"Those of us who went to school before our past was rewritten as a catalog of the White Man's crimes were taught that empire -- with all its vices and virtues -- was built by monarchs and statesmen. In "Empire, Incorporated" (Belknap/Harvard, 399 pages, $35), Philip J. Stern tells us that this picture, while not inaccurate, is quite incomplete.
British colonialism in particular, Mr. Stern says, was conceived by investors, creditors, entrepreneurs and, lest we forget, parvenus and embezzlers. This cast of men-on-the-make flourished alongside sovereigns and their ministers and produced what Mr. Stern calls "venture colonialism" -- a form of overseas expansion that was driven by a belief that "the public business of empire was and had always been best done by private enterprise."
The history of British colonialism is really the history of the joint-stock corporation. A novel strategy in the mid-16th century, this form of enterprise procured capital from an array of investors with ownership shares or profit-sharing and created a single legal entity, often granted special privileges. Among much else, the joint-stock corporation made undertakings on a global scale newly possible.
But what made joint stocks so appealing also made them "unsettling," Mr. Stern writes, and a faction in Parliament worried about the clout of these companies in far-flung places. There was, no doubt, a class component to the apprehension. The original investors in the East India Co. -- the pre-eminent joint stock, from its founding in 1600 to well into the 19th century -- were all merchants, with only one aristocrat among them.
By the 1620s, the East India Co.'s demographics had changed, its successes attracting a posher class of investor. But the company ingeniously -- and audaciously -- refused to admit the king himself, "fearing the loss of independence it would entail," Mr. Stern explains. The public justification for this apparent irreverence was that it was unseemly for the king to enter into commercial partnerships with his subjects.
"Empire, Incorporated" tells us how the joint-stock corporation shaped British colonialism. As a narrative, the author says, "it is like a novel that places an originally supporting character in the center of the story," elevating fortune-hunters into fabledmen. Robert Clive, that most infamous of the nabobs enriched by the East India Co. in the mid-18th century, and Sir Humphrey Gilbert, a mass killer of rebellious Irishmen who took possession of Newfoundland for the crown in 1583, were both VCs, or venture colonialists. As were Thomas Smythe, the first governor of the East India Co. and later treasurer of the Virginia Co., whose tobacco yielded great riches; and Sir Thomas Roe, who went as the ambassador of James I to the court of the Mughal Emperor Jahangir even as his true purpose was to secure a trade monopoly in India.
England's "portfolio colonialism" came into existence through royal charters, by which the sovereign doled out juicy commercial advantages to those who petitioned for them. These plums ranged from exemptions from duties and taxes to the prerogative to claim territory overseas in the name of the crown (as Gilbert did in Newfoundland). The terms could be audacious, Mr. Stern observes, allowing companies to run all sorts of enterprises over "ill-defined geographic spaces insouciantly superimposed over indigenous sovereignty." Breathtaking claims to territory or jurisdiction resulted in assertions of rights to "sacrosanct" private property that were enforceable in British courts. The charters redrew the maps of the world.
The first such charter was granted to the Muscovy Co. in 1555. Mr. Stern writes that the company effectively became "the English government over Anglo-Russian commerce" and, as a conduit of relations between England and Russia, exercised "de facto command over Anglo-Russian diplomacy."
Mr. Stern, a professor of history at Duke University, is the author, previously, of "The Company State" (2011), a truly original work on the place of "corporate sovereignty" in the foundations of the British Empire in India -- a kind of intellectual prequel to "Empire, Incorporated." The East India Co., he argued there, was not a trading body that happened to morph into a political institution over time; it was an imperial project from the start. In his new book, he extends the argument to English (later British) charter companies from Ireland and Australia to the Americas, including the Falkland Islands. Embedded in each company was a piquant ambiguity: Was it "an extension of sovereign power, a check on sovereign power, or a sovereign power unto itself?" The answer is, roughly speaking, all three.
The English crown tended to work in cynical symbiosis with company men. In the 1570s, for instance, its security rested on enriching itself at the expense of Spain, yet diplomacy dictated that open hostility with Philip II was not an option. So Humphrey Gilbert stepped in with an offer to "annoy the King of Spayne" and to be the "cloake" to undertake attacks on Spanish fleets and settlements. The English crown could, by this means, burgle Spain without leaving any fingerprints.
Time and turbulence brought an end to the imperial autonomy of the charter corporations, especially the East India Co. Allegations -- and proof -- of corruption had dogged the company from the middle of the 18th century, and lawmakers in London looked for ways to hobble its imperial strut. A distaste for its cupidity had led to the impeachment in the House of Commons of Warren Hastings, India's governor-general. The great Edmund Burke, who led the prosecution of Hastings for graft, insisted nonetheless that the company's "mercantile constitution" was "perhaps the best contrivance that ever has been thought of by the wit of men for the government of a remote, large, disjointed empire." (Hastings was later acquitted in the House of Lords.)
In fact, the East India Co. managed the affairs of much more than an Indian empire. As Callie Wilkinson underscores in "Empire of Influence" (Cambridge, 281 pages, $110), the company ruled indirectly over numerous nominally independent kingdoms all over the subcontinent, none formally annexed. These dependencies were supervised by "residents," men charged with ensuring that the native rulers remained docile and complaisant. Ms. Wilkinson, a historian at Munich's Ludwig Maximilian University, makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of British rule, whose historiography has given short shrift to these princely states, which comprised 40% of the territory of pre-independence India.
After the Indian Mutiny of 1857, the East India Co. gave way to the crown, with Queen Victoria's ascent as Empress of India marking the end to a rollicking century of Company Raj. Yet the rise of the East India Co. two centuries before -- often depicted as if inevitable, emerging from a mix of cleverness and ambition -- was, in truth, a near-miracle. David Howarth, an emeritus professor at Edinburgh University, tells us in "Adventurers" (Yale, 459 pages, $35) that the East India Co. was a "parlous, improbable institution which survived a hazardous birth, but only just."
Mr. Howarth's book examines the period from 1550 to 1650, the year after the execution of Charles I. It is the story of an insular sapling that grew into a massive imperial oak. The title refers to the company's first investors, called "adventurers" in their time not because they anticipated "exciting events at sea" but because they embarked on the "venturing of capital." The East India Co.'s roots, Mr. Howarth writes -- with the jaunty elegance that marks his narrative -- "ran deep in the loam of English commerce."
The company's beginnings were unpromising: Six months before its first voyage, it owned not a single ship. This shouldn't be surprising. In the late 16th century, Mr. Howarth says, English marine tonnage was the smallest among the seafaring nations of Europe, dwarfed by Spain, Portugal and Holland. But what England lacked in tonnage, it made up for with pluck. "England possessed in abundance," writes Mr. Howarth, "people willing to chance everything to open up new trade routes." The East India Co. was set up by gutsy men who "sallied forth to make England sail." In its way, "Adventurers" is a reminder that grandeur is seldom attained without the fearless taking of risk.
Of course, providence also played a part. Bested by Holland in the early 17th century in the seas east of Bengal -- and ceding primacy in the Spice Islands to the Dutch -- the East India Co. turned its focus to India. This would, in time, transform Britain into a superpower. "Had the Dutch not got the Spice Islands," Mr. Howarth muses, "the English would not have got India." So it is that history parcels out triumphs, creating the spoils and laurels that statesmen and monarchs blithely take for themselves.
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Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at Columbia University's Center on Capitalism and Society." [1]
Why did the British Empire disappear? The French acted to help to form a competitor - U.S.A. Germans devastated the British Empire in two wars. The U.S.A. is using its riches and promotion of nationalism to destroy competing empires. These three actions are most important in killing the British Empire. What was an Empire once, became a group of clowns (Sunak, Truss, and Johnson are prime examples of this behavior).
1. REVIEW --- Books: Venturing Out For King And Profit. Varadarajan, Tunku.
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 03 June 2023: C.7.
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