← New Books Network
New Books Network
Philip J. Stern, "Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations That Built British Colonialism" (Harvard UP, 2023)
00:54:46
An interview with Philip J. Stern
Loading summary
Transcript30 lines
- [00:00]
Apple Watch Advertiser
Here's to quitting. Quitting the couch for a quick run. Quitting the snooze button for a morning workout. Quitting giving up after two weeks. You see, staying committed to your fitness goals isn't easy. But with Apple Watch, you don't have to do it alone. Because Apple Watch gives you real time motivation plus advanced metrics that track all your workouts so you can stick to your New Year's fitness resolutions. And once and for all, quit quitting with Apple Watch. IPhone 11 or later required.
- [00:30]
Mint Mobile Advertiser
Well, the holidays have come and gone once again. But if you've forgotten to get that special someone in your life a gift, well, Mint Mobile is extending their holiday offer of half off unlimited wireless. So here's the idea. You get it now, you call it an early present for next year.
- [00:45]
Philip J. Stern
What do you have to lose?
- [00:47]
Mint Mobile Advertiser
Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch limited time.
- [00:50]
Apple Watch Advertiser
50% off regular price for new customers. Upfront payment required. $45 for three months, $90 for six month or $180 for 12 month. Plan taxes and fees. Extra speeds may slow after 50 gigabytes per month when network is busy, see terms.
- [01:00]
Marshall Po
Hello everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [02:08]
Thomas Kingston
Hello and welcome to this episode of New Books Intellectual History, part of the New Books Network. I'm your host, Thomas Kingston, and today I'm delighted to be joined by Philip J. Stern, Associate professor of History at Duke University, who's going to be talking to me about his new book, Empire Incorporated, out now with Harvard Press. It's great to have you here.
- [02:27]
Philip J. Stern
Thanks, Thomas. Thanks for having me. I'm really excited about the opportunity to talk to you about this. Look.
- [02:32]
Thomas Kingston
So let's get straight into the deep end. As anybody who has briefly checked your CV can see, your first publication was on the East India Company. And it's sort of how it sort of straddles the line between, or blurs the line even between politics and business. And that was featured on the New Books network back in 2011, if anybody wants to go listen to it. So once this book sort of returns to the same topic, this ebb and flow of business and politics and, well, as the title suggests, empire. But this is on a much grander scale. Was this the natural progression, sort of a zooming out, or was it something that really. That really just came to you based on, shall we say, a prompt or a. A trigger?
- [03:28]
Philip J. Stern
Yeah, that's a really. It's a really excellent question and I'm really excited to be back on the network. Network to talk about this book. I mean, you know, one sense, of course, right. There's a clear connection. The book the. The Company State certainly sparked my interest in these questions. But in a way, that book started from, I would say, the reverse place. I. In that book, I was trying to revisit the question of how British India came to be. And one of the most puzzling things about, I think, the making of British India was the fact that we always take it for granted at this point, but that it was the work of a company initially, not the state. And so that book was about, to some extent, how the puzzle of the question of how a commercial body like the East Indie Company could become a territorial empire. And the answer that I came up with in the process of investigating that question was that the premise of that question that we had had for so long was wrong. Right. That the. That as a corporation, and by the very nature of how early modern overseas commerce worked, the East India Company had been from its inception, a form of government over people, places, things. So in a way that the title was both a statement about. About, you know, the play on the idea of the nation state and other ways in which we can sort of imagine organizing political community. But it really originally started from thinking about how people talked about this thing in the literature about a company state that only emerged the late 18th century. And I was saying, no, you know, you go back about a century, you can really see a much longer and more long term origin. But in the process of writing that book and finishing that book, a couple of things happened. One was that I started to notice how much the East India Company became a model for other colonial companies even. And perhaps most especially what was most interesting was it became something more of a model, even as we would have assumed and as historians would tell us that the idea was becoming increasingly outmoded under assault. So in the 19th century, as you start to see people challenging the idea that a company should be a colonial government, and eventually up to and including the removal of the East Indie Company from governance governance in 1858, in the wake of the Indian rebellion, somehow the company, for a lot of colonial promoters and other companies kept being a positive model. And that was puzzling to me and problematic. And so I kept one looking, in fact, at a very, very early iteration of the depths of time. I actually thought about this project just being about the afterlives quote unquote, of the East India Company and thinking about how it sort of spawned out in its influence. But, and the, the more I got into it, that story was problematic because I kept seeing companies and corporations everywhere, right like that. The more I dug, the more surprised I was about just how pervasive this model was. But many of them did not look like the East India Company and they did not fit the model of the company state. I've been quite flattered. People have taken up the model of the company state to look at other major territorial companies, and they're very much big part of my book, Empire Incorporated. But you know, one, another early iteration of this project was actually just going to be a book about urban corporations and how they spread throughout empires, cities and municipalities. There were so many different kinds of joint stock and corporate projects, you know, some for territorial rule, but others for which governance or political promotion took a range of forms. Some that governed directly, others that parceled out land to others. Some that had nothing to do with territory in a direct sense at all. There's some, like railway companies or mining companies or logging companies, which exerted a kind of jurisdiction or what I would call a kind of micro sovereignty, kind of in the vein of the way that Lauren Benton's pioneering work has talked about historical geography and sovereignty, that the kinds of power they exerted did not look like the massive territorial empire that we know that India came to be. It also didn't look like what the literature intended to call those things. Which was informal empire. And a lot of what I've written about in this book is trying to explode the. The dichotomy of the distinction that you can kind of that there's the formal empire if the place is colored red on the map, and then there's the. The informal empire influence or that there's colonies that are about settlement and colonies that are about rule. And these corporate and joint stock models kind of complicate that idea. Also, a very key part of this book were the many, many, many companies that failed that were just ideas that were scams that didn't work. One that I'm quite taken with in the book I ended up calling get poor quick scheme. You know, that it was not the juggernaut form that we expect it to be. My argument is that all of those failures amount up to a phenomenon and, you know, a lot of other dynamics in the book that look very different as you sort of get into it. Companies that were connected to one another or fragmented subsidiaries, things that weren't companies. These models that are supposed to be antithetical to company formation, like what we call proprietorships in the 7th century, individual grants to someone like, say, William Penn. But if you look and dig underneath it, joint stock models of sort of territorial or property or rule of property underlie even those models. And even the East India Company, as I got back into these other periods, didn't look so much like one company as it did a conglomeration of different kinds of forms and influences. One of the arguments I make in the book is that we see that in the 19th century. We tend to think of the transformation from a quote unquote, company Raj to a Crown Raj in 1858. But what I call in the book, a company's raj, emerged in between those. As the East India Company became more of a government than a merchant. You start to see all of these kinds of companies I was just talking about that start to do the business of government even under East India Company rule, and continue on through into this period when the East India Company is removed from government. And finally, another way this book sort of moves on from the company state book is that really spends a lot more time trying to think about how, thinking about a narrative, the British Empire through companies or corporations challenges, or thinking about a British Empire, an English Empire, through companies, corporations, challenges what we think of as English or British. A lot of these companies have foreign investment. They all certainly have foreign employees. And they're all like the East India Company, to some extent, rooted in indigenous forms of Sovereignty and ability to make claims over that. So, I mean, I guess if the project started with the company state, I hope it will not be read as only an extension of it, but really also both a continuation but also sort of a challenge or complication of that model or what happens when you move past India, which is so absolutely critically important. But since the British Empire in India itself has tended to overshadow or drown out a lot of these other stories and be the measure against which they are sort of set, which I think may not be necessarily the right way to look at these things.
- [11:18]
Thomas Kingston
I found the book fascinating, and part of that comes from my own personal interests. I remember reading with my folks on Burma. I remember reading work from Furnival about. He speaks about Leviathan. And when you're reading about the early days of sort of the British Empire, which was the East India Company really in Burma, it doesn't seem like a company. It seems it's a government. So this was really, really fascinating to me. And I mean, what the book managers do so well is it covers such a huge span of time. I mean, and in a way, even as someone who's a graduate student working on history, what the book did was fill in a lot of the gaps for me. I mean, like, it sort of joined a lot of these dots that I see as disparate. I mean, for example, the book opens talking about the loss of Calais, and we don't really think about Britain's European ambitions being linked to, like, we don't think about that even being in the same period, sort of as in, like, New world exploration. And I think one of the things the book also emphasizes is that it wasn't always, like, going to be New World exploration. You see the Muscovy Company, you see these. You see, you talk about the plantations in Ireland. There's. This is a very, like. It's a very prolific sort of approach that evolves. I think the other thing that the book emphasizes is that it does evolve sort of organically. I mean, a lot of sort of economic histories we sort of see have this very sort of sharp line that all of a sudden finance comes and everything's changed, for good or for bad, should we say. And that's this sort of revolutionary moment, because without that. But really what the book does is, I mean, as you say, the book is an experiment in collective legal and intellectual and institutional biography that places an originally supporting character at the center of the story. And I think it really does place it at the center of the story. And, yeah, as I Say it's an ambitious task and yet you accomplish it convincingly. So given this ambitious task and given that, as you say, lots of people hadn't looked at it this way, what were the main challenges in this and what were the barriers to. Like, what were the, what were the, what were the barriers that had prevented other people?
- [13:36]
Philip J. Stern
Yeah, that's a. It's a really great question at first, I have to say. Like, that was. I really appreciate the reading. You just gave the most flattering thing, you know, anybody can do after someone's written a book is re. Articulate it and show that you kind of get what I was trying to do. And I think you've summarized it. It's always better, better than I could. It's. This is trying to look at how this idea developed over time, you know, and the best way, as I do say in the book, the way I think about it is a kind of an intellectual biography or a legal biography of a concept over time intergenerationally. So the way I tend to think of it is like a family tree or, you know, a kinship chart where you could see these things develop over 300 years. But it wasn't necessarily a one to one or relationship or through analogy. I think we tend to sometimes look back something. As someone who started working on the East India Company, you see a lot of the phenomena of corporate power today compared to the East India Company. What I wanted to look at is how these things evolved over time. So it looked. It's a lot like genetics. You can see family resemblances, but maybe not identical, or you see recombinations of ideas and institutions or financial schemes or things that are influenced by external factors like changes in the way the British government worked or other kinds of institutions worked. So that is absolutely what I've been going for as well as this idea of, you know, thinking of it as a kind of minor character study. You know, you might call it the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of British Imperial history or something like that. Taking the companies that had always been there. It's not like we didn't know they were there, but they tend to be part of our stories of the British Empire as a, you know, as a supporting character. So what happens if we put them in the center? I want to make the point, and I hope the book is read this way. I make this point in the introduction, but I, you know, can't make it enough that the point of doing that is not to turn things around and say it's just companies or it's just the joint stock corporation that runs Empire. It's to say that Empire requires all kinds of stories at the same time. And looking at it from this perspective, this character, you get a different way of thinking about how Empire works or what's actually behind it. That might shake us up to sort of think a little bit about some of our assumptions about things. But you're right, it was a challenge. It was probably one of the hardest things I've ever done was this book. Because at some point in this process, I decided it was going to be a story that looks across this entire phenomenon, not a story about case studies or particular words, which would be, I think, perfectly good and maybe even a more sane way to go about doing this. But because of what I was saying before, how I just found the phenomena, Repeat it was a bit like when you learn a new word and you see it all over the place. It began to just seem like you really had to trace that phenomenon. So what were the challenges? It's a great question. The scale was absolutely the hardest part. Figuring out how to tell little stories and weave them together into one big story was extremely difficult in a way that people could follow. The book has a lot of detail, and I really hope that people can read for that detail, but also see past it to the big picture. As with a lot of work not getting, there's so many interesting and, frankly, disturbing stories that you come across in the process of doing this work and trying to figure out how much of any one part you need to spend time with to get the big picture. How can readers who may be not familiar with the history of the British Empire, or even historians of the British Empire who may be modernists or early modernists who may not be familiar with the other side of the story. How much do you have to introduce them to? How much muting of the kind of conventional narrative, which I don't disagree with necessarily, but wanted to look at differently, does one do? And so I think that winding my way to the other answer, your story, which is that one of the challenges with this, and I think maybe one of the reasons why no one's tried it before, other than, again, people being more reasonable than I am, is that is I think, the historiographical borders and boundaries, the silos we tend to be in, especially between histories of Early Modern Empire and modern Empire. And so I had done work on the East India Company, but I had also done work on the History of Mercantilism, a book that I co edited. My colleague and friend, Carl Wetterland that was about sort of rethinking the boundaries between what we think of as kind of early modern political economy and modern political economy. And I think I've kind of been thinking about this theme for years and years about how as someone who was trained as someone working in the 17th and 18th centuries, how much that period doesn't just get wiped away at the Napoleonic wars, the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, but you really see its traces all the way through into the 19th and 20th centuries. And so a lot of this book is sort of asking the question of like just how modern is modern empire and where are the, where do those lines break? I think maybe another answer to your question is that we're really, you know, a lot of the way we think about companies is really driven by a 20th century understanding of what these things are. I would argue that the work I'm trying to do, and I'm not alone, there's an immense amount of work out there of people working on particular companies or particular regions or places that I respect and make a great deal of use of in the book, hopefully to their author's satisfaction, that rethink this. But nonetheless our modern assumptions are very powerful about how companies are private bodies driven by self evident interests about making money and states are public bodies driven by self evident interests about forms of governance. And I think once you break that assumption, all kinds of possibilities open up for just seeing things differently. And so you ask why maybe we haven't sort of seen this before. I think that it's to some extent because it with one of the modern state and modern companies, the narrative of the proper boundaries from public and private are just so powerful and hard to read. It's also one of the reasons I wanted to write this book. It's one of the things that motivates me. Finally I have to say if I'm thinking about this on a personal level, one of the answers might actually be Covid. Covid. It was devastating for any number of reasons. A very challenging for me personally and professionally. But one of the things that happened is I had a deadline looming and it was really, you know, writing this book was to some extent a form of personal and professional connection. When we were all isolated from one another was the fact that, you know, more archival deep dives were not possible. And so you were left with not only, you know, a lot of digitized by Google sources which I might not have looked at before, I'd opened my eyes up to a whole bunch of things at three in the morning when I was, you know, trying to get these things done before all of the zoom calls started for the day. But also, you know, I'd always. I say this in the book somewhere. You know, I'd always imagined writing over 300, 400 years was going to have to be a work of synthesis. And to some extent, what I was trying to do with this book was get my arms around what was becoming a massive cottage industry of work on this subject and maybe see if we could put a big story together from all of the really excellent research that was being done locally. But. But being cut off from the archive and being cut off from being able to travel, you know, really compelled me to. To. To really think about that on a different level. And so I think part of what I'd like people to know, what I. What. What I, you know, hope people will appreciate about the book, is that there's really a lot you can do with the excellent work other people do by stringing it together. And also, I mean, there's a lot of archival work in the book that I'd done before and a lot of reliance on digital sources, which I also think during the 2020, 2021, when people were scrambling to put so many things online, it really had opened up a lot of other things that probably also created an immense amount of anxiety because I thought I was done and I wasn't even close to done with the book. So I think that's maybe part of the story. I haven't fully processed it enough just yet to really give a better answer than that, but I think it's a way which we're all grappling with the overload that comes with digitization and with what's available now that maybe wasn't even five years ago.
- [23:10]
Thomas Kingston
Yeah, I mean, I think. I think that's a great answer. And I mean, that's one of the things that impressed me about the book, as I said in the previous question, is that I want to emphasize it, is that it's sort of. It's broad as well as deep. It's covering across the world, but it's covering through time. And as part of that as well, obviously, it's touching on so many different sectors. And as I'm sure it almost seems like a.
- [23:39]
Philip J. Stern
You.
- [23:40]
Thomas Kingston
You always hear people complaining about it, but it seems to be something that you've successfully conquered but still remains an issue is this is these internal discipline boundaries that, oh, this is business history, this is imperial history, or this is North American history. And I think that the works like this really show that not only are these boundaries artificial, but in some ways they're also quite harmful and restrictive because they mean you're only getting this one perspective on such a integral topic to world history that also runs through as a thread as well, because you speak about the division between public and private sector, and yet this is a topic we talk about today. Right? You know what I mean? We talk about government subsidies. The left and the right have issues with that.
- [24:31]
Philip J. Stern
You know what I mean?
- [24:32]
Thomas Kingston
You can have a fiscally conservative argument about the government supporting why they're supporting businesses, giving them an unfair example. And then you have the left argument that might say, why is this crony capitalism going on? And the book shows us that really, that's not a really new thing. And that governments have always had this uneasy, shall we say, relationship with companies that are a best friend in some ways, but they're the worst enemy, in other words. And I mean the originally supporting character, to use your words, is the joint stock company. And yet, as the book proves, it's indispensable for the spread of REDD across those atlases. And yet, despite these gains, whether territorial or financial, going back to London.
- [25:23]
Philip J. Stern
There.
- [25:24]
Thomas Kingston
Are scathing reports, there's public outrage.
- [25:29]
Philip J. Stern
And.
- [25:29]
Thomas Kingston
All of these things. So I was hoping you'd give our listeners just a brief insight into this very fraught relationship, but a very important relationship nonetheless.
- [25:38]
Philip J. Stern
Yeah, it's a really insightful and excellent question. And one of the challenges with this book is that there's no simple answer, right? I mean, I wish I had a straightforward answer to tell you. Companies are the creatures of the state, or companies are the, you know, antithesis of the state. In fact, one of the premises, one of the main arguments I make in the book, and the one I'm, you know, I think that drives, has driven me sort of theoretically, conceptually, is that actually going back to its medieval origins. So I make this argument in the introduction that the corporation itself, in a sense, has in its DNA the contradiction or the dilemma or the paradox that it is both. Right. It's a model that sort of emerges to kind of for medieval jurists to get their heads around the diversity of forms of governance in medieval Europe, particularly within the Church. Local governance in the church or within something like the Holy Roman Empire, It's a model that emerges to kind of conceptualize local church governance or particularly municipal governance, or odys, like universities. Right. But it doesn't take long. In fact, quite kind of simultaneously the theoretical thing that is behind a corporation, the idea that you can make A kind of abstract, transcendent, body politic person that is either out of an individual or most like, or more likely out of a group of individuals, becomes kind of the fundamental building block. There's a number of scholars have shown, going back to, like Ernst Kantorovitz's the King's Two Bodies. It becomes the foundation for thinking about modern sovereignty. Like, how do you think about a modern state, but as a juristic person that is the sum of its parts, but also the greater than its parts. And the most iconic image of this is of course, the frontispiece to Hobbes Leviathan of all the people inside of the. The sovereign. So there's a theoretical point, but I think it actually has real world implications. One of my arguments in the book is that it becomes even more complicated when you start to apply this corporate model to commercial life and then to send it overseas, where sovereignty is even more multivalent and complicated. So from its kind of origins, you know, the corporation could give you a vision of pluralism or federalism or, you know, a kind of multicellular form of state, as I think, you know, scholars like Frederick Maitland called it. Or it could give you an image of a singular sovereign state for which these corporations are just sort of subordinate forms. And one thing I trace in the book are all the ways in which people mobilize. Both arguments, say in the American Revolution, for example, where you have people arguing that colonies or corporations and therefore should be independent, or you have people arguing college or corporations and therefore they should be subordinate, like a municipality or something like that. So, you know, for lack of a better term, you know, I think the relationship between, say, corporations and government, as you're sort of thinking of it, the. The thing that emerges is the thing we might think of as the state. You know, you might think of them as frenemies historically or something like that, but they also are born from the same cut, from the same cloth. And that's a really important way to think about it. One of the important things that I trace in the book, important to my argument is also that what I call venture colonialism as a sort of term of art is an ideology that evolves and changes over the course of these many centuries. But what is sort of common to the common denominator that I'm really trying to look at are people who are basically arguing that not only that colonial, not only that companies can do colonialism, but that they do it better than the state or than government. Jeremy Bentham, who. One of the more surprising things that I discovered prior to doing this research, had his own manuscript thought experiment for a joint stock colony, joint stock company for colonizing Australia that was connected with the projects that were going on in the early 19th century. The line he uses is a model where government will not intermeddle with the business of government. This becomes the kind of key ideology to this thing, this phenomenon that I was talking about before of the biography. So in a way, it's ideologically centered in an antagonism. But that's contradicted by the fact that the categories you just used, as I think you'll know this, are totally incoherent. Right. The state is not one thing. It's a bunch of people and agencies sometimes working together, sometimes working in tandem, sometimes working across purposes. The colonial foreign office, for example, often competing or intention or say, crown in parliament also, there's. Anyone who studied this will absolutely know there's no lines between companies and government in the sense that members of parliament are investors in companies and companies are leaders, you know, in. In. In. As. As. As agents of the crown in a variety of different ways. My argument is, I think that's often been misunderstood as. As being able to be clearly understand understanding, you know, which is the dog and which is the tail, like what's wagging what. Right. But that actually, in any given case, it's not abundantly clear in which direction power or interest or influence is running. And of course, there's also the point that it's what I call in the book of portfolio colonialism, that the whole point of joint stock colonization, joint stock model, is that people can be participants in lots of different enterprises at once. And there's no way, as a kind of abstraction or general model to determine, you know, well, are they, you know, are they bringing their corporate interest to this, to their work in the state, or are they. Are they using the. Or are they funneling state policy through these companies? In fact, you know, one of the. I appreciated that you noticed the part about Calais and about the relationship with the European ambitions. And what I think of what in the 16th century would have been, the crowd's idea about empire would have been. Would have been going back to the days of Henry V and thinking about continental empire. But one of the things I point out in that chapter is that a lot of government in this early period was, you know, what you might think of as franchise government that did both a public office and private property or private interest working together. So it. Like the corporation, these two are always in a bit of. In. In a bit of a flux I think so. I mean. And finally, you know, as you've asked a. Very sorry for going on with this for long, but you've asked a key question because what the other thing I do not want people to read, as I said before, I would. I would not want people to take from this book is the idea that these corporations are doing this work without the state or without the crown. In fact, one of the things I argue throughout the book is not only that the state's power is growing alongside this story as a kind of. Maybe not in parallel or perpendicular to it, but somewhat askew from this corporate power related to it, but that one of the core arguments of the book is that we might think of the British Empire itself, or what you might think of as the British Empire proper, the one that's governed by the growing state. That a lot of it, not all of it, but a lot of it, was built by co opting, regulating and absorbing these forms of private colonization. You know, Charles I in Virginia in 1625 or Queen Victoria in India in 1858, both used the same phrase of taking it upon ourselves or taking it upon ourself to, To. To take on this governance. Right. So, you know, maybe it's a little too clever by half, but one of the ways I thought about this is that the book is making an argument that the British Empire is an empire incorporated in two senses. One, that it's filled with corporations and that these companies and joint stock companies, some of which are corporations of which aren't. Or what that means as a constant source of debate. But. But that actually the British. That the state's empire is built by incorporating or cobbling together other forms of colonial enterprise that may have started elsewhere. Corporations are one of those. Sometimes, you know, there's many that are. That are also about intra and intercolonial transfers from one European state to another. There's the ways of co opting indigenous sovereignty. There's ways of thinking about this that are related, I think, and that are also worth studying. But that. So the relationship between the companies. I do think the premise of your question, though I'll not test your patience to keep talking about it. I think that the premise of your question that there are things we can learn about at least rethinking how we think we might think that the lines between say company and state would work today, that this story is illustrative, that we need to open our minds to the fact that it can be a fair bit more complicated than just simply imagining that a corporation today is a Quote unquote American company or something like that. That might be another issue that I guess I would highlight here finally, which is to say that hitting a lot of these companies or corporations down that I've been looking at as British is problematic. They are both at the same time, often self consciously, exceptionally belligerent in their Britishness, making claim to that for a variety of reasons, whether it's to persuade investors or to persuade the state or frankly out of ideological conviction. But you have any number of examples of companies, as I sort of mentioned before, for whom these lines can be extremely fuzzy. The late one example in the 1880s, 1890s, the, the sort of lead figure in the World Niger Company essentially threatens, if the company's not given its charter, threatens to go get one from France. There's a movability and a portability to the drugstock model that challenges a nation based conception of what empire should look like. And that is part of the tension that's going on here.
- [36:35]
Thomas Kingston
Yeah, I think that's another thing that comes through is, as you say, not only is there just diversity of outcomes where we see these failures, as you say, it's almost like an evolutionary process where this approach didn't quite work. So we're not going to go down that. And obviously this has huge impact. I mean like the failure of the Darien Company leads to the act of Union and then. Yeah, and on the other hand the success and then the failure of the East India Company leads to that annexation as well. So and, and, and, and that's also something that comes across in as you say, the rules that are played. I mean we see James II in the Royal Africa Company taking a very active like setting it up rather than sort of. So yeah, I mean, I think, I think it's very fair that you gave a longer answer because it is a very complicated question that as you said, doesn't. I guess going back to maybe another theme is that these neat delineations, not only do they not work in disciplinary studies, but they don't work in our understanding. We can't just sort of draw these lines and expect things to be very separate. I think one of the things that also struck me is that there's the diet, like you, you have mentioned it. And there's a, there's a diversity in motivations too and there's diversity in personalities. I guess the most familiar figures are going to be people like Raffles and Clive. And some people might know that Raffles didn't do so well in his own lifetime and that's kind of a posthumous rehabilitation. But yeah, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about just what sort of people were involved in these ventures.
- [38:16]
Philip J. Stern
Yeah, that's. That's, you know, that's an excellent. Another excellent question. It. All kinds. I know that's not a terribly satisfying answer, but I mean, one of the other things about doing something on this scale is, again, it's very hard. It's very hard to say that there's, you know, one. One motivation or one incentive, you know, that it's all about making profit. Right. You've got people who are interested. And that's not. I want to be very clear, that's not to suggest that it's not about profit or not about capital or that in some way I'm trying to make a case for thinking about these as redeemable enterprises. What I'm trying to say is that to understand why people do what they do, we got to understand the full range of other motivations. People interested in companies for proselytization can be just as integral to the dispossession of indigenous territories, those interested in profit. And so it's worth thinking about. But a lot of these enterprises were driven, you know, by people whose motivations were, you know, theological as much as they were commercial. For people. There were some. There were people, were, were. One example I give in the book, kind of iconic example, is the colony of Georgia, which is self consciously begun by a bunch of people establishing a corporation, but very self consciously not a joint stock corporation, but rather a corporation run by trustees as a form of charity or a form of philanthropy. Trying to, in a sense, respond to the moments of the scandals of the South Sea bubble and other moments in the early 18th century. To say we can do colonization differently also was anti slavery and anti monoculture and all of these experiments. It also doesn't end up working and ends up ultimately being absorbed. Another one of these enterprises absorbed into the state and then becoming kind of the opposite of what it had set out to be. So these are the kinds of contingencies you were talking about. You know, figures like these, like, you know, sort of iconic figures that you mentioned, like Raffles or Clive, they're critical. But the other thing that I'm trying to say in this book is that while individuals are super important in driving these stories, they're also conditioned by the structures through which they work, that institutions matter. Institutions become repositories of property and of. Of ideology, of legitimacy. I am saying legitimacy not in an absolute sense, but within the legal Systems and structures of the British Empire. They also. What's an important theme in my book is they become repositories of history. That a lot of the arguments, as I was saying before about what I call venture colonialism was not that it was new or that it was pathbreaking or swashbuckling. It was that it was time and time again, starting from 16th century Ireland to 19th century Africa. One of the arguments for company colonialism was not that it was a novel innovation, but that this is how it had always been done, right? You got 16th century joint stock plantations and companies and early 17th century plantations in Ireland that are calling back to Strongbow and the Marcher lords of the 12th century, suggesting that the. This is how it's always been private enterprise. And you can debate what that means. Some of this is about twisting some of these categories. Or Edward Gibbon, Wakefield in the early 19th century, who thinks of himself as a latter day William Penn in South Australia. So these institutions have a way of connecting those categories. And Wakefield is a good example of another way in which I might answer your question, which is that I think a lot of what I was thinking about in this book, not I didn't set out to do this, but as the evidence sort of challenged me a bit, was to challenge a little bit of, of our understanding of, of. Of. Of a lot of this later colonialism is being driven by gentlemanly capitalism, what King and Hopkins called gentlemanly capitalism. Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of that and I think it's a brilliant and absolutely critical intervention in a number of ways and has changed the way we think about empire over the last several decades. But it also turned out that as you were looking at a lot of these companies, many of the people who put them forward were not because, not through their connections or common cause with government, but because they were ostracized from government or polite society because they were on the make or saw their projects as a waste of capital, catapult their way into it. Conversely, you just get the palpable sense from a number of figures, especially in state bureaucracy, who see with a kind of skepticism and distaste for some of these people like Wakefield. I'm not sure if you're familiar with the story, but those who know the history of South Australia will know the story immediately. Was that Wakefield first famously conceived of his project for quote unquote for South Australia while serving time in prison for having tried to essentially kidnap an underage girl, an heiress, and try to lay claim to her Fortune. And it wasn't the first time he had tried to do that. Right. You know, and so these were. But at the same time, Wakefield had these pretensions and becomes, you know, Marx calls him the greatest political economist of his age. He has these pretensions to rehabilitate himself and connect to these. To these. These intellectual circles that he was sort of interested. So the company becomes a vehicle, in a sense, for. I don't know what the right word is, if it's rehabilitation or it's about the financial. But also a social and political form of legitimacy that at the same time, people like James Stephen Jr. Mentioned in the Colonial Office meant that these company promoters, someone like him, these company promoters, were, you know, a lot of them were unredeemable as a result of these. The ways in which they sort of come to this and less dramatically. I mean, Wakefield is a particularly extreme story, to be fair, but less dramatically. I guess the other point I would make kind of more systemically is that a lot of the stories in this book show you how the companies or joint stock enterprises that launched these colonial ventures were born not from great wealth, but from great debt. And the debt and borrowing and the capacity to, in a sense, create empire out of these institutional systems that allow for you to supersede the fact that the capital is not actually there are absolutely critical and key and essentially allow for those are critical technology that are based in these kinds of institutions, regardless of how the particular personalities or individuals you're sort of mentioning, in a sense, are shaping them, if that makes sense.
- [45:21]
Thomas Kingston
Yeah, it does make sense. I mean, I think if you'd tried to sum up the book in a slightly longer sentence. I mean, not only are you placing an originally supporting character, it's. You're placing originally overlooked characters at the center of this or possibly characters that have been the main characters to the detriment of the other dynamics that are going on. I mean, as you say, like, it's not just Raffles and Clive. There are all these people, whether they're the leaders or whether they're the bureaucrats, the administrators that are all like, out there doing their own thing. I mean, going back to my own personal experience, personal knowledge of these things. I mean, what's remarkable is often that these, these. Some of these projects develop in, as you. As you say, in a sort of British way, but also with, like, regional identities. At one point was called the Scottish Colony because of the absolute dominance of, like, Scottish businesses. And I think as we. So we're now drawing towards the end and it's been a really, really. I mean, even as someone who read and enjoyed the book and will be returning to it and recommending it, it's still been a very informative conversation you've mentioned and it's very clear from the book itself. And like, I've been very much enjoying going through the references and bibliography. There's a lot of research has gone into this book and it's been research across archives, across countries, across eras. So I was wondering, is there anything in particular? I mean, this is one of the things I think archives are great for. Is there anything in particular that surprised you or fascinated you. More than I suppose. Yeah. You could ever. You expected?
- [47:11]
Philip J. Stern
Yeah, it's a great question. So I assume we have another hour for me to answer this question. There's just so many different things. I mean, this book was one surprise after another in the archive and I guess so. I could give you any number of specific examples which we don't really have the time for, of moments and stories that kind of blew my mind, both sort of confirming my sort of instincts and suspicions, but also just going in places that were extremely unexpected about how these companies sort of imagined settlers or the moments where, you know, you think you are reading about something implicit and, you know, and they, and they come right out and tell you we are interested in the idea of colonies here in places that aren't, you know, Mahogany Plantations in 19th century Central America, for example, thought of as colonial projects that were colonial projects not for Britain per se, but necessarily, but maybe, but, but, but the company in combination with other forms of sovereign power. And of course, some of these sort of figures that you mentioned, not just the Raffles and the Clives, but some of these guys like, you know, Dave Bruck and Sarawak and places like that that I know you're interested in, that you know, are supposed to be figures who are not interested in company colonization and somehow are connected to it in a variety of ways. So I think the general answer I'd give you to that question is that if I had to pick one, and I'm absolutely sure that after we end this interview, I will kick myself for thinking about other ones I'd rather answer with was this constant feeling of discovery, connections across place and time. Deep in the archives, you'd see ideas from the 17th century reiterated quite literally in the 19th century. One of the main motivations for the story of this book was to look at the devastating and critically important moment of the resurgence of Companies in late 19th century, particularly in Africa, and to not see that as an anomaly that we didn't understand why they came back, but rather to see their connections across time and the fact that those connections were really there and self conscious. And just how much at every. I was. I think I may have answered this question before in a different way. Just how much the people that are behind these kinds of enterprises were thinking about their own history and making arguments. I mean, twisting the history, manipulating it in many ways, misunderstanding it, but thinking about that connection or how you'd find one particular person you thought of as associated with one company or not in with the company at all, as being involved with another, or how you'd be able to see how, how they were connected. I mean, the whiteboard in my office at various points made people really worry about me. Like one of those police procedurals with people, the connecting lines between one place or another. But mostly, again, just to come back to where we started this conversation, it was just all of the companies and the great complexity of them. I have to admit, when I set out, I really didn't expect to find so many lurking under every rock and around every corner. I didn't expect it to be as hard as it was. To be completely honest with you, that's. There's so much more that went into the book and some of them so much more complex in the space I had to give them. I mean, certainly this conversation, but even in the book itself. But I learned so much about things I thought I knew about. But Ivan, I didn't really quite understand or like that, that even I hadn't come in skeptical about or challenged my narratives about certain places and times that I said, well, those weren't company related joint stock enterprises that I would find. Of course they were connected to this larger phenomenon. So that they know it was. That was really a more general answer. And I'm sure again, if we had more time I could tell you about all of the interesting stories. But you know, I tried to put them in the book. So maybe that's something we can, we can, we can leave it at that.
- [51:15]
Thomas Kingston
I mean, that's a, that's a great selling point for the book. I mean, I think you've, you've probably enticed people and got their literary mouths watering at the prospect. I'd like to thank you for joining me, but just before you go, I'd like to ask you, as I always do, what's next? Or are you burnt out from this? Which would be very understandable given the Leviathan. It is.
- [51:41]
Philip J. Stern
That's a good question. Yeah. No, I mean, of course, I would be lying if I said I wasn't a little exhausted, both from. From the book as well as from, you know, from the last several years of just living life through the way the world has been. But, you know, the book has just generated so many. There's so much in the book, but there's so much I didn't put in the bag. And you probably say that about any book. Right. So one of the things I hope to do is to be able to follow up actually more deeply on some of the stories that some of the particular instances I didn't, you know, want to take your time up with. And to answer your last question, some of the particular cases, really fascinating moments that sort of bring out these issues. But then I've gotten. I'm involved in a number of other projects. I've actually been talking, being involved with a group looking at the ways some of these stories of private colonization, the history of private colonization, might help us to think about the next generation of space colonization. And. Yeah, which is again, another privatized form of expansion. And a number of other projects, some of which may be going back to a different side of my intellectual interest and going back into the world of geography and cartography and space in a different sense and doing some work on sort of 18th century geography and making the British Empire that I like to get into. So I've got a number of things that I'm kind of interested in. But for. For right now, I. I really kind of excited about being. Having some space to follow up on some of the. The most. Maybe some of the deeper, deeper dives that there wasn't space for in the book or that get mentioned briefly or maybe that even, frankly, since publishing it, I've learned more about and had a different perspective on.
- [53:30]
Thomas Kingston
All right, I'm gonna. And I'm gonna say this, and I'm. I'm ready for the listeners to cringe, but I think you've just got to watch this space. So thank you very much for joining me. And as a reminder, we've been talking about Empire Incorporated, which is out now from Harvard University Press, and I wholeheartedly recommended it. Thank you very much for joining me.
- [53:48]
Philip J. Stern
Thank you for having me. This has been a wonderful conversation. I really appreciated it.