Empire, Incorporated

The Corporations That Built British Colonialism

By: Philip J. Stern

Narrated by: Rick Adamson

Across four centuries, 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 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. As Empire, Incorporated makes clear, venture colonialism did not cease with the end of empire.

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.

©2023 The President and Fellows of Harvard College (P)2023 Tantor

Great read on public / private empire building.

I enjoyed reading the many variations of public and private empire building structures. The different types of “joint stock” arrangements and are well described in this book. We can talk endlessly about the morality and propriety of the British colonial effort, but this book provided insight on how it was done.

Dry, boring, uninteresting

Just a terrible book. Just endless repetition of the minutiae of British company code. There is a great story to be told about the companies of the British Empire. Jardine Matheson, Imperial Chemical, HSBC, Unilever and hundreds more. Those stories are not told.