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"Stern, Philip J"
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Alcohol and the Ambivalence of the Early English East India Company-State
This article explores the various roles that alcohol played in defining the governance of East India Company fortifications and settlements in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It argues that, much like elsewhere in Europe, Asia, and the colonial world, alcohol was absolutely crucial to political and social life, as well as a source of great revenue and profit for both the Company and individuals who worked for it. At the same time, it was a cause of immense anxiety and concern for Company government, which understood the use (and overuse) of alcohol as a principal sign of potential disorder and disobedience. Far from a contradiction, this ambivalence towards alcohol formed a foundation for a variety of regulatory instruments, from tavern licences to taxation, that were crucial to the establishment of early Company governance and a prime reflection of the Company's very own ambivalent nature as both merchant and sovereign.
Journal Article
Early Eighteenth-Century British India: Antimeridian or antemeridiem?
In the thirty years since the publication of C.A. Bayly’s Imperial Meridian, the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British Empire has moved definitively from the “sidelines” to the center of British imperial historiography. This article asks how Bayly’s method and argument might be transplanted to help us understand different periods of colonial development, inspired both by his call to situate the growth of the British Empire in the context of global political and economic crisis and a recent efflorescence in scholarship on the earlier period of East India Company expansion in Asia. Refocusing analysis on the Company rather than the state, and thinking about the more short-term responses to radical dislocations of commercial and political power in India, this article proposes that the early eighteenth century can be understood both as a foundation for later transformations as well as a critical moment of empire building in itself. More broadly it suggests an approach to the history of empire that is as evolutionary as it is revolutionary, one which is perhaps defined by multiple meridians in time and space.
Journal Article
Bombay: the genealogy of a global imperial city
This article will argue that the history of East India Company Bombay – like that of many foreign British enterprises, and like many other ‘global’ cities and indeed colonies generally – is best understood as the product of contradictions and contingencies. Bombay was never easy to define geographically and its identity as an ‘English’ settlement was precarious. It could not insulate itself militarily from the powerful polities nearby; nor could it always rely on the loyalty of its subjects, whether English or of other ethnicities. It was a city constructed out of crisis and tragedy, trial and error, a history that the story about a European dynastic ‘dowry’ obscures, and which Company representatives worked hard to conceal.
Journal Article
The Corporation and the Global Seventeenth-Century English Empire
Though often taken in isolation as particularly local or regional in character, the history of the colonial urban corporation took on a peculiarly global character in the later seventeenth-century Anglophone world. Putting three such experiments in incorporation—Tangier, Madras, and Philadelphia—in a common frame highlights the necessary tensions and contradictions at the heart of any methodology of studying an early modern “English” empire. Examining the municipal corporation as a particular form of imperial institution reveals a common vision of the structure of colonial authority, one that attempted to vest local inhabitants in limited and circumscribed modes of self-governance, only to find that in each case, such constitutional forms did not easily accommodate the demands of governance and jurisdictional power in the extra-European world. The simultaneous history of these relatively failed experiments offers a window into the nature of the “global” British Empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, proposing a narrative of colonial expansion that does not privilege chronological, geographical, or demographic divisions but, rather, focuses on a shared history of difference and an institutional and juridical pluralism that informed European governance in the colonial world.
Journal Article
Seeing (and Not Seeing) like a Company-State
Stern offers insights on the re-emergence of East India Company after 135 year of absence in the fine foods and gold retail business. It mentioned the studies of the history of the company where its development has seemed to have taken on a new meaning and interest spilling far over the traditional boundaries of the history of British India and Company studies, scholars ranging from Atlantic historians to literary critics, sociologists, and legal theorists continue to look to the Company for new subjects or to shed light on old ones. This has been paralleled by a seemingly growing sense beyond the walls of the academy that the Company represents something germane to the contemporary world. It endures the triumphs of global capitalism and for the evils of neocolonialism at the very same time. The consider as one of the recognized brands that pioneers the English merchant adventurers who control the waters of the world.
Journal Article
British Asia and British Atlantic: Comparisons and Connections
The oceanic histories seem to have encouraged and reinforced a geographic and chronological rupture in the study of the early modern British Empire and have led to misleading narratives of the development of the British Atlantic and British Asia. By comparing overseas companies, the Darien Company's plan for Panama, and the piracy problem, guidelines can be made for incorporating the interconnectedness of British imperial activity into early modern history without subsuming it under any monolithic institution or organizing principle such as the British Empire or the global.
Journal Article
The Ideology of the Imperial Corporation: “Informal” Empire Revisited
Abstract
Ever since its introduction into the vernacular of imperial historiography over a half century ago, the concept of “informal empire” has had a profound influence on how historians have understood the size and nature of British expansion in the modern world. While offering a crucial corrective to definitions of empire that had focused exclusively on “formal” colonial holdings, such a division has also obscured other frameworks through which we might understand the contours of imperial power, while also underscoring traditional bifurcations between early modern and modern forms of empire. This paper suggests instead an approach that privileges schema that take into account the different institutional and constitutional forms that shaped imperial expansion, and specifically argues that the corporation was one such form, in competition with others including the monarchical and national state. Looking specifically at the early modern East India Company and its modern legacies, particularly George Goldie’s Royal Niger Company, it also suggests that institutional approaches that de-emphasize distinctions between behavioral categories, such as commerce and politics, allow the possibility of excavating deep ideological connections across the history of empire, from its seventeenth-century origins through the era of decolonization.
Book Chapter