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Abstract
Over the past twenty years historians have observed that early modern chartered companies exhibited many of the characteristics of the state such that the term “company-state” has become a common trope of analysis. One of the features of statehood, however, that was absent from representations of these companies was any claim to sovereignty. One reason for this absence was that the companies were often perceived to be created by sovereign states. This was not, however, always the case – they were also frequently understood by their own members to have an existence independent of any state and deriving, rather, from natural sociability and compacts. They were also understood to be political communities which raises the question of whether sovereignty was necessary for a community to function like a state: that is, with constitutions, armies, laws, currencies, offices, and diplomacy. At the same time, one might ask what work sovereignty does and why the language of sovereignty was absent from discussions of these corporations. The concept of sovereignty was employed in the early modern period by authors such as Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes in reference to the necessity for the state to exercise supreme power over rival authorities, notably the church. Early modern corporations, on the other hand, were not engaged in a contest with the political authority of the church, or any other authority, other than sometimes with the states that claimed to have created them, so the concept of sovereignty did no work for them or might raise questions they wished to avoid.