Stern, Philip J. The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty & the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
In studying British Imperial history–or global history in general–it is hard to escape the specter of the East India Company. Just look at Concerning History, where it has been discussed in everything from book, television, and movie reviews to comparisons to pop culture touchstones like Star Wars. Whenever it appears, the EIC almost invariably stands as a symbol of the rapacity and transgressive nature of European imperialism: a merchant corporation exercising territorial sovereignty, collecting taxes and conducting diplomacy and war as a state in its own right understandably strikes modern audiences as horrifically unnatural and exploitative. Yet are we letting our modern conception of business and statecraft cloud our judgment? Philip Stern certainly thinks so, and in his fascinating study of the first century and a half of the Company’s existence, argues that far from being an anomaly, the EIC’s later dominion in India was the natural evolution of its founding principles.
Rather than take Stern’s word for it, however, The Company-State invites readers to view this reality through the eyes of Company officials themselves, extensively citing everything from the EIC’s founding charter to the official and unofficial correspondence of every level of administrators from directors to governors to lowly writers to show that not only did the Company possess the power to tax, raise forces, and in all other ways govern its holdings from the very beginning, but that its officials always conceived of themselves as a government, pursuing territorial as well as commercial rights from Asian powers and even at times holding the ideal of effective civil administration above making a profit. Indeed, Stern contends that this conflation of mercantile and governmental authority was perfectly normal during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as the very idea of “corporation” began when towns sought to codify their special legal privileges under monarchical rule. The inclusion of the island of St. Helena, the EIC’s sole Atlantic colony (and one only indirectly related to Eastern commerce through its role as a waystation), effectively serves to question the traditional divide between England’s Asian and North American empires; the Atlantic seaboard colonies were, after all, settled under the auspices of companies of their own, yet modern scholarship (and public opinion) have never had the same problems with their sovereignty. All this persuasively argues that when Robert Clive rendered the EIC the paramount power in Bengal after the Battle of Plassey, only a change in quantity of governance had occurred, not a change in kind.
I cannot help but wonder, however, if the nature of Stern’s sources and general historical relativism lead him to be too kind to the Company at times. Officials’ rhetoric is usually taken at face value with little effort to verify whether they practiced what they preached–admittedly not the point of his argument, but something that prevents The Company-State from functioning as a more general history of the Company. Even some of Stern’s revisions can fall prey to this tendency; his argument that the first great Company controversy at the turn of the 18th century was actually an issue of Parliament asserting its own, more modern conceptions of authority over a messy monarchical foundation is intriguing, but the idea that the massive bribes and kickbacks paid to Members of Parliament by the EIC were simply how one did business in the early modern era, no different than sending gifts to the Mughal court in order to secure trading privileges, is hard to believe as an earnest defense–and indeed wasn’t, even at the time.
As a reconceptualization of the operation of the East India Company through its own eyes, however, The Company-State remains a fantastic contribution to the field, and one I’m ashamed to not have read earlier (especially considering it was published before I had even begun my undergraduate studies). It has revolutionized the way I conceive of and teach the opening phases of European global colonization, and for any interested in this era of history or modern questions of corporate power, I cannot recommend it highly enough.