HIST363: Global Perspectives on Industrialization

Part Two subjects the case studies that are largely drawn from the English companies to comparison with Dutch, Scandinavian, French, and Iberian contexts. Trading corporations emerged in several European nations in the period 1550 to 1750, and while they undoubtedly operated in different domestic environments, they also shared significantly similar overseas experiences with their English corporate counterparts. The chapters in this part will critically examine the English experiences outlined in Part One, and explore the way in which the distinctive global sociology of corporations was not confined to England, but was rather characteristic of all European trading companies in the early modern world.

In chapter 11, Lisa Hellman compares the Scandinavian overseas experience to the English case studies provided in the proceeding section. She argues that to consider the overseas corporation as global protagonists is part of a much-needed turn in which global historians are not just discussing the potential of global history but are using its methodological approaches and insights to provide new answers, and new frameworks. Hellman points out that different European corporations provide very different clues to a new, integrated, history of the corporation as such – that affects this volume's aim of exploring the corporation as a global actor, but is even more important for its endeavour to elucidate the formation of the corporation as a global process in and of itself. She goes on to explore how including Scandinavian overseas corporations, such as their East India Companies, Levant Companies, African Companies and West India Companies, also slightly changes the picture of European overseas ventures. These corporations were established in countries with much less successful colonial and imperial venture than that of the British ones. As such, they add to the variety, and 'messiness' of early modern globalisation. The Swedish East India Company, for example, focused solely on trade with China; it was a chartered company, but acted as a small interloper in the trade with an expanding and powerful Asian empire. Hellman argues that the crucial fact is not only that the European corporations differed, they also affected each other, which is why they should not be studied separately. Rather, they show how the global history approach of going beyond the nation state offers a new view on an old story. Indeed, one could argue that the British corporations are difficult to understand without taking into account cooperation and competition with other actors, including local and regional actors and networks – as well as other European corporations.

In chapter 12, Leonard Hodges explores early modern French chartered companies, and their role in transporting state sovereignty abroad. He argues that historians have traditionally arranged Dutch, British, and French overseas corporations on a sliding scale between private and state control. The Dutch are typically seen as running first and foremost a business organisation overseas, while French overseas enterprises barely rank above the Portuguese as appendixes of the state. The often-unspoken assumption is that the British sit serendipitously somewhere in the 'Goldilocks zone' between these extremes. Insofar as the metropolitan context is concerned, it is impossible to overlook the long shadow of the state in the organisation of the French East India Company, for example. Hodges suggests that rather than limiting ourselves to metropolitan perspectives, it is crucial to set the French East India Company more firmly in its Indian context. One of the most enduring puzzles of the French Company is how, under its aegis, the French engaged in a dress rehearsal for empire-building in the Carnatic and Hyderabad, setting the stage for the eventually more successful British intervention in Bengal. In return for military support provided to Indian rulers, for a brief period the French gained the right to raise revenue across large swathes of territory and wielded the trappings of Mughal sovereignty, with many individuals making significant personal fortunes. In this respect, the idea of the corporation as a protagonist in global history is to be especially welcomed in offering the chance to reframe a largely outdated historiography on the French East India Company's role in imperial expansion.

Hodges argues that, with a few exceptions, this literature has remained rooted in the Third Republic 'great man' school of history, overshadowed by the contentious figure of Joseph-François Dupleix, Governor of French India from 1742 to 1754. Instead, the many thoughtful chapters in this volume suggest a number of starting points for recalibrating our understanding of the French East India Company, and the important role it played during this crucial period. His chapter concludes by revealing how, even though overseas French enterprises were often characterised as an appendix of the state, the French East India Company was able to integrate and respond to non-European interests in its own particular way. Changing metropolitan governments, as well as French Catholicism are certainly complicating factors, yet what is striking is how this response can itself be conceived as an act of state-building, the appointment of a Director integrated into the ministerial patronage system which characterised the Ancien Régime. Phillip Stern may have taught us to see how companies could be states, but the French case shows that states could be companies.

In chapter 13, Edgar Pereira compares the English overseas experience with that of the Iberian powers, Portugal and Spain. His chapter provides an etymological analysis on the concept of 'corporation' within its Iberian context, pointing out its rich and long history in Spanish and Portuguese society, law and political order, making insightful comparisons with the place of 'corporations' in English society. Pereira then deploys the volume's conceptualisation of corporations as adaptive constitutions to the Spanish and Portuguese overseas experiences to challenge entrenched understandings of their colonial dominance. Instead, he explores the responsive nature of, for example, the Estado da India, and highlights its malleable and fluid nature. By drawing on examples of Iberian trading companies from Asia to the West Coast of Africa, Pereira is able to refute historiographical accusations that Iberian companies lacked the durability of their north European counterparts or the centrality to Spanish and Portuguese overseas interactions. He most notably points out that in the eighteenth century, corporations came to dominate Iberia's engagement overseas, whether as the Royal Company of Havana or the Company of Barcelona. The chapter concludes by demonstrating that we can confidently talk of a Spanish or Portuguese corporate Atlantic in perhaps more ways than the English.

In the volume's final chapter, Chris Nierstrasz explores the global sociology of perhaps the most prolific corporations in the early modern world, those of the Dutch. His chapter argues that the study of Dutch companies more often than not have had a strong national bias that stands in the way of more abstract conceptualization of their essential form. National historians have a hard time jumping over their own shadow and acknowledging that companies are part of similar institutional developments elsewhere. Nierstrasz calls for a more general conception of Dutch corporations in order to understand that, for instance, the Dutch East India Company was not so different from the West Indies Company in their constitutional form. This chapter of the book specifically analyses the Dutch voc to tease out the ways in which the volume's claim for the 'distinctive Global Sociology of the Corporation' can also be applied to Dutch overseas trading companies. Nierstrasz's chapter delves into the position of Companies within the field of Global History and will then try to relate the distinctive Global Sociology of the Corporation to the Dutch voc. He argues that, although a more general conceptualization of corporations is necessary, it must also be acknowledged that similar global constitutional frameworks could often also create different local outcomes.