“Brilliant, ambitious, and often surprising. A remarkable
contribution to the current global debate about Empire and a small
masterpiece of research and conceptual reimagining.” —William
Dalrymple, author of The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate
Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire An award-winning historian
places the corporation—more than the Crown—at the heart of
British colonialism, arguing that companies built and governed
global empire, raising questions about public and private power
that were just as troubling four hundred years ago as they are
today. Across four centuries, from Ireland to India, the Americas
to Africa and Australia, British colonialism was above all the
business of corporations. Corporations conceived, promoted,
financed, and governed overseas expansion, making claims over
territory and peoples while ensuring that British and colonial
society were invested, quite literally, in their ventures. Colonial
companies were also relentlessly controversial, frequently in debt,
and prone to failure. The corporation was well-suited to overseas
expansion not because it was an inevitable juggernaut but because,
like empire itself, it was an elusive contradiction: public and
private; person and society; subordinate and autonomous;
centralized and diffuse; immortal and precarious; national and
cosmopolitan—a legal fiction with very real power. Breaking from
traditional histories in which corporations take a supporting role
by doing the dirty work of sovereign states in exchange for
commercial monopolies, Philip Stern argues that corporations took
the lead in global expansion and administration. Whether in
sixteenth-century Ireland and North America or the Falklands in the
early 1980s, corporations were key players. And, as Empire,
Incorporated makes clear, venture colonialism did not cease with
the end of empire. Its legacies continue to raise questions about
corporate power that are just as relevant today as they were 400
years ago. Challenging conventional wisdom about where power is
held on a global scale, Stern complicates the supposedly firm
distinction between private enterprise and the state, offering a
new history of the British Empire, as well as a new history of the
corporation.
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