• Contact

  • Newsletter

  • About us

  • Delivery options

  • Prospero Book Market Podcast

  • The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India

    The Company-State by Stern, Philip J.;

    Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India

      • GET 10% OFF

      • The discount is only available for 'Alert of Favourite Topics' newsletter recipients.
      • Publisher's listprice GBP 102.50
      • The price is estimated because at the time of ordering we do not know what conversion rates will apply to HUF / product currency when the book arrives. In case HUF is weaker, the price increases slightly, in case HUF is stronger, the price goes lower slightly.

        48 969 Ft (46 637 Ft + 5% VAT)
      • Discount 10% (cc. 4 897 Ft off)
      • Discounted price 44 072 Ft (41 973 Ft + 5% VAT)

    48 969 Ft

    db

    Availability

    printed on demand

    Why don't you give exact delivery time?

    Delivery time is estimated on our previous experiences. We give estimations only, because we order from outside Hungary, and the delivery time mainly depends on how quickly the publisher supplies the book. Faster or slower deliveries both happen, but we do our best to supply as quickly as possible.

    Product details:

    • Publisher OUP USA
    • Date of Publication 26 May 2011

    • ISBN 9780195393736
    • Binding Hardback
    • No. of pages320 pages
    • Size 168x236x30 mm
    • Weight 590 g
    • Language English
    • Illustrations 13 halftones
    • 0

    Categories

    Short description:

    The Company-State offers a political and intellectual history of the English East India Company in the century before its acquisition of territorial power. It argues the Company was no mere merchant, but a form of early modern, colonial state and sovereign that laid the foundations for the British Empire in India.

    More

    Long description:

    The Company-State rethinks the nature of the early English East India Company as a form of polity and corporate sovereign well before its supposed transformation into a state and empire in the mid-eighteenth century. Taking seriously the politics and political thought of the early Company on their own terms, it explores the Company's political and legal constitution as an overseas corporation and the political institutions and behaviors that followed from it, from tax collection and public health to warmaking and colonial plantation. Tracing the ideological foundations of those institutions and behaviors, this book reveals how Company leadership wrestled not simply with the bottom line but with typically early modern problems of governance, such as: the mutual obligations of subjects and rulers; the relationship between law, economy, and sound civil and colonial society; and the nature of jurisdiction and sovereignty over people, commerce, religion, territory, and the sea. The Company-State thus reframes some of the most fundamental narratives in the history of the British Empire, questioning traditional distinctions between public and private bodies, "commercial" and "imperial" eras in British India, a colonial Atlantic and a "trading world" of Asia, European and Asian political cultures, and the English and their European rivals in the East Indies. At its core, The Company-State offers a view of early modern Europe and Asia, and especially the colonial world that connected them, as resting in composite, diffuse, hybrid, and overlapping notions of sovereignty that only later gave way to more modern singular, centralized, and territorially- and nationally-bounded definitions of political community. Given growing questions about the fate of the nation-state and of national borders in an age of "globalization," this study offers a perspective on the vitality of non-state and corporate political power perhaps as relevant today as it was in the seventeenth century.

    With great skill, Stern has extracted from the archives a cogent and highly engaging narrative of events that even participants found highly tremendously confusing. He deftly conveys the world of the East India company, marshaling striking visual materials and wonderfully evocative quotations from a wide array of Company documents.

    More

    Table of Contents:

    "Planning & Peopling Your Colony": Building a Company-State
    "A Sort of Republic for the Management of Trade": The Jurisdiction of a Company-State
    "A Politie of Civill and Military Power": Diplomacy, War, and Expansion
    "Politicall Science and Martiall Prudence": Political Thought and Political Economy
    "The Most Sure and Profitable Sort of Merchandice": Protestantism and Piety
    "Great Warrs Leave Behind them Long Tales": Crisis and Response in Asia after 1688
    Auspicio Regis et Senatus Angliae": Crisis and Response in Britain after 1688
    "The Day of Small Things": Civic Governance in the New Century
    "A Sword in One Hand & Money in the Other": Old Patterns, New Rivals

    More
    0