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"WILLIAM A. PETTIGREW"
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A history of socially responsible business, c.1600-1950
This volume examines the changing reciprocal relationships between corporations and their various social obligations over the very long term - from the 17th to the 20th century. Chapters from emerging and established business historians assess the full range of social obligations that corporations held historically.
Book
Freedom's Debt
In the years following the Glorious Revolution, independent slave traders challenged the charter of the Royal African Company by asserting their natural rights as Britons to trade freely in enslaved Africans. In this comprehensive history of the rise and fall of the RAC, William A. Pettigrew grounds the transatlantic slave trade in politics, not economic forces, analyzing the ideological arguments of the RAC and its opponents in Parliament and in public debate. Ultimately, Pettigrew powerfully reasons that freedom became the rallying cry for those who wished to participate in the slave trade and therefore bolstered the expansion of the largest intercontinental forced migration in history.Unlike previous histories of the RAC, Pettigrew's study pursues the Company's story beyond the trade's complete deregulation in 1712 to its demise in 1752. Opening the trade led to its escalation, which provided a reliable supply of enslaved Africans to the mainland American colonies, thus playing a critical part in entrenching African slavery as the colonies' preferred solution to the American problem of labor supply.
eBook
Free to Enslave: Politics and the Escalation of Britain's Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1688-1714
Ending Britain's transatlantic slave trade required political intervention, and histories of abolitionism traditionally privilege the movement's political aspects over its economic rationales. There remains an underappreciated political aspect to the development of Britain's slave trade.
Journal Article
Corporate Management, Labor Relations, and Community Building at the East India Company’s Blackwall Dockyard, 1600–57
This essay offers a social history of the labor relations established by the English East India Company at its Blackwall Dockyard in East London from 1615–45. It uses all of the relevant evidence from the company’s minute books and printed bylaws and from petitions to the company to assemble a full account of the relationships formed between skilled and unskilled workers, managers, and company officials. Challenging other historians’ depictions of early modern dockyards as sites for class confrontation, this essay offers a more agile account of the hierarchies within the yard to suggest how and why the workforce used its considerable power to challenge management and when and why it was successful in doing so. Overall, the essay suggests that the East India Company developed and prioritized a broader social constituency around the dockyard over particular labor lobbies to preempt accusations that it abdicated its social responsibilities. In this way, the company reconciled the competing interests of profit (as a joint stock company with investors) and social responsibility by, to some extent, assuming the social role of its progenitor organizations—the livery company and the borough corporation.
Journal Article
Historicizing Supply and Demand in Early American Economic History: The Importance of Transatlantic Politics
Two of the major transformations that took place in Virginia during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were the adoption of slave labor to produce a staple commodity (tobacco) and the emergence of a gentry class that built its wealth, power, and social influence on both slavery and export of this crop. The reasons and timing of the transition to slavery and the nature of the planters’ consolidation of power within the British Empire have long been subjects of keen interest and debate. In this Forum these two major transformations are given close scrutiny by John C. Coombs and Douglas Bradburn. Coombs challenges the generally accepted notion that the use of enslaved labor spread only gradually during the first sixty years of the colony’s history before increasing rapidly in the last quarter of the seventeenth century. Bradburn examines the critical role played by the English state in intervening in the tobacco trade, part of a new system that transformed Atlantic commerce, allowed a small group of Virginia elites to consolidate their power, and sowed the seeds of future misunderstanding between Britain and the colonies. Six commentators address the two essays’ interpretive arguments and the larger historiographical issues they raise: Lorena S. Walsh, Paul G. E. Clemens, Peter A. Coclanis, April Lee Hatfield, William A. Pettigrew, and Alexander B. Haskell. Bradburn and Coombs conclude the Forum with their response to the commentary.
Journal Article
Constitutional Change in England and the Diffusion of Regulatory Initiative, 1660-1714
This article places a new account of the English state's changing framework for economic regulation alongside what economic historians have demonstrated about the phasing and arenas of economic growth between 1660 and 1714. It places studies of parliamentary legislation into a broader examination of the state's means of regulation (which included the privy council and parliament) and sets this account of regulatory actions against a new account of the changing ways in which petitions approached the state as a regulatory body and how the state responded to those approaches. It also offers a more textured account of the changing styles of economic regulation in this period and of the important (though neglected) role played by commercial interests groups. It argues that the executive colluded with these interests during the Restoration period to use the state to increase the scale of England's overseas trade. With the rising importance of parliament after 1689 regulatory initiative diffused to either local interests which focused on infrastructure projects or trading interests bent on defeating regulating statutes in ways that would lead to deregulation as other constitutional means of regulation (especially the privy council) retreated from view. The state continued to regulate to protect manufacturing (which also provided customs revenue) and to support the monopoly of the East India Company (which provided money and materiel for the wars against Louis XIV). As such the article offers a broader and more agile means to understand the economic connotations of constitutional change in this critical period.
Journal Article
Blanching the Corporate Blush
This article examines English publications relating to the international trading corporations active during the seventeenth century. It includes those directly authored by the corporations, alongside those supporting or attacking them. It considers the way in which these corporations engaged in the public sphere: How did companies speak? Why did they speak? What personas did they establish? And how did companies, and their opponents, conceive of the public sphere in which they were engaged? Combining quantitative data analysis with qualitative reading of the 177 corporate pamphlets written during the seventeenth century affords insight into the benefits and disadvantages of corporate public speech, and deepens our understanding of the development of the public sphere. Corporate writing enabled companies to construct a separate public personality. Such a personality—coupled with the anonymity inherent in their legal form—allowed corporations and their supporters to utilize the mechanisms of public opinion for private pleading.
Journal Article
PARTING COMPANIES: THE GLORIOUS REVOLUTION, COMPANY POWER, AND IMPERIAL MERCANTILISM
This article revisits the late seventeenth-century histories of two of England's most successful overseas trading monopolies, the East India and Royal African Companies. It offers the first full account of the various enforcement powers and strategies that both companies developed and stresses their unity of purpose in the seventeenth century. It assesses the complex effects that the ‘Glorious Revolution’ had on these powers and strategies, unearthing much new material about the case law for monopoly enforcement in this critical period and revising existing accounts that continue to assert the Revolution's exclusively deregulating effects and that miss crucial subtleties in the case law and related alterations in company behaviour. It asks why the two companies parted company as legal and political entities and offers an explanation that connects the fortunes of both monopoly companies to their public profile and differing constituencies in the English empire and the varying non-European political contexts in which they operated.
Journal Article
Corporate Constitutionalism and the Dialogue between the Global and Local in Seventeenth-Century English History
This forum discusses the utility of ‘corporate constitutionalism’ as a category of historical analysis. Corporate constitutionalism privileges the constitutional activities of international trading corporations to understand the cross-cultural dynamics at work in European expansion. William A Pettigrew sets out the possibilities of corporate constitutionalism in the first essay which defines the concept, makes the case for viewing trading corporations as constitutional entities at home and abroad, signals some possible interpretive benefits for historians of empire, corporate historians, global historians, and constitutional historians, before offering an illustrative case study about the Royal African Company. Leading thinkers in international history (David Armitage), legal history (Paul Halliday), constitutional theory (Vicki Hsueh), and corporate history (Thomas Leng and Philip J Stern) offer their reflections on the possibilities of this new approach to the international activities of trading corporations. Although the Forum focuses on seventeenth century English trading corporations, it proposes to start a discussion about the utility of corporate constitutionalism for other European corporations and for periods both before and after the seventeenth century.
Journal Article