"[A] landmark book...[a] bold reframing of the history of the British Empire."--Caroline Elkins, Foreign Affairs 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
Almost since the event itself in 1757, the English East India Company's victory over the forces of the nawab of Bengal and the territorial acquisitions that followed has been perceived as the moment w
Almost since the event itself in 1757, the English East India Company's victory over the forces of the nawab of Bengal and the territorial acquisitions that followed has been perceived as the moment w
This book captures a moment when the competing ambitions of the Mughal Empire and the English East India Company brought them into armed conflict. The central document is a previously unpublished diar
Rethinking Mercantilism brings together a group of young early modern British and European historians to investigate what use the concept "mercantilism" might still hold for both scholars and teachers
