Philip J. Stern’s book, Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations That Built British Colonialism, offers a sweeping history centered on the entanglement between the British Empire and the corporation over the early modern and modern periods. Operating as a spiritual sequel (of sorts) to the author’s award-winning 2011 monograph, The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India, Stern’s much-anticipated new book provides a macro-narrative about how commercial enterprises such as the joint stock company and the corporation emerged, evolved, and transformed within the context of Britain’s global empire, particularly within a legal and political framework. Although the text offers few surprises for business historians of empire, Stern’s book—with its crisp prose and well-crafted narrative arc—represents an important statement and synopsis about how commercial agents and large companies—along with charters, contracts, patents, and other legal mechanisms—were central to the expansion and governance of Britain’s empire since as early as the sixteenth century. In doing so, the book offers the most comprehensive and wide-ranging account of the deep connections that existed between private interests and Britain’s empire, and as such, should be required reading for any scholar looking to understand the subject in greater depth.
Stern’s book is divided into six chronologically organized body chapters, along with a short but well-crafted introduction and an epilogue. Chapter 1, which focuses on the “Age of Discovery,” leads the reader through the most important events of this era globally, ranging from the establishment and expansion of the Irish plantations and the Atlantic-world explorations of figures such as Humphrey Gilbert to the founding of the Levant Company and the East India Company. Chapter 2, entitled “Municipal Bonds,” then examines the period between roughly 1600 and 1660, focusing primarily on the litany of companies involved in the colonization of North America—especially in Virginia, New England, and Newfoundland—as well as broader concerns over monopolies, fishing rights, and patents. Chapter 3 looks at the rise of corporate finance from the Restoration era through the end of the Stuart dynasty, expanding on the previous chapter’s discussion of North America and further examining early British corporate ventures in Africa, India, and elsewhere globally, including the events and fallout of the so-called “South Sea Bubble.” Chapter 4, entitled “Hostile Takeovers,” then examines the rest of the eighteenth century during an era of increased imperial expansion, focusing on some of the “experiments” in corporate colonialism that took shape over that period, such as the role of trusteeships and the rise of “charitable” and “abolitionist” corporate ventures. This chapter moves through a host of geographic case studies that stretch from the Thirteen Colonies before and after the American revolution to events in India and West Africa. Chapter 5 focuses on “Corporate Innovations” across the early to mid-nineteenth century, with a particular emphasis on the expansion of settler colonial projects in Australia and Canada, as well as one of the primary architects of this project, Edward Gibbon Wakefield. Chapter 6, entitled “Limiting Liabilities,” then covers the period of “New Imperialism” in the late nineteenth century, examining the various corporate entities that defined this era—from chartered firms to limited liability companies—and their continued role as movers of empire. Finally, the book concludes with a short but dense epilogue that hints at many of the important shifts—including, significantly, the rise of the multinational corporation—that took shape over the late colonial period and into the era following decolonization.
Stern’s book, with its long temporal scope, offers a much-needed overview of how private interests were at the center of Britain’s imperial project. In addition to providing an excellent synopsis of the British Empire’s evolution since the late sixteenth century, the book shows how commercial entities, whether in the form of joint-stock companies, trusteeships, limited liability companies, or other corporate ventures, became and remained an active and persistent component of Britain’s imperial expansion from the earliest days of empire until the period of decolonization. While scholars—including Lauren Benton, Mira Wilkins, and Steven Press, among others—have unraveled different layers of this story, Stern’s big-picture approach allows readers to understand how the relationship between the British Empire and private interests evolved across time and space, moving through a wide of range of geographies, peoples, events, and eras in an easily digestible narrative.
Nevertheless, as with any book of this scope, there are some limitations to Stern’s methodology. Because the author is effectively covering over four hundred years of global history in a single monograph, the main analytical focus is on the elite movers of Britain’s corporate empire rather than events or agents on the ground. For example, while most of the book’s narrative is focused on company owners and their board of directors, political leaders, jurists, and other high-minded intellectuals in metropolitan Britain, the reader learns much less about either the workers who helped build these companies or the people who resisted these projects of corporate colonialism in the empire itself. Similarly, there is little about the extraction and circulation of commodities in the book, something that was at the center of the actual commercial activities that many of these businesses were pursuing in the empire over the early modern and modern periods. While it is understandable that the author omitted much of this material—you can only do so much in one book, after all—it is worth emphasizing that this is largely a political and legal history of empire, rather than an on-the-ground accounting of how these corporate ventures were made and remade by those living under them.
Despite these issues, Empire, Incorporated deserves a wide readership. The author’s ability to weave together an extensive array of different geographic and temporal case studies into a strong narrative is impressive, and the book’s main argument—that business was central to the expansion and governance of Britain’s empire—is a critical reminder about how deeply embedded private interests and European empires were over the early modern and modern periods.
Professor Baillargeon is Assistant Professor of European History, University of Texas. He is the author or coauthor of several works, including Spatial Histories of Occupation: Colonialism, Conquest and Foreign Control in Asia (2022).
