HIST363: Global Perspectives on Industrialization

This book offers a new account of the distinctive role that corporations played in global history in the period 1550–1750. It also offers a re-appraisal of what the corporation was in its global setting. This period provides the critical time for the intensification of cross-cultural relationships between European and non-European cultures. It was also the phase in which corporate bodies played the most important part. The prominent global historian, John Darwin has called this period the age of 'equilibrium' during which European and non-European states and empires interacting on roughly equal terms and therefore structured global relationships that were not simply colonial or imperial in character.⁶¹ Corporations played a central role in calibrating this equilibrium and facilitating these relationships. As agents of commercial and knowledge exchange and the default means for European states to integrate their commercial interests in this period, trading corporations ought to be essential actors in any account of global exchange. Although their leadership was at times cultural supercilious to non-European peoples, corporations (and the people who worked with and for them) did not typically seek imperial overlordship in this period and instead understood that their commercial successes depended upon their ability to encourage trade that satisfied European and non-European interests.⁶² Corporations moved peoples, knowledge, goods, ideas, buildings, art, literature, scholarship across cultural barriers, around continents; they traded with and governed diverse communities. Corporations integrate the comparative, connected, globalised imperatives of Global History into a single, formal, institutional framework. They were protagonists in global history.

Andrew Zimmerman has urged the need for historians to 'think rigorously about the categories we use to analyze the past', suggesting that a new global historical sociology and transnational history could work to erode traditional Eurocentric models.⁶³ This book proposes to emphasise the underappreciated features of the overseas corporation's distinctive global sociology.⁶⁴ Whether as regulated trading companies, as joint stock trading corporations, as the colonising corporations, or as the municipal corporations established overseas, corporations brought a distinctive civic culture to overseas activities; they brought characteristically deliberative and responsive constitutional mechanisms to cross-cultural interaction, and combined commercial and governmental ambitions into creative tensions in ways that integrated European and non-European interests. This distinctive global sociology can best be understood by adopting a comparative and even integrative approach to trading corporations. Although these two approaches may seem distinct, they are actually reinforcing. Only by comparing the broad range of England's corporations can the common global framework which they established be traced. Corporate history has most often been written with reference to a single corporation.⁶⁵ Our approach tests some of the insights developed with reference to single corporations – and most often this has meant the English or Dutch East India Companies – with reference to the other corporate entities to assemble a global field of view for corporate history. Trading corporations sometimes targeted each other's privileges, they often shared legal foundations, commercial strategies, and courtroom representation, overlapping personnel, and resources of capital.⁶⁶ Such cross-corporate interdependence was, in some ways, even more prominent between foreign corporations. England's largest corporation, the East India Company, benefitted substantially from foreign investment. By the end of this period, in the mid-eighteenth century, almost a third of Company stock was foreign owned, approximately 88% of which was held by those resident in the United Provinces.⁶⁷ Similarly, its settlements in Asia were heavily funded by foreign merchants. This was the case for Fort St. George in India, where the interest alone on loans largely contracted from Portuguese merchants in the first three years between 1639 and 1642 was estimated at £5,000.⁶⁸ The transnational constituencies of the Company were also reflected in its personnel, its expertise and its shipping resources.

While the corporation's iconography, their domestic governance practices, and their personnel looked homogenous at home, the corporations experienced, however, very different careers overseas. These differences can only be explained by the global circumstances of their trades. Some lasted for only a few years – such as the Virginia Company (1607–1624). Different nation's corporations were supposedly locked into ruthless competition overseas. The rivalry between the Company of Royal Adventurers trading to Africa (1660–1671) and the Dutch West India Company in Africa prompted a series of wars between the Dutch and English during the second half of the seventeenth century. Certain companies were much more commercially successful than others. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the English Levant Company was the most successful company by revenue. By the early eighteenth century, the English East India Company had emerged as the only viable trading company and endured for over a hundred and fifty years. But the ability to make money did not – on its own – determine longevity. Part of the explanation for this longevity is that domicile states could not entertain the possibility of corporate failure because they would lose access to the overseas infrastructure that these companies had established. The Royal African Company famously made little profit, but became the largest single contributor to the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans and endured for eighty years because the English state feared the results of abandoning the company's West African forts.⁶⁹

The integration of a broader corporate framework which emerges from a comparative treatment of corporations suggests that the main explanations for corporate success derive, however, from a careful assessment of the relationships that corporations formed overseas – not just with their own officials, but also with their non-corporate constituencies, from interlopers to non-European hosts.⁷⁰ Their divergent fortunes were often the result of commercial and constitutional differences in their overseas trading hinterlands. In this, the ultimate victor was the English East India Company and its distinctive mode of operation can only be understood if placed into the context of its Dutch and French rivals, as well as its English forbears and antecedents. The East India Company more successfully defended its monopoly privileges at home by merging with its lobbying opponents and erecting a grand superstructure for free English trade on the Indian subcontinent that enfranchised the entrepreneurial instincts of its overseas factors and their Indian trading partners.⁷¹ Corporations were homogenous franchises of state authority at home. It was their sui generis qualities as global protagonists that determined their careers. Take, for instance, Thomas Pitt. In the 1670s and 1680s, Pitt proved one of the most successful interlopers in Asia, trading freely between Persia and the Bay of Bengal, even gaining his own trading concessions from the Mughal governor of Hugli, where he set up a trading factory in 1683. Despite attempts to prosecute Pitt in England, and even arrest him in Asia, ultimately the East India Company chose to integrate Pitt into their operations. As the Court of Directors declared to their servants in Bengal in 1694, 'we have agreed with the Principall Interlopers … and that we hope is the end of all our long quarrells and contentions'.⁷² Three years later, Pitt was offered the governorship of Madras, which he took up and administered until 1707.