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 when the
British Empire in India was born. Examining the
Company's political and intellectual history in the
century prior to this supposed transformation, The
Company-State rethinks this narrative and the nature of
the early East India Company itself. In this book,
Philip J. Stern reveals the history of a corporation
concerned not simply with the bottom line but also with
the science of colonial governance. Stern demonstrates
how Company leadership wrestled with typical early
modern problems of political authority, such as the
mutual obligations of subjects and rulers; the
relationships among law, economy, and sound civil and
colonial society; the constitution of civic institutions
ranging from tax collection and religious practice to
diplomacy and warmaking; and the nature of jurisdiction
and sovereignty over people, territory, and the sea.
Their ideas emerged from abstract ideological,
historical, and philosophical principles and from the
real-world entanglements of East India Company employees
and governors with a host of allies, rivals, and
polyglot populations in their overseas plantations. As
the Company shaped this colonial polity, it also
confronted shifting definitions of state and sovereignty
across Eurasia that ultimately laid the groundwork for
the Company's incorporation into the British empire and
state through the eighteenth century. Challenging
traditional distinctions between the commercial and
imperial eras in British India, as well as a colonial
Atlantic world and a ''trading world'' of Asia, The
Company-State offers a unique perspective on the
fragmented nature of state, sovereignty, and empire in
the early modern world. |
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