas corporations through their engagement with non-European states and communities ensured that the latter had a role to play in England's domestic state formation. Histories of England's overseas trading companies have similarly failed to draw upon the longer history of the domestic corporation, whilst companies operating in different oceanic regions have only recently been opened up to comparative (but not integrative) treatment, those operating in the Atlantic and their counterparts in Asia meeting analytically for the first time.⁵¹

The corporation therefore has been proscribed differentiated histories: business, mercantilist, national, domestic or foreign; civic, humanistic or commercial; European, Atlantic or Asian. Whilst these distinctions are vital, they have nonetheless led to the absence of an independent global history for the corporation itself, in favour of its subordination to larger national or regional narratives of governance, society, exploration, liberty, commerce, and conquest.⁵² And yet the durability of corporate governance styles associated with regulated companies rather than joint stocks challenges this view.⁵³ Indeed, Henry Turner's recent Corporate Commonwealth has demonstrated that the sheer breadth and longevity of the corporation in domestic English history demands a far more open and overarching approach to the study of corporations. For Turner, the corporation was a durable actor that encompassed not just the joint-stock or regulated companies, but indeed included the state, the universitas, the theatre, and other artificial persons. The corporation, he argues, 'focuses our attention on this problem of scale; it invites us to analyse the forces of translation whereby wholes become parts and parts become wholes again'. The durability and longevity of the corporation in all its forms 'provoke a necessary shift in our account of political agency and will result … in a displacement of the concept of the state'.⁵⁴ In this light, corporations were networked institutions which operated across scales at an ontological level. In essence, corporations made ideal global actors, capable of integrating the local, the national and the global.

The corporation as a global actor has yet to be explored, although recent research has shed light on the considerable agency exercised by corporations in certain global theatres. Most significantly, Phil Stern's Company-State exposed corporations as sovereign and constitutional actors, capable of acquiring, negotiating and projecting social, political and judicial authority autonomous of the nation-state.⁵⁵ Whilst Stern focuses on the English East India Company, nonetheless his study sheds light on the rich range and heritage of corporate rights, structures and foundations that transformed early modern England, shaping wider debates about sovereignty, political economy, jurisprudence, sociability, morality and civility.⁵⁶ As valuable as such research is in recognising the significant agency of corporations as independent political actors, these new directions are still, essentially, national and imperial histories. And yet some scholars have depicted the corporation as an agent of (and vehicle) for transcultural interaction. Rather than viewing these companies exclusively as projectors of European power or as the precursors to modern multinational companies, for Sanjay Subrahmanyam corporations have provided a means to depict European expansion into Asia as a political discourse that connected two regions (in much the same way that Atlantic history stressed how European and indigenous American contact produced a 'new world' for both groups).⁵⁷ Far from peaceful, however, these connected histories show how international migration affected the power dynamics of groups in both areas of embarkation and disembarkation and produced arenas of 'contained conflict' rather than cross cultural partnership.⁵⁸

Corporations, then, have yet to be proscribed a global analytical framework. Yet if corporations acted uniformly and simultaneously in the seventeenth century in Europe and across the Mediterranean, Atlantic, Asia and Pacific, as this volume will demonstrate, then they present the prospect of a transoceanic global history that has not yet been considered, one that provides us with a clear framework of global integration. Corporations were extremely adaptive, and trading companies especially 'integrated the diverse constitutional mechanisms granted to them from the various states they subordinated themselves to'.⁵⁹ Yet in doing so, corporations were themselves reshaped by the non-European communities and states to whom they became subordinate. Operating across national, sovereign and oceanic borders, Europe's vast range of corporate bodies spread across the globe in an integrative and adaptive dynamic that bound together a staggering number of social, political, cultural and economic constituencies. David Armitage has recently expostulated upon the possibilities of a new 'constitutional turn' in Global History, one that provides a unique opportunity to rediscover the considerable global role played by that quintessentially global actor: the corporation.⁶⁰ In understanding the ways in which seemingly European enterprises were reshaped by their engagement with non-Europeans in every corner of the globe in the seventeenth century, it will be possible to fulfil the two most significant aims of Global History as stated here: exploring transnational contexts and connections, and understanding globalisation as an integrative process on a transoceanic scale. The contributions in this volume take up this unique opportunity to propose a conceptual and analytical framework based upon the notion that the corporation acted as a protagonist of globalisation in the years 1550–1750.

Of course, the methodology proposed by this volume, of using European corporations to construct a meta-history of globalisation, opens itself up to accusations of the very Eurocentrism which this volume attempts to address. A key aim of this volume is to redefine the traditional conceptualisation of the overseas corporation as a uniquely European construct, attempting to project narrow nationalist interests, to a transnational enterprise in which over the course of the early modern period, non-Europeans not only became key stakeholders in trading companies through European dependence on their commercial expertise, diplomatic access, sources of knowledge, powerful cultural practices and overwhelming military resources – to name a few – but in actual fact assumed controlling stakes to the extent that even metropolitan European authorities were forced to concede to the interests and demands of non-Europeans in distant communities and markets. European corporations may have originated in London, Paris and Amsterdam, but their desperate need to adapt to overseas environments made them more susceptible and vulnerable to outside influence, and, ultimately, to a degree of control. This volume therefore proposes a narrative not of European influence or expansion in the early modern global world through the study of the corporation, but a process of globalisation in which Native American chieftains, West African slavers, Persian monarchs, Arab merchants, southern Indian nayaks, Sumatran pepper farmers, Chinese migrants and Japanese officials became major stakeholders in the same trading companies, transforming them into something not entirely European or non-European, nor entirely local or national, but what this volume would argue as something that became truly global. This volume proposes that the overseas corporation presents the best opportunity to capture the integration of the globe in the early modern period, both archivally and in the historical processes of globalisation these facilitated.