HIST363: Global Perspectives on Industrialization

Part One of the book examines how ten sub-themes of corporate activity offer particular insights into how corporations acted as global protagonists. These themes are: building, family, gender, governance, literature, migration, political-economy, religion, scholarship, and science. In each case, these thematic examinations of global corporate activity illuminate the distinctive international mechanisms that corporations provided for cross-cultural interaction. Each chapter shows the global fruits of the corporation's distinctive global sociology.

In the first chapter, William Pettigrew, examines how corporations focussed debates about political economy – prevailing ideas about the relationships between commerce and governance – in their European and non-European fields of operation. From the outset, trading corporations had to justify their privileges with reference to the broader social and commercial advantages they generated for the state and public. In making their case, they developed a recognisable corporate discourse of political economy that proved formative for mercantilist ideologies and policies. The tropes of this discourse structured opposing arguments that proved formative for liberal political economies of the eighteenth century. A central focus of this discourse was the debate about monopoly, but the debate also confronted questions about sociability, the civility of non- European peoples, and theories of economic growth. The corporation's inherent calibration of commercial and governmental agendas sustained a role for constitutional and political variables in economic outcomes. As structures that gave individual personality to dynamic networks of individuals, the corporation helped to absorb and shape writing about political economy and gave that writing a public role. As an intermediary institution between cultures, these debates about political economy channeled the experiences of international contexts into domestic public debates. In this way, corporations can help us to demonstrate the global contexts in which mercantilist doctrine emerged and altered and can show how non-Europeans peoples interactions with European corporations prompted and structured transnational debates about political economy.

In chapter two, Michael Bennett, examines the prominent role that corporations played in transporting free and unfree migrants across the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. The global networks of exchange forged by overseas trading corporations during the early modern period facilitated the movement of people over long distances, and directed migration flows to regions of America, Africa, and Asia which were of commercial interest to English colonisers. By using their chartered monopolies to integrate these various colonial regions, and by successfully negotiating the competing interests of both the English state and non- European empires, corporate bodies were particularly effective in mobilising free planters, co-religionists, overseers, artisans, servants, slaves, and coolies to 'people' nascent English colonies and trading outposts. The constitutional and governmental structure of corporations, which encouraged the sharing of expertise and the regular changeover of members, enabled policies relating to labour and migration to constantly evolve and be re-shaped to better suit the shifting economic and geopolitical circumstances of the early modern world. The dynamic approaches taken by corporate bodies towards empire-building encouraged experimentation and transnational interaction. An inclination to learn from other European and non-European empires meant that corporations were especially effective at inventing new methods of stimulating migration and producing innovative labour systems during the seventeenth century.

In chapter three, Aske Laursen Brock, assesses the importance of networks to the distinctive global sociology of corporations. Brock explores how trading companies relied on global networks to ply their trade and secure the position far from British shores. The companies constituted a very fertile and durable global space for exchange and dissemination of commodities, information and ideas over large distances. To successfully do this, the forming and strengthening of networks with other numerous agents, companies, and English trading companies with knowledge of long distance extra-European trade became increasingly important. Between 1550–1750 new connections were formed to answer the changing political and commercial realities globally and domestically. England developed from a peripheral power in Europe to a country at the centre of a global commercial imperial web. Corporate interests spanned from America and the Caribbean to South-East Asia and from Russia to southern Africa. Some corporations were designed to participate in colonial ventures and brought about vast migrations and placed large landmasses under direct corporate control. Others were dedicated to trade and shipping, exporting and importing products from England and around the world. The early modern corporations were created by networks and would come to facilitate a space globally where new networks was formed and, in time, strengthen the corporations. Partnerships and other looser associations did not create durable ties that lasted multiple decades and generations like corporations. For Brock, it is only by studying the social networks of company employees in Britain and overseas it is possible to understand how decision making worked, how the early modern knowledge economy developed and how knowledge became a commodity for commercial agents tied together in patronage and/or kinship networks. The networks were not stronger than their weakest links, and the study of them emphasize the agency of otherwise overlooked people such as corporate women and local people. Global corporate networks are crucial to understand the development of the British political economy and the later British Empire.

In chapter 4, Liam Haydon considers the role of the global corporation in making literature, and the role of print culture in making the corporation. Historians of the corporation have recognised the importance of writing to corporate activity, and the creation of corporate identity, but have not considered the corporation's relationship with fictional, or literary, texts. Conversely, literary scholars have noted the profound impact of global political economies in early modern literature, though often without observing the centrality of the corporation to the development of that political economy. Moreover, these sorts of studies have tended to be historicist in approach, aiming to embed the literary text in economic activity without a conceptualisation of literature's role in creating the fictions and narratives on which the early modern trading company relied. Haydon considers a varied set of texts, including drama, pageantry, and poetry, as well as fictional and 'factual' prose from across the globe, to try and capture something of the interplay between fiction and economics. The functioning of a state or economy, the relationship between Europe and its 'others', even the ontology of the corporation itself, relied on language which was deployed, tested and refined in contemporary literature. Corporate ideas about trade and international relations took on cultural capital in early modern London, and around the globe. This process was part of a larger intellectual network, in Europe and beyond, which, through history, theology and early attempts at anthropology, sought to understand and historicise European relations with their new trading partners. At stake in all of these texts is the language of social, political and economic development, and the creation of a narrative framework which allowed the representation, and testing, of corporations and their ideas.

In Chapter 5, Haig Smith, examines how throughout the early modern era, corporations provided the main institutional framework to organise and police the commercial, political and religious lives of their members. English company charters for the majority of the seventeenth century gave general religious and social obligations, both domestically and abroad, to advance English Protestantism in America, India, Japan and the Levant. Extending Protestantism into religiously cosmopolitan and diverse environments abroad led to attempts to police the religious lives and behaviour of the companies' English personnel to secure the company's leaders various religious, political and commercial aims. The commercial and religious aims of the company became entwined as the companies' flexible governments developed various forms of religious control shaped by local circumstances and global experiences. Corporate structures both provided the legal space and protection to establish diverse but connected forms of autonomous English governmental authority across the globe. An assessment of religious control in England's overseas companies allows further analysis into how overseas companies developed into corporate political bodies that established and advanced their own sovereignty. By understanding how corporate control of religion became a mechanism through which corporate structures directed and governed people overseas we can see how companies formed governments over its own employees. Moreover we can see how company employees as well as, local peoples and foreign environments, shaped the religious and governmental identities of those in the trading corporations. By doing so this expands our understanding into how early modern English people regulated the political and religious behaviour of its employees, corporators and the communities it governed. Furthermore, through an assessment of how religious governance and control regulated interaction between religious communities, we are better able to recognise the role and involvement of numerous faiths, including Hindus, Muslims, Catholic, Jews and Armenian, in the development of English Protestant authority abroad.

In chapter 6, Edmond Smith views corporations through the lens of governance. The development of new forms of trading and colonial corporation in the latter half of the sixteenth century provided an effective means of regulating the behaviour of people in England and overseas. Livery and urban corporations had played an important role in how commerce was organised in England, providing a framework for commercial education, institutions and law that became central pillars of the new corporate bodies that facilitated global exchange. Across the multiplicity of corporations that governed English activities across the world we can see a set of shared social and cultural conditions that provide an effective means of approaching global history. Through corporations the early modern world became increasingly connected; examining how they were governed in a comparative framework reveals what different corporations shared, but more importantly how they negotiated and adapted to different environments.

Effective corporate governance helped establish and integrate transoceanic frameworks that facilitated migration, commerce, and knowledge exchange on a global scale. This chapter will examine the role of governance in four distinct areas: how the corporation was a process of negotiation between its internal constituencies, within states, and between communities around the globe; the ways corporate discourse and opposition shaped non-corporate spaces through debates about free trade, interloping, sovereignty, the state, and jurisprudence; how constitutional malleability of corporations allowed them to both subordinate and exert themselves at the same time across multiple sovereign, national and cultural spaces; the process by which they were quickly reshaped and reformed through their subordination to, and growth within, non-European spaces, markets, sovereignties and societies. To assess these four key areas, the paper will survey how corporate governance developed between 1550 and 1750, focussing in particular on how it sought to regulate the behaviour of employees oversees in Europe, the Levant, the East Indies and the Atlantic World. From this foundation, the chapter will examine three case studies about how governance adapted to different circumstances. First, it will examine the ways the East India Company sought to build the governance practices of London's traditional companies into the disparate trading environment of the East Indies – particularly focussing on the challenges faced of integrating ambassadorial, naval and merchant authority in dealings with the Mughal Empire. The second case study will consider how corporate governance provided a flexible structure for employees that allowed them to interact effectively with diverse peoples and societies overseas. Using the Levant company as a focal point this case study will explore the different way English people in the Ottoman Empire interacted with numerous ethnic, religious and political groups, adopting new modes of doing business and living while remaining loyal and law-abiding within the accepted parameters of corporate culture. The final case study will consider how corporate governance continued to affect the organisation of English overseas activities beyond the specific boundaries of corporate control. To do so it will examine the development of Caribbean colonies that were operated by figures who were culturally dependent on their corporate upbringing and networks in early modern London.

In chapter 7, David Veevers analyses the corporation through the lens of gender. He highlights how the relationship between gender and the primary protagonists in England's overseas expansion, corporations, has yet to be investigated. As trading companies were, first and foremost, constitutions for the regulation of trade and the government of inhabitants within their jurisdiction, Veevers argues that they were therefore crucial sites of gender formation, in which male and female identities and relationships were proscribed and ordered within a corporate structure. Senior company officials, for example, legitimised their authority by drawing on patriarchal ideas of absolutism and divine right, projecting themselves as the paterfamilias of the settlements and subjects under their government. However, as trading companies expanded in Asia and the Atlantic in the years 1550 to 1750, Veevers notes that their constitutional parameters gradually became more malleable and shifting. This process meant that covenanted servants and their female relations increasingly operated within a decentred corporate framework, one that provided them with the opportunity to reshape and reimagine their own sense of gender to an extent less possible in their domicile nation-states. This allowed women, for instance, to exploit a degree of independence to become partners in the business of their male relations and even private traders on their own account. In more extreme ways, they could even facilitate or instigate conspiracies in an effort to shift the balance of power within particular factions or settlements, to suit the interests of themselves and their families. Furthermore, as the family became a significant actor in establishing expansive Company networks of trade, settlement and movement, men and women crossed cultural and national borders to integrate a number of foreign constituencies into the Company through sexual relations and even marriage. The ingratiation of non-Europeans was crucial for the success of England's trading companies, and the process transformed corporate settlements into transnational sites of exchange and cooperation, expanding populations and markets, whilst also acting as recruiting grounds for commercial brokers, soldiers and translators. Veevers concludes by illustrating that with the establishment of mixed-race families, non-Europeans were able to exert a degree of agency to shape the corporate landscape around them, challenging and often subverting the order of gender in Company settlements.

In Chapter 8, Emily Mann examines corporate initiatives and investment in the construction and maintenance of fortified settlements on three continents – America, Africa and Asia – through the long seventeenth century, this paper will demonstrate how in each case the corporation, like the built spaces it created, was a process of negotiation between its internal constituencies, within states, and between communities (and other corporations) around the globe. The connected, comparative approach over space and time will illuminate how the experience of one company influenced not only the attitudes and activities of commercial counterparts, but also the ideas and expectations of shareholders and the state. In particular, the paper will consider the corporate/colonial business of building in the context of the emerging fiscal- military state and its global frame. At the same time, the paper will enhance understanding of the material impact that trading corporations had on overseas territories and their inhabitants, and of the impact that building and maintaining fortifications overseas had on the development of corporate and state constitutions. In and around these entangled spaces, corporate cultures came into contact with others, and European practices and ideas were challenged and reshaped by non-European customs and conditions. This paper's focus on fort-building facilitates discussion of the corporation's operations on local and global levels, and across commercial, state and transnational spheres, and in so doing sharpens awareness of the interactions and tensions between them.

In chapter 9, Anna Winterbottom highlights the scientific interactions, formal and informal, between members of a wide variety of corporations, from trading companies to the Royal Society, and even European universities, to understand the crucial role of knowledge-gathering in this period. Winterbottom argues that as well as drawing parallels between these relationships, there were also differences. The particularities of each of these relationships – centrally, the particular global connections that they sought to navigate and understand – would in fact shaped the distinctive national characters of science and colonialism that would emerge by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In this chapter, Winterbottom explores the terminology of the early modern period, in which it was more accurate to speak of 'useful knowledge' and of 'natural' and 'mechanical philosophy' than of science.

First, useful knowledge was central to both savant institutions and the trading companies in this period. Both organisations concerned with natural philosophy – like the Royal Society – and trading companies – strove to prove their usefulness throughout this period. As the introduction to this volume makes clear, European trading companies in this period had to please multiple constituents, including European and non-European rulers, their own shareholders, and their critics, again, at home and abroad. Similarly, organisations like the Royal Society had to convince royal and governmental funders, sceptical publics and their own correspondents and informants, that their inquiries were practically useful rather than nonsensical and possible heretical fantasies. Winterbottom's chapter concludes by discussing the various forms of natural and mechanical knowledge that were produced in and circulated around trading company settlements and how they were interpreted, codified, and compiled both within the settlements and by metropolitan institutions, scholars, and artisans, before often being recirculated and reinterpreted within the company network. In doing so, the chapter will demonstrate how the non-European context of the activities of the trading companies actively shaped the co-creation of science and colonialism in the early modern period.

In chapter 10, Simon Mills traces how scholars intersected with the corporations of early modern England, focusing predominantly on England's commercial endeavours in Africa, the Levant, and East Asia. Uncovering some of the links between English scholars and the merchants, diplomats, and consular staff stationed across the globe, Mills takes a fresh look at stimulus provided to various fields of scholarly enquiry by the expansion of the early modern trading corporations. Secondly, the chapter will consider the extent to which the corporations could themselves assimilate scholarly practices into their global activities. One focus here will be the chaplaincies, established to serve the mercantile communities from Algiers, to Aleppo, to Surat, which provided a key link between the trading companies and the universities. We shall see too some of the ways in which the companies' connections with local actors could be bound up with scholarly interests. Although the central governors of the Levant Company in London were concerned in only a limited capacity with scholarship, this would change as a consequence of the East India Company's developing colonial ambitions. The final part of the chapter will thus look again at the connection between scholarship and British India, stressing the continuity with earlier practices in order to suggest a more historically-nuanced approach to the relationship between the emergence of 'oriental' studies and colonialism.