Empire, Incorporated : The Corporations That Built British Colonialism / Philip J. Stern.
Stern, Philip J., author.
2023
HF485 .S74 2023
Available Online

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Title Empire, Incorporated : The Corporations That Built British Colonialism / Philip J. Stern.
Author Stern, Philip J., author.
ISBN 9780674293472
DOI https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674293472
Published Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, [2023]
Copyright ©2023
Language English
Language Note In English.
Description 1 online resource (432 p.)
Other Standard Identifiers 10.4159/9780674293472 doi
Call Number HF485 .S74 2023
Dewey Decimal Classification 382.0941
Summary An award-winning historian places the corporation-more than the Crown-at the heart of British colonialism, arguing that companies built and governed global empire, raising questions about public and private power that were just as troubling four hundred years ago as they are today.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.
Access Note Access limited to authorized users.
System Details Note Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
Digital File Characteristics text file PDF
Source of Description Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 29. Mai 2023)
In EBOOK PACKAGE COMPLETE 2023 English
EBOOK PACKAGE COMPLETE 2023
EBOOK PACKAGE History 2023 English
EBOOK PACKAGE History 2023
Harvard University Press Complete eBook-Package 2023
Available in Other Form print 9780674988125
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Frontmatter
CONTENTS
Introduction: Incorporating Empire
1. Initial Public Offerings: The Age of Discovery
2. Municipal Bonds: The Age of Crisis
3. Corporate Finance: The Age of Projects
4. Hostile Takeovers: The Age of Revolutions
5. Corporate Innovations: The Age of Reform
6. Limiting Liabilities: The Age of Imperialism
Epilogue: Winding Up
Abbreviations
NOTES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INDEX OF COMPANIES, CORPORATIONS, AND SOCIETIES
GENERAL INDEX

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