Description

Across four centuries 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 wellsuited to overseas expansion not because it was an inevitable juggernaut but because it was an elusive contradiction public and private person and society subordinate and autonomous centralized and diffuse immortal and precarious national and cosmopolitana 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 As Empire Incorporated makes clear venture colonialism did not cease with the end of empire

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