Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations That Built British Colonialism
May 2023 · Harvard University Press
Ebook
408
Pages
About this ebook
A Spectator Book of the Year
“Brilliant, ambitious, and often surprising. A remarkable contribution to the current global debate about empire.” —William Dalrymple, author of The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire
“Remarkable...The richness of detail and evidence that Stern...brings to his subject is [new]—as is the lucidity with which he organises his material over six long chapters that stretch from the mid-16th century almost to the present.” —Linda Colley, Financial Times
“[A] commanding history of British corporate imperialism.” —Michael Ledger-Lomas, London Review of Books
Across four centuries and multiple continents, 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. 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. And, as Empire, Incorporated makes clear, colonialism’s 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.
“Brilliant, ambitious, and often surprising. A remarkable contribution to the current global debate about empire.” —William Dalrymple, author of The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire
“Remarkable...The richness of detail and evidence that Stern...brings to his subject is [new]—as is the lucidity with which he organises his material over six long chapters that stretch from the mid-16th century almost to the present.” —Linda Colley, Financial Times
“[A] commanding history of British corporate imperialism.” —Michael Ledger-Lomas, London Review of Books
Across four centuries and multiple continents, 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. 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. And, as Empire, Incorporated makes clear, colonialism’s 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.
Discover more
About the author
Philip J. Stern is a historian of the British Empire and the author of the award-winning book The Company-State. He is Professor of History at Duke University.
Rate this ebook
Tell us what you think.
Reading information
Smartphones and tablets
Install the Google Play Books app for Android and iPad/iPhone. It syncs automatically with your account and allows you to read online or offline wherever you are.
Laptops and computers
You can listen to audiobooks purchased on Google Play using your computer's web browser.
eReaders and other devices
To read on e-ink devices like Kobo eReaders, you'll need to download a file and transfer it to your device. Follow the detailed Help Center instructions to transfer the files to supported eReaders.
