Empire, Incorporated. The Corporations That Built British Colonialism
Empire, Incorporated. The Corporations That Built British Colonialism
Talk by Philip J. Stern, Duke University
Discussant: Joshua Barkan, University of Georgia
6 December 2023, 13:00-15:00
Location: CBS, Porcelænshaven 18B, room 1.154
Sign up: https://cbs.nemtilmeld.dk/844/
The research project Corporate Subjects: An Intellectual History of the Corporation invites to a talk by Philip J. Stern on his book
Empire, Incorporated – The Corporations That Built British Colonialism
Harvard University Press, 2023
Across four centuries, from Ireland to India, the Americas to Africa and Australia, British colonialism was above all the business of corporations. Corporations conceived, promoted, financed, and governed overseas expansion, making claims over territory and peoples while ensuring that British and colonial society were invested, quite literally, in their ventures. Colonial companies were also relentlessly controversial, frequently in debt, and prone to failure. The corporation was well-suited to overseas expansion not because it was an inevitable juggernaut but because, like empire itself, it was an elusive contradiction: public and private; person and society; subordinate and autonomous; centralized and diffuse; immortal and precarious; national and cosmopolitan—a legal fiction with very real power.
Breaking from traditional histories in which corporations take a supporting role by doing the dirty work of sovereign states in exchange for commercial monopolies, Philip Stern argues that corporations took the lead in global expansion and administration. Whether in sixteenth-century Ireland and North America or the Falklands in the early 1980s, corporations were key players. And, as Empire, Incorporated makes clear, venture colonialism did not cease with the end of empire. Its legacies continue to raise questions about corporate power that are just as relevant today as they were 400 years ago.
Challenging conventional wisdom about where power is held on a global scale, Stern complicates the supposedly firm distinction between private enterprise and the state, offering a new history of the British Empire, as well as a new history of the corporation.
Here you can also find links to podcasts discussing the book.
A copy of the introduction will be send to all who sign up for the seminar.
In the talk, the author will present the book and its main arguments. The talk will be followed by a discussion with Joshua Barkan
Philip J. Stern is Associate Professor of History at Duke University
He has previously published The Company State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India.
Joshua Barkan is Associate Professor at the Department of Geography at the University of Georgia and author of Corporate Sovereignty: Law and Government under Capitalism, University of Minnesota Press, 2013.
The talk is hosted by the research project Corporate Subjects: An Intellectual History of the Corporation (funded by the Carlsberg Foundation). More info:www.corporatesubjects.com
Located at the Department of Business Humanities and Law, Copenhagen Business School.
For more information, please contact Mathias Hein Jessen (mhj.bhl@cbs.dk).