Empire, Incorporated

A landmark book…[a] bold reframing of the history of the British Empire. -- Caroline Elkins * Foreign Affairs * British colonialism…Stern says, was conceived by investors, creditors, entrepreneurs, and, lest we forget, parvenus and embezzlers. This cast of men-on-the-make flourished alongside sovereigns and their ministers and produced what Stern calls ‘venture colonialism’—a form of overseas expansion that was driven by a belief that ‘the public business of empire was and had always been best done by private enterprise.’ The history of British colonialism is really the history of the joint-stock corporation. -- Tunku Varadarajan * Wall Street Journal * Remarkable…The richness of detail and evidence that Stern…brings to his subject is [new]—as is the lucidity with which he organises his material over six long chapters that stretch from the mid-16th century almost to the present. -- Linda Colley * Financial Times * Empire, Incorporated offers a refreshingly new take on British imperialism…[It] is a remarkably comprehensive account of how—from the reigns of Elizabeth I to Elizabeth II, and from some of the earliest plantation projects in Ireland to the Falklands War—corporations have played a defining role in the British Empire. -- Dinyar Patel * Los Angeles Review of Books * [A] commanding history of British corporate imperialism…Stern avoids a trite parallelism that reduces chartered companies to the forerunners of modern multinationals. The East India Company didn’t just bow out to Apple or Tesla; instead, it has undergone a sort of resurrection…But it’s also possible to finish this book convinced that the British Empire has been just one phase in the pragmatic imagination of Anglophone capitalism. -- Michael Ledger-Lomas * London Review of Books * The genius of Empire, Incorporated lies in weaving a coherent narrative that is at once solid and lucid, explaining how corporations are structured and how they ended up ruling the world, creating empires…Scholarly, engaging, and entertaining. -- Salil Tripathi * Mekong Review * An exceptionally well-written, comprehensive narrative of 400 years of British colonialism. -- Gijs Dreijer * International Journal of Maritime History * Stern is a tireless researcher and an accomplished explainer of geopolitical and financial matters. This is a consequential reconsideration of the history of colonialism. * Publishers Weekly * Brilliant, ambitious, and often surprising. With great clarity and remarkable archival reach, Stern convincingly argues that it was joint-stock ‘venture colonialism’ that financed and drove the earliest attempts at establishing Tudor and Elizabethan colonies from Ulster to Spitsbergen, Virginia to ‘Cathay,’ and even a Puritan republic of the Bahamas. A remarkable contribution to the current global debate about empire and a small masterpiece of research and conceptual reimagining. -- William Dalrymple, author of <i>The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire</i> This is an extraordinary book of great erudition and vast scope. Stern has written the definitive work on how the British Empire was driven by the joint-stock company and the legal device of incorporation. This remarkable account of a dizzying number of corporations that drove imperial expansion will be unrivaled for many years to come. -- Andrew Fitzmaurice, author of <i>King Leopold’s Ghostwriter: The Creation of Persons and States in the Nineteenth Century</i> Stern has written the most important book on the history of the company in the English-speaking world in over a century. Empire, Incorporated is a gift for historians and general readers alike. Lawyers and investment bankers—always looking for the next clever idea to structure a deal or a new commercial entity—will delight in all the examples this book provides, and profit from the cautionary tales that abound. -- Paul Halliday, author of <i>Habeas Corpus: From England to Empire</i>