Empire, incorporated: the corporations that built British colonialism

By:

Stern, Philip J

Material type: Text

TextPublication details: Harvard University Press Cambridge 2023Description: 399 pISBN:

9780674294066

Subject(s):

DDC classification:

382.0941 STE

Summary: 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. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674988125

Tags from this library: No tags from this library for this title. Log in to add tags.

Average rating: 0.0 (0 votes)

Holdings
Item type	Current library	Collection	Call number	Copy number	Status	Date due	Barcode
Book	Indian Institute of Management LRC General Stacks	Non-fiction	382.0941 STE (Browse shelf(Opens below))	1	Available		005573

Browsing Indian Institute of Management LRC shelves, Shelving location: General Stacks, Collection: Non-fiction Close shelf browser (Hides shelf browser)

Previous								Next
Previous	370.15 SHA Build, don't talk: things you wish you were taught in school	370.92 RAY Daughters: a story of five generations	381.14206573 BRY Working backwards:	382.0941 STE Empire, incorporated: the corporations that built British colonialism	382.094205 ROY The East India Company: the world's most powerful corporation	382.09540903 LAL India and the silk roads:	384.55 LOW Watch and learn: how I turned Hollywood upside down with Netflix, Redbox, and MoviePass lessons in disruption	Next

Table of Contents

Chapter-1.Introduction: incorporating empire
Chapter-2.Initial public offerings: the age of discovery
Chapter-3.Municipal bonds: the age of crisis
Chapter-4.Corporate finance: the age of projects
Chapter-5.Hostile takeovers: the age of revolutions
Chapter-6.Corporate innovations: the age of reform
Chapter-7.Limiting liabilities: the age of imperialism

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.

https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674988125

There are no comments on this title.

to post a comment.