The Corporation as a Protagonist in Global History 1550–1750

Read this article about how historical forces shaped big business. Of particular interest is the global perspective.

Endnotes


  1. Lynn Hunt, Writing History in the Global Era (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2014), 1.
  2. Sebastian Conrad, What is Global History? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 67.
  3. We use the term 'protagonist' to emphasise the significance of corporations to global history without any triumphalising of their historic role
  4. Kathleen Wilson, ed., A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Stephen Howe, ed., The New Imperial Histories Reader (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010).
  5. James Belich, John Darwin, Margaret Frenz, and Chris Wickham, eds., The Prospect of Global History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
  6. Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence Debate: Europe, China, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
  7. Bruce Mazlish, 'Global History and World History', in Bruce Mazlish, ed., The Global History Reader (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005), 16–20.
  8. Merry Wiesner-Hanks, 'Review: What is Global History?', Journal of Global History, vol. 11 (2016): 483.
  9. Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).
  10. Compare Burbank and Cooper with, for example, John Darwin, After Tamerlane: the Global History of Empire since 1405 (London: Penguin, 2008).
  11. Eric Jones, The European Miracle: Environments, Economies and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); David Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some are so Rich and Some so Poor (New York: Abacus, 1998).
  12. Pomeranz, Great Divergence.
  13. Pomeranz, Great Divergence, 25.
  14. Maxine Berg, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (OxfordL Oxford University Press, 2005). See also Maxine Berg, Felicia Gottmann, Hanna Hodacs and Chris Nierstrasz, eds., Goods from the East, 1600–1800: Trading Eurasia (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello, eds., The Global Lives of Things: The Material Culture of Connections in the Early Modern World (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016);; Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Europe's India: Words, People, Empires, 1500–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017). For earlier approaches, see Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York: Knopf, 1987) and Joan Thirsk, Alternative Agriculture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
  15. C. A. Bayly, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, 'Portfolio Capitalists and the Political Economy of Early Modern India'. Indian Economic and Social History Review 25, no. 4 (1988): 401–24; Simon Schaffer, Lissa Roberts, Kapil Raj, and James Delbourgo, eds., The Brokered-World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770–1820 (MA: Sagamore Beach, 2009).
  16. See, for example, Anna Winterbottom, Hybrid Knowledge and the Early East India Company World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
  17. For instance, see Richard Drayton, 'Maritime Networks and the Making of Knowledge', in David Cannadine, ed., Empire, the Sea and Global History (Basingstoke: aiaa, 2007), 72–82. Also Parker, Global Crisis.
  18. Claude Markovits, 'Trading Networks in Global History', in Catia Antunes and Karwan Fatah-Black, eds., Explorations in History and Globalization (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), 63.
  19. Rila Mukherjee, ed., Networks in the First Global Age, 1400–1800 (New Delhi: Primus Books, 2011), 6.
  20. For an excellent survey of networks in the eighteenth century, see Natasha Glaisyer, 'Networking: Trade and Exchange in the Eighteenth-Century British Empire', Historical Journal, vol. 47, no. 2 (2004): 451–457.
  21. For the failure of networks as a historical actor, see David Hancock, 'The Trouble with Networks: Managing the Scots' Early-Modern Madeira Trade', Business History Review, 79, 3, 2005: 467- 491. For the concern with networks as a methodology of Global History, see David A. Bell, 'This Is What Happens When Historians Overuse the Idea of the Network', New Republic, https://newrepublic.com/article/114709/world-connecting-reviewed-historians-overuse-network-metaphor, accessed 26 October 2017.
  22. Alison Games, The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
  23. Trivellato, Familiarity of Strangers; Sebouh David Aslanian, From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: the Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa (London: University of California Press, 2011).
  24. Charles H. Parker, Global interactions in the early modern age, 1400–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 78–9.
  25. David Veevers, '“Inhabitants of the Universe”: Global Families, Kinship Networks, and the Formation of the Early Modern Colonial State in Asia', Journal of Global History, vol. 10, no. 1 (March, 2015): 99–121.
  26. Emily Erickson, Between Monopoly and Free Trade: the English East India Company, 1600–1757 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 22.
  27. For the debate on transformative networks, compare the following: Avner Grief, 'Reputation and Coalition in Medieval Trade: Evidence on the Maghribi Traders', Journal of Economic History, vol. 49, no. 4 (1989): 857–82; Douglass North, 'Institutions', Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol. 5, no. 1 (1991): 97–112.
  28. Francesca Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers: the Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (London: Yale University Press, 2009), 12.
  29. For example, see Giorgio Riello, Cotton: the Fabric that Made the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A New History of Global Capitalism (London: Penguin, 2015).
  30. Conrad, What is Global History, chapter 5.
  31. The conceptualisation of an Indian Ocean World owes much to K. N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge, 1985). For a synthesis of recent research, see Michael Pearson, ed., Trade, Circulation, and Flow in the Indian Ocean World (Basingstoke, 2015).
  32. David Armitage and Michael Braddick, eds., The British Atlantic world, 1500–1800 (Basingstoke, 2009), p. 5.
  33. Carole Shammas, 'Introduction', in Elizabeth Mancke and Carole Shammas, eds., The Creation of the British Atlantic World (MA: Baltimore, 2005), p. 2. Robert Appelbaum and John Wood Sweet, eds., Envisioning an English Empire: Jamestown and the Making of the North Atlantic World (Penn, 2005).
  34. Ibid.
  35. David Armitage and Michael Braddick, The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (New York, 2002), p. 9.
  36. Belich, et al., Prospect of Global History, pp. 3–4.
  37. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System (New York, 1974).
  38. Maxine Berg, ed., Writing the History of the Global (Oxford, 2013), p. 5.
  39. Armitage and Braddick, British Atlantic, p. 1.
  40. An excellent example is Ray A. Kea, 'From Catholicism to Moravian Pietism: The World of Marotta/Magdalena, a Woman of Popo and St. Thomas', in Mancke and Shammas, Creation of the British Atlantic, pp. 115–138.
  41. H. V. Bowen, Elizabeth Mancke and John G. Reid, Britain's Oceanic Empire: Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds, c. 1550–1850 (Cambridge, 2012), p.3.
  42. C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (London, 2005), p. 2.
  43. See for example James D. Tracey, ed., The Political Economy of Merchant Empires: State Power and World Trade, 1350–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
  44. A conspicuous example is Nick Robins, The Corporation that Changed the World: How the East India Company Shaped the Modern Multinational (London: Pluto Press, Second Ed., 2012).
  45. David Ormrod, 'The demise of regulated trading in England: the case of the Merchant Adventurers, 1650–1730', in Entrepreneurs and Entrepreneurship in Early Modern Times. Merchants and industrialists within the orbit of the Dutch staplemarket, ed. C. Lesger & L. Noordegraaf (Amsterdam: Stichting Hollandse Historische Reeks, 1996), 253–68; R. C. Nash, 'The organization of trade and finance in the British Atlantic economy, 1600–1830', in The Atlantic Economy during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Organisation, Operation, Practice, and Personnel, ed. Peter A. Coclanis (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005), 97–8. For the Marxian tradition see Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London's Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (London: Verso, 2003); and A. Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), V.1.98–119).
  46. Steve Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).
  47. For recent examples see Edward Cavanagh, 'Corporations and Business Associations from the Commercial Revolution to the Age of Discovery: Trade, Empire and Expansion without the State, 1200–1600', History Compass, vol. 14, 10, (2016): 493–510.
  48. For European corporate competition in Asia, see Holden Furber, Rival Empires of Trade in the Orient, 1600–1800 (Ontario: University of Minnesota Press, 1976).
  49. For new research on the French Company, see Felicia Gottmann, Global Trade, Smuggling, and the Making of Economic Liberalism: Asian Textiles in France, 1680–1760 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); for the Swedish and Danish Companies, see Hanna Hodacs, Silk and Tea in the North: Scandinavian Trade and the Market for Asian Goods in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); for the English Company, see Emily Erikson, Between Monopoly and Free Trade: The English East India Company, 1600–1757 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
  50. Phil Withington, The Politics of Commonwealth: Citizens and Freemen in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
  51. See the contributions in Bowen et al., Britain's Oceanic Empire.
  52. An excellent example of this is James D. Tracey, The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long-Distance Trade in the Early Modern World, 1350–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
  53. William A. Pettigrew and Tristan Stein 'The Public Rivalry between Regulated and Joint Stock Corporations and the Development of Seventeenth-Century Corporate Constitutions', Historical Research, vol. 90, 248, (2016): 341–362
  54. Henry Turner, Corporate Commonwealth: Pluralism and Political Fictions in England, 1516–1651 (London: University of Chicago press, 2016).
  55. Philip J. Stern, The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
  56. For the impact of overseas corporations on these elements within the domestic state, see William A. Pettigrew, Freedom's Debt: The Royal African Company and the Politics of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1672–1752 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013).
  57. The classic example of this is Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
  58. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, 'Connected Histories: Notes towards a reconfiguration of early modern Eurasia', Modern Asian Studies, 31, 3, 1997: 735–762.
  59. William A. Pettigrew, 'Corporate Constitutionalism and the Dialogue between the Global and the Local in Seventeenth-Century English History', Itinerario, vol. 39, no. 3 (January, 2016): 491.
  60. David Armitage, 'Wider Still and Wider: Corporate Constitutionalism Unbounded', Itinerario, Vol. 39, no. 3 (2015): 501–503.
  61. Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire since 1405, ch. 3.
  62. For the failure of corporations and their servants to satisfy non-European constituencies, and the disastrous impact this could have, see the expulsion of the English East India Company from Bencoolen, in David Veevers, '“The Company as their Lords and the Deputy as a Great Rajah”: Imperial Expansion and the English East India Company on the West Coast of Sumatra, 1685–1730', Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. 45, no. 5 (2013): 687–709.
  63. Andrew Zimmerman, 'Conclusion: Global Historical Sociology and Transnational History – History and Theory Against Eurocentrism', in Julian Go and George Lawson, eds., Global Historical Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 241.
  64. Philip J Stern, 'Parasites, Persons, and Princes: Evolutionary Biology of the Corporate Constitution', Itinerario, Vol. 39, no. 3 (2015): 512–515. Stern here stresses that while the corporation shared the same biology with the state, it exhibited a different sociology.
  65. Stern, Company-State.
  66. William A. Pettigrew and George Van Cleve, 'Parting Companies: The Glorious Revolution, Company Power, and Imperial Mercantilism', Historical Journal, vol. 57, 3, (2014): 627.
  67. H. V. Bowen, 'Investment and Empire in the Later Eighteenth Century: East India Stockholding, 1756–1791', Economic History Review, vol. 42, no. 2 (May, 1989): 200.
  68. Consultation held at Fort St. George, Madras, 29 December 1642, in William Foster, The English Factories in India, 1637 to 1641: A Calendar of Documents in the India Office, British Museum, and Public Record Office (Oxford, 1912, 8 vols.), vol. 7, 70.
  69. Pettigrew, Freedom's Debt.
  70. Soren Mentz, The English Gentleman Merchant at Work: Madras and the City of London, 1660–1740, (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2005), 264; Chris Nierstrasz, In the Shadow of the Company: the Dutch East India Company and its Servants in the Period of its Decline (1740–1796), (Leiden: Brill, 2012).
  71. Erikson, Between Monopoly and Free Trade.
  72. British Library, apac, IOR/E/3/92, court of directors to Bengal, London, 3 January 1694.
  73. Attorney General Sir Robert Sawyer described corporations as 'subordinate governments' in the quo warranto proceedings against the Corporation of London in 1683. See Howell, State Trials, Vol. viii, 1158–66 and 1178 and Halliday, 207.
  74. Matthew Parker, The Sugar Barons: Family, Corruption, Empire and War (London: Windmill Books, 2011), 14–24.
  75. See Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London's Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (London: Princeton University Press, 1993), 170–179.
  76. Tristan Stein, 'Tangier in the Restoration Empire', The Historical Journal 54, no. 4 (December 2011): 985–1011.
  77. John F. Richard, The Mughal Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 239–242; Om Prakash, European Commercial Enterprise in Pre-Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
  78. Paul Halliday, Dismembering the Body Politic: Partisan Politics in England's Towns, 1650–1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
  79. For an example see 'Reasons humbly offered by the Governor & Company of Merchants trading into the Levant Seas', tna SP 105/144, p. 80; and Argument for a Regulated Company or Open Trade to the East-India Answered. See also Philip J. Stern, '“A Politie of Civill & Military Power” Political Thought and the Late Seventeenth-Century Foundations of the East India Company-State', Journal of British Studies, vol. 47, 2, (2008), 266–7.
  80. Porto Novo to Madras, 14 May 1687, in Thomas Bowrey, A Geographical Account of Countries Round the Bay of Bengal, 1669 to 1679 (London: The Hakluyt Society, 1903), 31.
  81. Philip Withington, 'Public Discourse, Corporate Citizenship, and State Formation in Early Modern England', American Historical Review 112, no. 4 (Oct., 2007): 1016–1038.
  82. Ann M. Carlos, 'Bonding and the Agency Problem: Evidence from the Royal African Company, 1672–1691', Explorations in Economic History, 31, (1994): 313–335; Santhi Hejeebu, 'Contract Enforcement in the English East India Company' The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 65, No. 2 (Jun., 2005): 496–523.
  83. Edmond Smith, 'Socially Responsible and Responsive Business in Seventeenth Century England' in William A. Pettigrew and David Chan Smith, eds., A History of Socially Responsible Business c. 1600–1950 (London: Palgrave, 2017), 65–93
  84. William A Pettigrew and Aske Laursen Brock, 'Leadership and the Social Agendas of the Seventeenth Century English Trading Corporation' in Pettigrew and Smith, eds., A History of Socially Responsible Business, 33–36.
  85. Aske Laursen Brock 'The Company Director: Commerce, State, and Society', PhD. Thesis University of Kent, 2017.
  86. See especially Josiah Child, A Treatise Wherin is Demonstrated (London, 1681), 38.
  87. Philip Withington, 'Public Discourse, Corporate Citizenship, and State Formation in Early Modern England', 1024; Miles Ogborn, Global lives: Britain and the world, 1550–1800, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 87–93; Farhat Hasan, 'Indigenous Cooperation and the Birth of a Colonial City: Calcutta, c. 1698–1750', Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 26, No. 1 (February, 1992): 73.
  88. Ralph Preston to court of committees, Amadaver, 1 January, 1614, in Foster, Letters Received by the East India Company from Its Servants in the East, 261.
  89. BL, apac, IOR/G/19/21, Yale to 'his most Imperial Majesty Jeanepatwan [?] Emperor of the Island of Sumatra and Territories thereof' Madras, 12 Sept. 1687, (f. 33v); IOR G/19/21, Yale to the 'Emperor of the Island of Sumatra and Territories thereof' [the ruler of Bengkulu], Madras, 12 Sept. 1687, (f. 33v).
  90. Philip J. Stern, 'Rethinking Institutional Transformations in the Making of Modern Empire: The East India Company in Madras', Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, vol. 9, 2 (2008).
  91. Pettigrew, 'Corporate Constitutionalism'.
  92. Stern, 'A Politie of Civill and Military Power', 253.
  93. Lauren Benton, 'The Legal Regime of the South Atlantic World' in Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes and World History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 49–59.
  94. Michael Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England; Steven Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, 1550–1640 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2002).
  95. Kathleen Wilson, 'Rethinking the Colonial State: Family, Gender, and Governmentality in Eighteenth-Century British Frontiers', American Historical Review, vol. 116, no. 5 (2011): 1294–1322.
  96. Stern, The Company State.
  97. Charles Davenant, Reflections upon the Constitution and Management of the African Trade, etc., in Charles Whitworth, ed., The Political and Commercial Works of That Celebrated Writer Charles D'Ave- nant, LL.D. …, V (London, 1771), 34.
  98. See especially Phil Withington and Alexandra Shepard, eds., Communities in Early Modern England: Networks, Place, Rhetoric (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001); Withington, The Politics of Commonwealth: Citizens and Freemen in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
  99. Batavia is the best example, as explored by Leonard Blusse, Strange Company: Chinese Settlers, Mestizo Women and the Dutch in VOC Batavia (Dordrecht: Floris Publications, 1986).
  100. Child, A Treatise Wherin is Demonstrated…, 38
  101. Withington, 'Public Discourse, Corporate Citizenship, and State Formation in Early Modern England', 1016–1038, 1024.
  102. See Nierstrasz, In The Shadow of the Company.
  103. Pettigrew and Van Cleve, 'Parting Companies'.
  104. On the early histories of the Muscovy, Levant, and East India Companies, see T. S. Willan, The Early History of the Russia Company (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1956); A. C. Wood, A History of the Levant Company (Oxford: Routledge, 1935); Susan Skilliter, William Harborne and the Trade with Turkey, 1578–1582 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977); K. N. Chaudhuri, The East India Company: The Study of an Early Joint-Stock Company, 1600–1640 (London: Routledge, 1964).
  105. See also Elizabeth Mancke, 'Chartered Enterprises and the Evolution of the British Atlantic World', in The Creation of the British Atlantic World, ed. Elizabeth Mancke and Carole Shammas (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2005), 237–262.
  106. Davies, The Royal African Company and, more recently, Pettigrew, Freedom's Debt.