“A Politie of Civill &amp; Military Power”: Political Thought and the Late Seventeenth-Century Foundations of the East India Company-State

Stern, Philip

doi:10.1086/526759

Cited by 40 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 58 publications

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“…For some, the European merchant powers should be seen merely as the forerunner of modern multinational corporations (Stern, 2009: 1151); for others, they represent a ‘quasi sovereign’ (Clulow, 2009: 72), or ‘hybrid’ form of polity which combines the functions of governance with the profit-seeking motivations of a private corporation (Philips, 2017: 40). While some historians have even argued that these merchant companies should be seen as a distinct form of polity in their own right as a ‘company state’ (Stern, 2008; Weststeijn, 2014). Although the VOC was sometimes backed by the state, it also developed as a separate commercial organisation with civic autonomy, which reflected the competing interests of different business factions.…”

Section: The Voc As a Merchant Empirementioning

confidence: 99%

Revisiting the expansion thesis: international society and the role of the Dutch East India company as a merchant empire

Blachford

2020

European Journal of International Relations

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This paper breaks new ground by looking at the role played by merchant empires, such as the Dutch East India Company (VOC), in shaping European interactions with the non-Western world. It offers a critique of the English School’s state-centric narrative of the expansion of international society by looking to how the VOC and its expansion in Asia influenced developments within Europe. As a non-state actor, the VOC developed networks of trade and power, which were intertwined with the Dutch struggle against Iberian hegemony. As this paper shows, the development of international law, sovereign equality and European international society needs to be understood as being constituted through these colonial encounters. Looking to the VOC as a merchant empire presents a more nuanced approach to the expansion narrative that recognises that states, empires and early modern companies developed in a co-evolutionary manner. This critical approach calls for the recognition of international society as an ongoing process formed by the contestation of hybrid cultures.

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Section: The Voc As a Merchant Empirementioning

confidence: 99%

Revisiting the expansion thesis: international society and the role of the Dutch East India company as a merchant empire

Blachford

2020

European Journal of International Relations

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“…The political establishment in Britain, however, increasingly took the view that there was an appropriate division of labor between states and companies, and that the use of organized violence was properly the sole province of the former. 131 As such, the EIC's hybrid status came under attack inside and outside Parliament; for the first time, the Company's doings in Asia came under widespread popular and media scrutiny. Edmund Burke and Adam Smith were only two of the best known critics of the Company, assailing the combination of powers best kept separate.…”

Section: The Historical Evolution Of Gunboat Diplomacymentioning

confidence: 99%

Power and Profit at Sea: The Rise of the West in the Making of the International System

Sharman

2019

International Security

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The making of the international system from c. 1500 reflected distinctively maritime dynamics, especially “gunboat diplomacy,” or the use of naval force for commercial gain. Comparisons between civilizations and across time show, first, that gunboat diplomacy was peculiarly European and, second, that it evolved through stages. For the majority of the modern era, violence was central to the commercial strategies of European state, private, and hybrid actors alike in the wider world. In contrast, large and small non-Western polities almost never sought to advance mercantile aims through naval coercion. European exceptionalism reflected a structural trade deficit, regional systemic dynamics favoring armed trade, and mercantilist beliefs. Changes in international norms later restricted the practice of gunboat diplomacy to states, as private navies became illegitimate. More generally, a maritime perspective suggests the need for a reappraisal of fundamental conceptual divisions and shows how the capital- and technology-intensive nature of naval war allowed relatively small European powers to be global players. It also explains how European expansion and the creation of the first global international system was built on dominance at sea centuries before Europeans’ general military superiority on land.

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“…Indeed, the experience of Lichfield contradicts the established picture of the Royalist war effort, in which regularized and well‐managed taxation gradually descended into plunder by an increasingly ‘feral’ soldier‐gentry. Perhaps the most interesting contribution to ‘high’ political history is Stern's discussion of the East India ‘Company‐State’. Prevailing historiography has seen the late seventeenth‐century company not as the body politic it was to become after 1757 but as a mere ‘colonial frontier’ of the national state.…”

Section: (Iii) 1500–1700 Jonathan Healey University Of Cambridgementioning

confidence: 99%

Review of periodical literature published in 2008

Pratt¹,

Schofield²,

Healey

et al. 2009

The Economic History Review

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“A Politie of Civill & Military Power”: Political Thought and the Late Seventeenth-Century Foundations of the East India Company-State

Cited by 40 publications

References 58 publications

Revisiting the expansion thesis: international society and the role of the Dutch East India company as a merchant empire

Revisiting the expansion thesis: international society and the role of the Dutch East India company as a merchant empire

Power and Profit at Sea: The Rise of the West in the Making of the International System

Review of periodical literature published in 2008

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