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"Historians typically regard the British Empire as a state project aided by corporations. Philip Stern turns this view on its head, arguing that corporations drove colonial expansion and governance, creating an overlap between sovereign and commercial power that continues to shape the relationship between nations and corporations to this day."

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

This volume of collected essays takes a new approach to this problematic subject by rethinking its broad foundations. From a variety of perspectives, its authors situate mercantilism against the backdrop of wider transformations in seventeenth-century Britain, Europe, and the Atlantic, from the scientific revolution to the expansion of empire

The English East India Company was first chartered in 1600, endured until the late nineteenth century, and, in a clever act of corporate resurrection, has even recently returned as a global, upmarket retail outlet selling fine foods and commemorative coins. It has also endured in the popular imagination and culture, churning out heroes and villains alike in film, television, and video games. The script writer for a forthcoming BBC miniseries, in which the East India Company stars as the prime antagonist, even noted recently that the Company was like "the CIA, the NSA, and the biggest, baddest multinational corporation on earth" wrapped into one corporation. All of this attention of late to one of the largest and most enduring corporations of its time, which managed a commercial and political system separated by half a world at upwards of a year and half's distance, is perhaps unsurprising given the great legal, political, and economic conundrums surrounding the modern multinational corporation, from questions about global management to controversial issues such as tax inversions, monopoly, state-owned corporations, as well as the corporate person's rights to free speech, religion, and so on. However, from outlandish film productions to the most sober of scholarship, the connections between the Company's past and our present seem to have become all things to all people, stretched almost to the point of breaking. Though it would be impossible to be exhaustive, this Article nonetheless seeks to outline the various ways in which the East India Company's legacy has been drawn upon in a range of fields, but especially legal and business scholarship, for a wide range of purposes. In so doing, it proposes that the sheer diversity of uses to which the Company's history has been put, as well as the lack of any agreement about the meaning and nature of such comparisons, might suggest that the lessons the East India Company can offer to the financial, commercial, and organizational history of the modern corporation, while ...