Connected Histories in the Early Modern WorldConnected Histories in the Early Modern World contributes to our growing understanding of the connectedness of the world during a period in history when an unprecedented number of people-Africans, Asians, Americans, and Europeans-made transoceanic or other long distance journeys. Inspired by Sanjay Subrahmanyam's innovative approach to early modern historical scholarship, it explores topics that highlight the cultural impact of the movement of people, animals, and objects at a global scale. The series editors welcome proposals for monographs and collections of essays in English from literary critics, art historians, and cultural historians that address the changes and cross-fertilizations of cultural practices of specific societies. General topics may concern, among other possibilities: cultural confluences, objects in motion, appropriations of material cultures, cross-cultural exoticization, transcultural identities, religious practices, translations and mistranslations, cultural impacts of trade, discourses of dislocation, globalism in literary/visual arts, and cultural histories of lesser studied regions (such as the Philippines, Macau, African societies).

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This chapter examines the development of a different form of corporate religious governance in the Atlantic in the years after the Jamestown massacre. It focuses on the denominational identity of its members and how this influenced the direction and formation of a theocratic model of governance that the company would adopt. This chapter illustrates how the leaders of the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay companies, such as William Bradford, John Endicott and John Winthrop, established authoritarian governments by manipulating charter privileges, forming a theocratic model of governance in New England. It examines how the leaders and members of the Plymouth Company and Massachusetts Bay Company, as corporate bodies, established and nurtured a distinct form of governmental identity. By tracing the development of the Massachusetts Bay Company’s congregational theocratic governance through works such as Bradford’s Of Plimoth Plantation, the Winthrop Papers, as well as the Records of the Town of Plymouth and the Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay New England, it shows how the joint stock corporation offered its members the legal and structural framework that would dogmatically police the religious behaviour of its members to secure and establish a godly republic.

Draw together the book’s key themes, the conclusion highlights how, by the end of the seventeenth century, England’s overseas companies had adapted various models of religious governance to stamp their authority over peoples and faiths across the globe, thereby securing their governmental autonomy. However, as a new century approached, domestic religious and political authorities in England took steps to centralise the role of religion, evangelism and the overseas governance. Consequently, this changed the character of English imperial expansion and the relationship between English corporate governance and religion forever.

This Chapter investigates an extraordinary group of company agents who have often been overlooked, but were ubiquitous in overseas corporate life; the chaplain. It provides a detailed assessment of the daily lives and responsibilities of chaplains. Moreover, it traces how they became important figures of control who policed over the spiritual and earthly lives of personnel in religiously and governmentally diverse environments of India, the Levant and Japan. This chapter examines how corporate chaplains, such as Edward Terry, Edward Pococke and Patrick Copeland, became instrumental figures in establishing corporate authority, and thereby commercial success, in this period. Furthermore, it reveals, through their published works, such as Terry’s, A Voyage to East-India, Lord’s, A display of two forraigne sects and the letters and works of Pococke, the essential role chaplains played in the corporate exchange of ideas and religious knowledge overseas. Finally, this chapter highlights how, throughout much of its existence, the LC and, for a small period, the EIC’s government, helped to inform the flexible process of how companies established corporate governance abroad and how they interacted with peoples, faiths and cultures.