Britain's Overseas Empire before 1780: Overwhelmingly Successful and Bureaucratically Challenged

Company-states and the creation of the global international system

“…Huge distances radically amplified the difficulties European rulers and managers qua principals faced in maintaining control over their agents over the seas. The costs entailed in mobilizing the “patient” capital needed to fund overseas expansion often exceeded early modern rulers’ very limited fiscal capacities (Greene, 2016: 321–322). These challenges of control and cost spurred Europeans to experiment with a diverse range of institutions to project power overseas, of which the most important proved to be company-states (Greene, 2016: 322; Roper and van Ruymbeke, 2007: 7).…”