Philip J. Stern. Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations That Built British Colonialism.

• Author: Uneke, Okori

Philip J. Stern. Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations That Built British Colonialism. Cambridge, MA & London, UK: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2023. 399 pages. Hardcover, $35:00.

Colonial empires oftentimes were perceived as territories gained and occupied by powerful nation states. Empire, Incorporated challenged conventional wisdom on this score: European colonialism was the business of companies. Stern, a Duke University historian, offers an in-depth analysis of the rise and fall of British corporate colonialism across four centuries. This period spanned precisely between 1555 (incorporation of the Russia Company) and 1982 (the Falklands/Malvinas War). The joint-stock company became the impetus behind Britain's motivation for overseas expansion. Stern explains why British colonialism became the business of corporations thus: Corporations originated, championed, financed, and exercised control over overseas expansion and, in the process, made claims over territory and peoples while ensuring that British and colonial society were also invested in their ventures. In terms of focus and coverage, Empire, Incorporated is an expanded sequel to Stern's 2011 publication, The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India. Stern described the current work as the genealogy of venture colonialism. He examines the history of corporate power and discusses the distinction between private enterprise and the state; thereby, offering a new history of the British Empire. He details extensively the inception, influence and demise of the East India Company, the Massachusetts Bay Company, the Hudson's Bay Company, The Newfoundland Company, the Virginia Company, the Royal African Company, the South Sea Company, the Royal Niger Company, and many others. He argues that corporations took the lead in global expansion and administration, stretching from sixteenth-century Ireland to North America to India, Australia, Africa, and the Falklands in the 1980s.

Stern notes that over the years, corporate or venture colonialism went by many different names, including "franchise and project, systematic colonization and double government, chartered colonialism and the 'joint-stock principle'" (pp. 10-11). He describes the joint-stock company as an elusive contradiction: it was both public and private; person and society; subordinate and autonomous. Put differently, it was a legal fiction with very real...