Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations That Built British Colonialism

by Philip J. Stern

“A landmark book…[a] bold reframing of the history of the British Empire.”
—Caroline Elkins, Foreign Affairs

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 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.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Politics, Economics, India, European History, Business

402 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 16, 2023

About the author

A specialist in the history of the British Empire, Philip J. Stern is Associate Professor of History at Duke University.

Reviews

[Austin Barselau · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the age of empire, colonial conquest is often thought to have been directly effectuated by the ruling impulses and dictates of the crown. However, recent scholarship by Philip J. Stern in Empire Incorporated reveals that empire-building was often an informal process governed by so-called “company states” – private corporations such as joint-stock enterprises funded by private shareholders. Stern, an Assistant Professor of History at Duke University, argues that the advent of the royal charter, which granted recipients special legal rights to jurisdictional immunity and commercial privileges, spearheaded what he calls “venture colonialism” – public statecraft by private means. Through legal procedure, British colonialism across the globe was both normalized and democratized. Investors, entrepreneurs, and even speculators could now throw in their lots with newfangled corporations to engage in finance, trade, and politics abroad.

Stern probes a potpourri of corporate ventures, established for various purposes such as manufacturing, mining, agriculture, or trade. Corporations adopted various functions, quickly becoming specialized vessels for proselytizing natives, laying telegram wire, and even establishing universities. Others became the precursors to successful colonies in the New World. For example, William Penn, the incorporator of Pennsylvania, established a thriving colony seeded with legal privileges such as the right to convene baronial courts, sue, conduct self-governance, and promote the public and private good. Other endeavors, such as the South Sea Company and the Mississippi Company, became disastrous spectacles of rampant speculation and financial ruin. As Stern elucidates, for every successful corporation, there were ample more that were failures, plagued by dubious origins and unstable legality.

Stern’s writing functions as a mix of corporate law and colonial history. However, he often dabbles too much in the legal arcana of corporate finance without equivalent attention to the political moorings that sanctioned these ventures. He also devotes insufficient space to some of the more successful ventures such as the British East India Company, the most profitable corporate endeavor of the British empire. The narrative is also unfocused and makes frequent digressions into all types of corporate legal procedure, not solely those which facilitated British statecraft. This book is an illuminating plunge into a “new history” of empire, but it is not a relaxed history for the uninitiated.

[Cade · Rating 2 out of 5]

I like history. I am interested in and read books about unglamorous topics. However, this book just did not keep my attention. It is written understandably and in a generally linear narrative. It is clearly well researched, but in an attempt to be thorough, the material is so dry and there are so many examples of similar corporations with similar stories that I found myself reading without really retaining any information. The different names of people and corporations came about as fast and sank in about as much as hail on a tin roof. Maybe it is my fault for not trying harder to digest the information, but the fact remains that I got very little out of the time I spent with this book.

[Andy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic read, very informative. It offers a perspective often overlooked, especially in our current social climate, of colonialism and imperialism.
Seen from the point of view of corporate interest, this is both an acute analysis of the past and its reverberations on current affairs, and the possible future perspectives, with corporate interest assuming control of our public life covertly and overtly.

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

What is the nature of the relationship between the state and capital. In the Communist Manifesto the state is described as an executive of the entire capitalist class, whose function is to manage It's interests.

This book delves into a more specific analysis, the relationship of capital to the English (British?) state over the course of about 500 years, from the late 16th century to today.

It is dry, but interesting read. While it is not a comparitive history of closely related entities like the Hudson's Bay Company and the East India Company, or the other chartered companies, it does reveal an intimate reliance between the state and capital over time, how England acquired an empire, and the legacy left in it's wake as "postcolonial" independence proved anything but.

[Gauri · Rating 2 out of 5]

A difficult book to get through even if full of very interesting nuggets

- the notion that indigenous peoples of the world dispossessed themselves of property and sovereignty by violating conditions of the law became the ideological and legal foundation of European colonialism. The concept pf private property was upheld by British law for Ty e most specious and outrageous claims abroad

- the joint stock company was a perfect vehicle to colonise - because of its jurisdictional evasiveness , while trouble abroad reverberated at home , its powers abroad served as arguments for upholding its powers at home . For shareholders it was limited liability to support legal and physical violence in faraway places that would be unthinkable otherwise . They were political chameleons. Sovereigns abroad and supplicant subjects at home


- portfolio colonialists abounded - shares in colonising joint stock companies helped them own a share in the sovereignty of many places without ever leaving home

- chaos and anarchy were an effective weapon for colonial expansion and violence. Ordered patterns existed to what seemed random irregular events . Empire May be uncoordinated but it certainly wasn’t unintentional

- through history corporate colonialism demonstrates how porous borders our nations and empire and companies were in the first place

- Bombay was acquired from the Portrugese in an alliance between King Charles and Princess Catarina de Braganza . Crown being unwilling to administer it , hence handed to East India company

- the British used telegraphy to anhilate Father Time ( Kipling ) . As all roads led to Rome all telegraphy lines led to London stringing as pearls together colonies of the crown . Reuters became the largest telegraphy service . The BBC was also started to maintain the consolidated empire against anti colonial nationalism and communism ( Radio Moscow )

- Berlin west Africa conference in 1884 carved Africa into spheres of influence between European powers setting off a mad scramble for colonies . Rhodes set up de beers , gold fields with funds from Rothschild

- a chartered company has no dignity to humiliate , no flag to avenge . It could stoop to conquer, redeem defeat with diplomacy and money where the prestige of a great power would compel a crushing display of force


- anti colonial nationalism led to new centers of corporate power like the Tatas , which fashioned themselves as sovereigns with workers as subjects

[Quentin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eye-opening account of the role of private companies in colonialism. This book answered my questions.

[William Strong · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book reads like it was simply compiled by taking an existing history of the British empire and removing every page that doesn’t contain the word “corporation”. There is no synthesis contained in the book that comes anywhere near “a bold reframing of the history of the British empire” as reviewed on the cover; instead it is functionally an encyclopedic list of facts about different corporations. It doesn’t tell a story like a book catering to the general public would, there is very little in the way of analysis, and even the index is not particularly comprehensive. All of this leads me to ask: who is this book for? In the end the reader can expect to know a bit about the legal history of hundreds of corporate endeavors, without knowing much in detail about any of them nor knowing the broad trends that connect them together.

[Laura Jordan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m sure there was much of great interest in this book — and I had been really looking forward to getting to it — but it’s unnecessarily dense and nearly unreadable as a result. The introduction offered a few over-arching ideas, but the rest of the book strained to offer any kind of thesis and just moved from example to example without a clear argument or through line. And I was surprised that it offered no real discussion of the East India Company and the origins of the Opium Wars, very strange for a book about corporate colonialism.

[Edwin · Rating 2 out of 5]

It is a shame that I have to rate it poorly, especially as the subject matter is fascinating, but the lack of coherent structure, overtly detailed legal arcana, and a lack of political history made it quite an uninteresting and dry read.

[Marks54 · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an historical survey of the British Empire from the perspective that to a nearly exclusive degree, the Empire was outsourced. Key components of the empire were established by a process in which some colonizing agent - a established colony, an entrepreneurial venture, a charitable or religious group, or some other organization - make an agreement with the British Crown and as a result obtained a permit or charter to establish operations in a given locale for a given period. This permission frequently included extensive governmental authority to raise money, establish and maintain a civil environment, including policing powers, and even raise and army and go to war with some enemy. All this was done in the name of the British Government, which was not infrequently called upon to enforce the actions of these contractor colonies. The Opium Wars provide an example.

While this sort of contracting out of empire was common - indeed the norm - it seems odd to more modern sensitivities. The legitimate exercise of governmental authority seems very different from the work we have come to associate with contractors - indeed the legitimacy of such action quickly comes to mind. Other ideas of how private nongovernmental actors are likely better suited to profit-making activities are also common, fueled for the British experience by Thatcher’s privatizing of much public industry after 1979. Privatizing of “governmental” functions today seems much more strange - consider the reactions to private prisons and contract policing.

What is especially thought provoking about the book is how long the traditional contract view of empire persisted in Britain, only changing sharply within the last fifty years or so.

The book is fairly clear, but there are so many examples over such a long time frame that it is hard to keep track of all the developments over multiple centuries.

[Ethan Cohen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was an excellent overview of the development and sub-surface level workings of British colonialism, covering its beginning in the 1500s up to the 1900s. This book does one thing extremely well: taking the more commonly known elements of colonialism and detailing specific companies, laws, expeditions, etc. and the people that drove them, using these to steadily build a refined image of how British colonial expansion continuously established, expanded, and evolved within itself into the world we see today. In doing so, this book provides a fantastically insightful look into the major foundations of modern day corporatism/capitalism and clear picture of how intertwined it is with colonialism and imperialism. For anyone seeking insight and well-researched, well presented information on the origins of corporate economics, this book does so clearly and concisely, giving commentary and connections through each period to create an enlightening image of the development of capitalism.

[Christian · Rating 3 out of 5]

A decent overview of joint stock companies established under the British empire. It was OK, but a very dry academic read. So much of the text could have been replaced with tables, timelines, and maps. I learned a lot of the people and players behind the joint-stock companies, but I won't be reaching for this when I need information about the British East India company or the the settlements of Australia.

[Daniel · Rating 2 out of 5]

Bluntly: this book is worth your attention if two things are true: 1) you're interested in the history of the early joint stock companies and their role in colonial history, and 2) you're willing to put up with a long, cluttered and disorganized book.

Empire, Incorporated doesn't know w... [see the rest on my book review site.]

[jammie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I first read it a quarter of the way, realized I wasn't absorbing anything, went back and re-read it but just couldn't get through. The author clearly knows a lot about the subject and has done a great amount of research. But I just couldn't get what points were being made with the details and examples. I am a lawyer and generally like diving into geeky theoretical stuff and history, but I was quite stumped. A pity because I really wanted to learn more about this topic and liked the idea

[Christy Matthews · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting subject matter focused on how British corporations colonized much of the world outside of the explicit supervision of the crown. Book was too detail oriented and read more like a chronological set of facts as opposed to something with high level summaries and key points. The end of the book improved a bit in this sense, but the beginning was borderline painful to get through.

[Donald · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dry, though it is clearly well researched. It’s narratively all over the place and like many other reviewers, I’ve found that names come and go only to then reappear at breakneck speeds. Very interesting topic and I appreciate the knowledge it presents, but the academic nature of this book requires full attention.

[Dylan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was really looking forward to this book, but about halfway through I have to give up (>1/2). The book has flashes of interesting points, but there's not a lot of structure to the chapters that assists with making the book accessible.

[Foster Haynes · Rating 1 out of 5]

The book was clearly well researched and reviewed Britain’s colonial expansion from an interesting angle but the writing is atrocious. There was no consideration for how the information should be presented and then how it would ultimately digested by the reader.

[Martha · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.4 - very broad and mostly interesting overview of the colonial corporation, specifically in the American/Canadian context from 1560s on and less in depth in India, Oceania and Africa. Not exactly what I was anticipating but a nice read

[Kevin Postlewaite · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting perspective on colonial history.

[Nick Harriss · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very interesting book, which is particularly strong on the early era of chartered companies.

[An · Rating 3 out of 5]

Too much yapping, not enough info. It was mind-numbingly boring but not educational enough. I want to read other books on this topic than this.

[Joey Mopsink · Rating 3 out of 5]

An argument about continuity, rather than change. As such, was not a super enjoyable read for me!

[Hello · Rating 2 out of 5]

im sure its great if ur a historian im not though

agree with the premise

DNF

[Victor · Rating 3 out of 5]

really drawn to the subject but this book was so dry I struggled through it the entire time.

[Reuben Herfindahl · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great read, but you may have to have at least minored in early colonial history to get it all. It assumes you know all the major figures (and that’s fine there are hundreds), It should probably have been a three book series. There is no introduction of any of the characters or their place in history. It just assumes you know American, English and Indian history very well.

That said, if you do it’s quite readable and a fascinating tale.