HIST363: Global Perspectives on Industrialization

The corporations' significance as protagonists in Global History therefore stems from the interplay between different regions with different interests all operating under the umbrella of the corporation, but not with its full cognisance. The corporation was a network of interests – both inside and outside the corporate membership – tied together by trade and constitutional agreements and supported by multiple states. Subordinate to the domestic and foreign states it negotiated with, but also autonomous of both and with sovereign constitutional powers in its own right, the corporation straddled sovereignty and subordination in often-creative ways. Collapsing the distinctions between the public and private realms, blending centre and periphery, deployed in Atlantic and Asian zones of operation, the companies asserted, mutated, hybridised governmental thinking and practice throughout the seventeenth century. Instead of stressing either the trading corporation's impervious, state-like features or its business operations, our approach views the corporation as shifting, porous communities across and within which various forms of cross-cultural dialogue occurred. Our depiction of corporations broadens the field of view of corporate history away from a narrow juridical interpretation of corporate activity that views trading corporations as vehicles established solely to further the interests of their owners to a more capacious view that notes the breadth and complexity of corporations' relationships with constituencies outside their formal membership such as rival merchants, non-European states and hosts.

Trading corporations were neither rigidly nationalist nor monopolist entities who operated without responding to the interests of external constituencies. They learned that various ostensibly rival entities – including other European companies and interlopers themselves could help to advance their trades. The English East India Company became successful in comparison to other English companies and, eventually, its European counterparts, because it learnt how to motivate its overseas officials through liberating their access to private trade – effectively turning malfeasance into corporate strategy. This was in contrast to the Dutch voc, who struggled to compete with the English Company in the eighteenth century largely due to its strict regulations against the private trade of its servants.¹⁰²

By facilitating private trade, the English East India Company could establish durable commercial relations in its trading hinterlands, something that the Royal African Company could not.¹⁰³ Nor were corporations solely global, nor statist, nor forerunners of modern companies. Although trading corporations originated in Europe, they were quickly reshaped and reformed through their subordination to, and growth within, non-European spaces, markets, sovereignties and societies. Corporations were less European agents of trade and expansion, but rather global conduits for the importation and redistribution of non-European ideas, goods, people, and practices. Corporations therefore recast Europe from the 'knowing' subject to the 'object' of Global History, and that is how this volume analyses them.

This volume assembles this new account of what the global significance of trading corporations was largely with reference to a single cohort of companies – those established in England. The English used corporations to establish durable commercial relationships with three continents: Africa, North America, and Asia. These corporations moved peoples and goods into global circulation and helped England establish lasting diplomatic relationships with two of the world's most powerful empires: the Moghul and Ottoman Empires. Beginning with the joint stock Russia (or Muscovy) Company in the 1550s, which established a privileged trading relationship with the Russian Tsars, continuing with the Levant (or Turkey) Company in the 1580s, which traded to the Ottoman Empire, and culminating in 1600 with the East India Company, which sought access to the spice trade in South East Asia but settled into a bullion and textiles trade with the Indian sub-continent, corporations provided the English with their default spearhead to the non-European world.¹⁰⁴ Corporations also established the first waves of sustainable English settlement in mainland North America with the Virginia Company from 1607 and the Massachusetts Bay Company from 1629 and established commercial relations with the fur traders of the North American Arctic via the Hudson Bay Company from 1670.¹⁰⁵ From 1660, the Royal African Company (originally the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa) monopolized England's trading relationship with West Africa and became the largest human trafficking organization of the period of the transatlantic slave trade and played a critical part in financing the development of the English Caribbean.¹⁰⁶

However, this volume does not suggest that English corporations were any more or less important than those of their European counterparts. This is partly due to the fact that, as all overseas corporations underwent substantial change through the participation and agency of non-Europeans, different European corporations adapted to and adopted similar trajectories of development overseas as they engaged with the same non-European communities and states. This dynamic served to erode the differences between them. Furthermore, while English corporations may have emerged economically and politically dominant in some regions of the globe after 1750, such as the Indian Ocean, for most of this period they were often weak latecomers to global regions, attempting to emulate their European predecessors or failing to rival them altogether, learning painful lessons along the way. Rather, it puts forward English overseas corporations as a representative case-study of the way in which all European enterprises overseas were transfigured and transformed by non-Europeans. And while the English case studies form the main contribution to the analytical framework put forward in this volume, it seeks to place these within the context of French, Iberian, Scandinavian and Dutch experiences in a number of responses by specialists of overseas corporations from those countries in the latter part of the volume.