William A. Pettigrew and David Veevers put forward a new interpretation of the role Europe’s overseas corporations played in early modern global history, recasting them from vehicles of national expansion to significant forces of global integration. Across the Mediterranean, Atlantic, Indian Ocean and Pacific, corporations provided a truly global framework for facilitating the circulation, movement and exchange between and amongst European and non-European communities, bringing them directly into dialogue often for the first time.
Usually understood as imperial or colonial commercial enterprises, The Corporation as a Protagonist in Global History reveals the unique global sociology of overseas corporations to provide a new global history in which non-Europeans emerged as key stakeholders in European overseas enterprises in the early modern world.
Contributors include: Michael D. Bennett, Aske Laursen Brock, Liam D. Haydon, Lisa Hellman, Leonard Hodges, Emily Mann, Simon Mills, Chris Nierstrasz, Edgar Pereira, Edmond Smith, Haig Smith, and Anna Winterbottom.
William A. Pettigrew, Ph.D. (2006), Oxford University, is Professor of History at Lancaster University. He has authored a number of edited volumes and published widely in journals on England’s overseas trading corporations, especially the Royal African Company. His first monograph, Freedom’s Debt: The Royal African Company and the Politics of the Atlantic Slave Trade (2013), won the Jamestown Prize.
David Veevers, Ph.D. (2015), University of Kent, is Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London. He has published in numerous edited volumes and journals on the English East India Company. His first monograph, A Hundred Gates: Asia and the Transnational Origins of the British Empire, 1600 – 1800, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.
"At the heart of this book is a series of wonderful essays in which ten specialists discuss the many non legal aspects of English trading companies".[...]The careful reader will find in this volume a trove of references to recent works on English constitutional, economic, social, and political history as well as an elegant introduction that situates the topic within the massive recent literature on global and British imperial history". Yair Mintzker, in Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung, 2020.
Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Introduction William A. Pettigrew and David Veevers
Part One – English Case Studies
1. Political Economy William A. Pettigrew
2. Migration Michael D. Bennett
3. Networks Aske Laursen Brock
4. Literature Liam D. Haydon
5. Religion Haig Smith
6. Governance
Edmond J. Smith
7. Gender David Veevers
8. Building Emily Mann
9. Science Anna Winterbottom
10. Scholarship Simon Mills
Part Two – European Responses
11. Scandinavian Lisa Hellmann
12. French Leonard Hodges
13. Iberian Edgar Pereira
14. Dutch Chris Nierstrasz
Index
Academics and students interested in the history of trading corporations, European overseas enterprises, early modern global history, empire, trade and commerce, and business and economic historians.