The author's previous book, a landmark study of the East India Company (EIC) titled The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (Oxford, 2011), concludes with the eclipse of a characteristically early modern form of layered, plural, and hybrid sovereignty in the early nineteenth century, as a centralizing national state began to seize the reins of empire. Although Stern persuasively showed how the EIC was far from an anomalous entity destined for obsolescence, being in fact constitutive of the modern state, its demise did signal a broader transformation in the nature of corporate entities from bodies politic to purely commercial enterprises. In this new work, Stern expands the temporal, spatial, and conceptual scope of analysis beyond the EIC to rethink the entire history of the British Empire from the ground up, beginning with the earliest chartered companies in the mid-fifteenth century to multinationals in the late twentieth century. This was an empire of corporations—hundreds of them, large and small, successful and failed—that generated the same tensions and contradictions over and over again. The main argument is one of continuity rather than rupture. Fundamental questions about whether the corporation is “an extension of sovereign power, a check on sovereign power, or a sovereign power unto itself” were never resolved (7).
Empire, Incorporated builds on a wave of recent interdisciplinary scholarship on corporate sovereignty in a global and imperial frame, by anthropologists (Marina Welker), geographers (Joshua Barkan), historians (Andrew Fitzmaurice, Stephen Press), and political scientists (Andrew Phillips and J.C. Sharman). Conceived as a “work of synthesis,” the book nonetheless makes several original contributions (387). Through the flexible category of “venture colonialism,” Stern brings together a vast array of corporate entities involved in empire-building in a fast-paced (at times whirlwind) “narrative history.” What emerges is also a “collective legal, intellectual, and institutional biography” of distinct individuals, from promoters and adventurers to politicians and scholars, who fiercely debated the rights and responsibilities of corporations (11–12). This is an exemplary history of ideas deeply embedded in contests of power and influence, which carefully reconstructs the contexts in which those ideas were produced and disseminated. One of the major strengths of the book is the reassessment of well-known events (the founding of the American colonies, the South Sea Bubble, the American Revolution, the Hastings trial, the 1857 Indian Rebellion, the Scramble for Africa) together with more obscure episodes such as Ferdinando Gorges’ quixotic quest to claim Massachusetts (ch. 2) and the connections between Edward Gibbon Wakefield, King Leopold of Belgium, and a failed colonization project in Guatemala (ch. 5). Alongside people, ideas, and institutions, Stern skillfully traces the mundane legal instruments of incorporation (charters, grants, patents, writs) and how they were transferred, purchased, and fought over.
The narrative begins in chapter 1 with the proliferation of various “projects” of colonization in the Elizabethan Age, revolving around the figure of Humphrey Gilbert. The establishment of the EIC in 1600, Stern argues, marked the “culmination” of disparate efforts to organize long-distance trade, merging “seigneurial” privileges with a novel joint-stock company structure (itself drawing on Spanish and Islamicate precedents). Chapter 2 focuses on the use of corporations to settle and govern land in Ireland and North America, including Edwin Sandys's plantation scheme for Virginia (first trialed in Ulster). Debates over the status of corporations in the common law are explored through legal cases such as Darcy v. Allen (1602), also known as the “Case of Monopolies,” and the use of the medieval quo warranto procedure to contest territorial claims (which in turn precipitated conflicts between the American colonies and the Crown). Chapter 3 examines corporations’ key role in dispossessing land in New England, due to a “legal prohibition on private bargains with indigenous peoples” (102). This tendency resembles and perhaps prefigures later imperial policies of “protection” from the vicissitudes of the market, such as the Punjab Land Alienation Act (1900) and Chota Nagpur Tenancy Act (1908) in India. The chapter goes on to discuss the increasing powers of Parliament after the Glorious Revolution and the intensification of attacks on corporations during the collapse of the South Sea Company (resulting in the passage of the Bubble Act).
Chapter 4 stands out as the richest and most thought-provoking to this reviewer. It opens and closes with two fascinating instances of alternatives to the prevailing joint-stock model. The first was James Oglethorpe's “trusteeship experiment” in the 1720s, proposing a colony of smallholder farmers in Georgia without plantations or slavery and based on fee tail primogeniture. The second was the abolitionist Sierra Leone Company in the 1790s, intended to make use of the “medieval legal principle of frank-pledge, a kind of combined trusteeship and joint-stock in which every member of the community paid tithings into a common fund” (186–87). Although both ultimately failed, and Stern downplays the extent of their innovations, the trust as “alter ego” of the corporation only grew in importance (149). Edmund Burke's declaration that the EIC as a “species of political dominion” was “in the strictest sense a trust,” emerged out of the same milieu as these radical experiments, even as it became the basis for entrenched imperial rule in subsequent decades (178).
Chapters 5 and 6 cover the “high noon” of empire in the nineteenth century, examining the spread of railway and telegraph companies, the protracted demise of the EIC and Hudson's Bay companies, the controversies over Wakefield's various colonization projects, and the continued use of chartered companies for expansion in Southeast Asia and Africa. Two questions arise here. First, Stern highlights the passage of the Companies Act of 1862, which theoretically ensured that incorporation became “a bureaucratic process not a political one” (256). Yet the narrative proceeds on the assumption that nothing much had changed in substance. What was the general development of laws of incorporation in Britain, and how did they affect the organization of economic life beyond the imperial context? Second, the intriguing role played by local rulers such as the Sultans of Borneo (271) and Zanzibar (305) merits greater attention. They acted as brokers, guarantors, and alibis of the traffic in sovereignty throughout the entire period under study.
The epilogue, which surveys formal decolonization and the persistence of corporations with connections to the British Empire in its aftermath, raises the specter of relevance to the present. Stern wisely refrains from “asking the world of early modern colonialism to explain the origins and nature of our contemporary global predicaments,” stressing that “venture colonialism proved to be neither anathema to capitalism nor coterminous with it” (14). In other words, the book is a history of corporations largely orthogonal to the history of capitalism. While this framework allows the exchange of ideas and evolution of institutional forms to be observed and assessed on their own terms, it limits the overarching conclusions that can be drawn—not least because historiographical interventions are relegated to the endnotes. The same could be said of the book's treatment of the law. A deeper dive into a specific case, such as the aforementioned Darcy v. Allen (1602), or a finer grained textual analysis of a single representative corporate charter, would have illuminated the tensions and contradictions at play while providing a brief respite from the narrative.
Due to its exceptionally broad scope and synthetic approach, Empire, Incorporated will be of significant interest and use to scholars and students of law, capitalism, and empire across the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. Historians of modern corporations in particular will have much to learn from a set of diverse and revealing case studies that resist the temptations of easy analogy.
