Philip J. Stern, "Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations That Built British Colonialism" (Harvard UP, 2023)

Jan 9, 2026

Philip J. Stern, an Associate Professor of History at Duke University, dives into the pivotal role of corporations in British colonialism. He reveals how entities like the East India Company were not just accomplices to empire but key drivers of global expansion. Stern discusses the blurred lines between formal and informal imperialism, along with the frequent failures of corporate ventures. He highlights the paradox of corporate power, intertwined with state authority, and how this legacy continues to shape notions of British identity today.

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INSIGHT

Companies As Governments From The Start

Corporations often acted as governments, not merely commercial agents, from early on.
The East India Company functioned as a form of territorial governance rather than an anomaly in empire building.

INSIGHT

Corporate Colonialism Came In Many Forms

Corporate colonialism took many institutional shapes beyond the East India Company model.
Joint-stock ventures produced varied forms of governance, from direct rule to micro-sovereignty over resources and people.

INSIGHT

The Corporation's Built-In Paradox

The corporation carries an intrinsic paradox: public and private, person and society.
That legal ambiguity made corporations powerful tools for projecting sovereignty and organizing empire.

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Philip Stern places the corporation―more than the Crown―at the heart of British colonialism, arguing that companies built and governed global empire, raising questions about public and private power that were just as troubling four hundred years ago as they are today.

Across four centuries, from Ireland to India, the Americas to Africa and Australia, 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. Colonial companies were also relentlessly controversial, frequently in debt, and prone to failure. 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, Stern argues that corporations took the lead in global expansion and administration. Whether in sixteenth-century Ireland and North America or the Falklands in the early 1980s, corporations were key players. And, as Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations That Built British Colonialism (Harvard UP, 2023) makes clear, venture colonialism did not cease with the end of empire. Its 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.

Thomas Kingston is an early career scholar and a voracious reader (183 books in 2021). You can find his website at www.thomasekingston.com or reach him on twitter @thomasekingston

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