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

Jan 4, 2026

Philip J. Stern, a historian and Duke University professor, delves into the pivotal role of corporations in British colonialism. He reveals how companies, from the East India Company to modern ventures, were integral to governing and expanding empires. By examining the evolving corporate landscape across centuries, he challenges traditional views of state versus corporate power. Stern also discusses the paradox of corporations as public and private entities, highlighting their complex legal origins and revealing surprising motivations behind these colonial enterprises.

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INSIGHT

Companies As Early Governments

Corporations often functioned as forms of government rather than mere commercial agents.
The East India Company embodied political rule from its inception, not just later transformation.

INSIGHT

Blurring Formal And Informal Empire

Corporate colonialism blurred the line between formal and informal empire across regions and centuries.
Joint-stock and corporate ventures produced many hybrid sovereignties beyond simple territorial rule.

ADVICE

Question Simple Public/Private Binaries

Rethink modern assumptions that companies are purely private and states purely public.
Use historical corporate complexity to better analyze today's blurred public-private power.

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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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