Princeton University Press is publishing a new book on the
history of chartered company and their historical contribution to the global
order.
ABOUT THE BOOK
How chartered company-states
spearheaded European expansion and helped create the world’s first genuinely
global order
From Spanish conquistadors to
British colonialists, the prevailing story of European empire-building has
focused on the rival ambitions of competing states. But as Outsourcing
Empire shows, from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries,
company-states—not sovereign states—drove European expansion, building the
world’s first genuinely international system. Company-states were hybrid
ventures: pioneering multinational trading firms run for profit, with founding
charters that granted them sovereign powers of war, peace, and rule. Those like
the English and Dutch East India Companies carved out corporate empires in
Asia, while other company-states pushed forward European expansion through North
America, Africa, and the South Pacific. In this comparative exploration, Andrew
Phillips and J. C. Sharman explain the rise and fall of
company-states, why some succeeded while others failed, and their role as
vanguards of capitalism and imperialism.
In dealing with alien civilizations to the East and West, Europeans relied
primarily on company-states to mediate geographic and cultural distances in
trade and diplomacy. Emerging as improvised solutions to bridge the gap between
European rulers’ expansive geopolitical ambitions and their scarce means,
company-states succeeded best where they could balance the twin imperatives of
power and profit. Yet as European states strengthened from the late eighteenth
century onward, and a sense of separate public and private spheres grew, the
company-states lost their usefulness and legitimacy.
Bringing a fresh understanding to the ways cross-cultural relations were
handled across the oceans, Outsourcing Empire examines the
significance of company-states as key progenitors of the globalized world.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Andrew Phillips is associate professor of
international relations and strategy at the University of Queensland. He is the
author of War, Religion and Empire.
J. C. Sharman is the Sir Patrick Sheehy Professor
of International Relations at the University of Cambridge, where he is a fellow
of King’s College. His books include Empires of the Weak (Princeton)
and The Despot’s Guide to Wealth Management. Phillips and Sharman
are the coauthors of International Order in Diversity.
