A Spectator Book of the Year

"Brilliant, ambitious, and often surprising. A remarkable contribution to the current global debate about empire." -William Dalrymple, author of The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire

"Remarkable...The richness of detail and evidence that Stern...brings to his subject is [new]-as is the lucidity with which he organises his material over six long chapters that stretch from the mid-16th century almost to the present." -Linda Colley, Financial Times

"[A] commanding history of British corporate imperialism." -Michael Ledger-Lomas, London Review of Books

Across four centuries and multiple continents, 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. 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. And, as Empire, Incorporated makes clear, colonialism's 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.

About the Author
Philip J. Stern is a historian of the British Empire and the author of the award-winning book The Company-State. He is Professor of History at Duke University.

Reviews
A landmark book...[a] bold reframing of the history of the British Empire. -- Caroline Elkins * Foreign Affairs *
British colonialism...Stern says, was conceived by investors, creditors, entrepreneurs, and, lest we forget, parvenus and embezzlers. This cast of men-on-the-make flourished alongside sovereigns and their ministers and produced what Stern calls 'venture colonialism'-a form of overseas expansion that was driven by a belief that 'the public business of empire was and had always been best done by private enterprise.' The history of British colonialism is really the history of the joint-stock corporation. -- Tunku Varadarajan * Wall Street Journal *
Remarkable...The richness of detail and evidence that Stern...brings to his subject is [new]-as is the lucidity with which he organises his material over six long chapters that stretch from the mid-16th century almost to the present. -- Linda Colley * Financial Times *
Empire, Incorporated offers a refreshingly new take on British imperialism...[It] is a remarkably comprehensive account of how-from the reigns of Elizabeth I to Elizabeth II, and from some of the earliest plantation projects in Ireland to the Falklands War-corporations have played a defining role in the British Empire. -- Dinyar Patel * Los Angeles Review of Books *
[A] commanding history of British corporate imperialism...Stern avoids a trite parallelism that reduces chartered companies to the forerunners of modern multinationals. The East India Company didn't just bow out to Apple or Tesla; instead, it has undergone a sort of resurrection...But it's also possible to finish this book convinced that the British Empire has been just one phase in the pragmatic imagination of Anglophone capitalism. -- Michael Ledger-Lomas * London Review of Books *
The genius of Empire, Incorporated lies in weaving a coherent narrative that is at once solid and lucid, explaining how corporations are structured and how they ended up ruling the world, creating empires...Scholarly, engaging, and entertaining. -- Salil Tripathi * Mekong Review *
An exceptionally well-written, comprehensive narrative of 400 years of British colonialism. -- Gijs Dreijer * International Journal of Maritime History *
Stern is a tireless researcher and an accomplished explainer of geopolitical and financial matters. This is a consequential reconsideration of the history of colonialism. * Publishers Weekly *
Brilliant, ambitious, and often surprising. With great clarity and remarkable archival reach, Stern convincingly argues that it was joint-stock 'venture colonialism' that financed and drove the earliest attempts at establishing Tudor and Elizabethan colonies from Ulster to Spitsbergen, Virginia to 'Cathay,' and even a Puritan republic of the Bahamas. A remarkable contribution to the current global debate about empire and a small masterpiece of research and conceptual reimagining. -- William Dalrymple, author of The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire
This is an extraordinary book of great erudition and vast scope. Stern has written the definitive work on how the British Empire was driven by the joint-stock company and the legal device of incorporation. This remarkable account of a dizzying number of corporations that drove imperial expansion will be unrivaled for many years to come. -- Andrew Fitzmaurice, author of King Leopold's Ghostwriter: The Creation of Persons and States in the Nineteenth Century
Stern has written the most important book on the history of the company in the English-speaking world in over a century. Empire, Incorporated is a gift for historians and general readers alike. Lawyers and investment bankers-always looking for the next clever idea to structure a deal or a new commercial entity-will delight in all the examples this book provides, and profit from the cautionary tales that abound. -- Paul Halliday, author of Habeas Corpus: From England to Empire


Awards
Winner of Stansky Book Prize 2024 (United States). Short-listed for PROSE Awards 2023 (United States).



Book Information
ISBN 9780674299290
Author Philip J. Stern
Format Paperback
Page Count 408
Imprint Harvard University Press
Publisher Harvard University Press
Weight(grams) 416g
Dimensions(mm) 210mm * 140mm * 25mm