corporate virtue: the languages of empire in early modern british asia

Corporate virtue: the languages of empire in earlymodern British Asia

Philip Stern

For those many early modern English theorists and statesmen who regardedwealth, accumulation, and even commerce with deep suspicion, the EnglishEast India Company was easily damned as the greatest of reprobates. Evenamongst overseas traders, it was arguably the least concerned with exportingEnglish manufactures and the most reliant upon the expatriation of specie.Its relatively novel, but hardly unique, form as a chartered, exclusive joint-stock company for foreign trade, which Thomas Hobbes denounced as‘double monopolies’ incorporated for the purposes of private greed only,only added fuel to the fire.1 Of course, the only thing more dangerous thana foreign trade monopoly was one conducted beyond Christendom, riskingbody, soul, and constitution, supposedly solely in the name of profit; cer-tainly for Roman writers and their early modern humanist acolytes, encoun-ter with the people, politics, climate, and wealth of Asia threatened theoverextension, enervation, luxury, and effeminacy that undermined civicvirtue and led to the decline of cities, states, and empires.2 In sum, to itsmany critics, the East India Company – and thus early sustained Britishcontact with Asia itself – conjured a perfect tempest of corruption and des-potism of the sort that brought down the later Stuarts, the Iberian empires,and even Rome itself.3

Yet, if the East India Company was born in 1600 in original sin, its leader-ship, advocates, and ideologues over the following century spent a good dealof time, money, and energy attempting to prove its salvation was to be foundin good works. Like much early modern English overseas endeavour, expan-sion into Asia was the work not of the Crown and state but of a corporatecompany, which, perhaps well before the state itself, had to be adept inengaging and even constructing a ‘public sphere’ in order to promote itself

1 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 160–61;David Harris Sacks, ‘The Countervailing of Benefits: Monopoly, Liberty and Benevolence in ElizabethanEngland’, in Dale Hoak (ed.), Tudor Political Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 275.

2 Andrew Fitzmaurice, Humanism and America: An Intellectual History of English Colonisation, 1500–1625 (Cam-bridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 20–25.

3 E.g., A Collection of the Debates and Proceedings in Parliament in 1694 and 1695 Upon the Inquiry in the Late Briberiesand Corrupt Practices (London, 1695), iii–iv.

Renaissance Studies Vol. 26 No. 4 DOI: 10.1111/j.1477-4658.2012.00823.x

© 2012 The AuthorRenaissance Studies © 2012 The Society for Renaissance Studies, Blackwell Publishing Ltd

and its purpose not only to investors but the Crown, Parliament, and others inEngland and beyond its shores.4 The twin discourses of commercial andAsiatic corruption were themselves inherently politicized and thus malleableas both rhetoric and ideology;5 as they coalesced in and about the East IndiaCompany, its defenders and administrators took recourse to the sort ofvocabularies of virtue, service, and good government often associated with‘humanist’ thought and which had been so crucial in justifying and promotingearly English expansion in the Atlantic.6 Partly to combat their detractors athome and partly out of concern for the vibrancy of their establishmentabroad, Company political language and thought fed ecumenically, perhapsat times indiscriminately, upon a range of humanist discourses, from thoseclassically associated with Machiavelli and civic republicanism – martial valour,justice, service, and active participation in the polity – to those that imaginedthe foundations for civic ‘greatness’ in the power, population, and commer-cial vibrancy of a city or polity.7 This productive ambivalence was typical of theCompany, whose ideological foundations and exemplars stretched from theBible to Batavia, from Venice to Virginia, and which was, by nature and deed,both a commercial and a political body.8

In attempting to turn the discourse of corruption and fear of declinearound on its English, European, and Asian rivals, Company politicalthought figured the corporation as a source of virtue and a protection againstthe constant threat of corruption. While as legal and political forms, corpo-rations came in a variety of shapes and sizes, for the East India Company thetwo most crucial were that of company and city, both not coincidentallycentral features of early modern English political life as well as overseasplantation.9 Companies, particularly joint-stock corporations, were criticalnot only to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English commercial life, but

4 Anthony Milton, ‘Marketing a Massacre: Amboyna, The East India Company and the Public Sphere in EarlyModern England’, in Peter Lake and Steve Pincus (eds.), Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008); Miles Ogborn, Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of theEnglish East India Company (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2007), esp. Chap 3; Jeremy Osborn, ‘India and theEast India Company in the Public Sphere of Eighteenth-Century Britain’, in H. V. Bowen, Margarette Lincoln,and Nigel Rigby (eds.), The Worlds of the East India Company (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2002), 201–22.

5 On Asiatic ‘despotism’, see, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Frank Submissions: The Company and the Mughalsbetween Sir Thomas Roe and Sir William Norris,’ in Bowen, Lincoln and Rigby (eds.), Worlds, 69–96; JamesTracy, ‘Asian Despotism? Mughal Government as Seen from the Dutch East India Company Factory in Surat’,Journal of Early Modern History 3, 3 (1999), 256–80; Stanley J. Tambiah, ‘What did Bernier actually say? Profilingthe Mughal Empire’, Contributions to Indian Sociology 32, 2 (1998), 361–86.

6 Fitzmaurice, Humanism and America; David Armitage, ‘Literature and Empire’, in Nicholas Canny, ed., TheOxford History of the British Empire, Vol. I: The Origins of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 104–05.

7 Andrew Fitzmaurice, ‘The Ideology of Early Modern Colonisation,’ History Compass 2 (2004), 1–4; Fitzmau-rice, ‘The Commercial Ideology of Colonization in Jacobean England: Robert Johnson, Giovanni Botero, andthe Pursuit of Greatness,’ William and Mary Quarterly 64, 4 (2007), 791–820.

8 Philip J. Stern, The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire inIndia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), esp. Chaps. 4–5.

9 See Phil Withington, The Politics of Commonwealth: Citizens and Freemen in Early Modern England (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2005); Paul Halliday, Dismembering the Body Politic: Partisan Politics in England’sTowns, 1650–1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Daniel Hulsebosch, Constituting Empire: New

Corporate virtue: the languages of empire in early modern British Asia 511

served a range of public functions, from education and religion to infrastruc-ture and public works.10 Certainly, corporate and proprietary governmentwas the rule, not the exception, in shaping early English Atlantic plantationand promoting and protecting its legal and political integrity.11 It was in thisvocabulary of the virtue of corporate commerce that the Company also con-ceived of the colonial city. Its transposition of corruption and private interestfrom a trenchant critique to both its core raison d’être and raison d’état under-lay the origins of its system of urban, colonial plantation in Asia. In articu-lating itself and its cities as the best and indeed only prophylaxis againstcorruption and decline in Asia, the Company echoed processes of the inter-section of corporation, state formation, and empire building in Britain andthe Atlantic, and as such both justified and shaped the early foundations forthe British Empire in India.12

THE PUBLIC COMPANY

Across the early modern world, for any number of reasons, foreign tradecould never be a purely private transaction. In English common and civil law,overseas travel and commerce, not to mention formal incorporation, requiredformal dispensations, such as a patent or charter, that immediately renderedtheir holders political actors. Abroad, trade inherently required diplomacy,both to establish the conditions necessary for commerce as well as its infra-structure, such as settled factories and warehouses. In fact, many politicaleconomists extolled the merchant as the first line of peaceable contact withforeign nations: the means, as Gerard de Malynes argued, of discovering newcountries, establishing correspondence, and gathering ‘politike Experi-ence’.13 By its very nature, to ‘traffick’ was not only to truck and barter but toengage in intercourse and exchange; likewise, to negotiate, etymologicallyspeaking, was at its core to do business of one form or another. This wasparticularly true in the extra-European world, as it remained an unsettled

York and the Transformation of Constitutionalism in the Atlantic World, 1664–1830 (Chapel Hill, NC: University ofNorth Carolina, 2008); Simon Middleton, From Privileges to Rights: Work and Politics in Colonial New York City(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2006).

10 See, most extensively, William Robert Scott, The Constitution and Finance of English, Scottish and IrishJoint-Stock Companies to 1720, 3 vols. (London: 1912 repr. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1968).

11 Mary Sarah Bilder, ‘English Settlement and Local Governance’, in Michael Grossberg and ChristopherTomlins (eds.), Cambridge History of Law in America, Vol 1: Early America, 1580–1815 (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2008); Vicki Hseuh, Hybrid Constitutions: Challenging Legacies of Law, Privilege, and Culture inColonial America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 68–9; Craig Yirush, Settlers, Liberty, and Empire: TheRoots of Early American Political Theory, 1675–1775 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); AlisonLaCroix, The Ideological Origins of American Federalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2010).

12 On urban political culture and state formation, see Phil Withington, ‘Public Discourse, Corporate Citi-zenship, and State Formation in Early Modern England’, American Historical Review 112, 4 (2007); on therelationship between empire and state formation in early modern England see, amongst others, David Armit-age, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

13 Gerard Malynes, Consuetudo, vel lex mercatoria, or The ancient law-merchant (London, 1622), [vi].

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question in the European law of nations under what conditions peace mightbe made with ‘infidels’ and thus commerce safely and legally conducted.14

Diplomacy and politics at home and abroad were thus at the centre ofcommerce, especially Eurasian commerce. The Company’s efforts, spear-headed by the colonial promoter par excellence Richard Hakluyt, to secure itsvery first charter turned on its ability to overcome the fear that Elizabeth andher Privy Council had of its further exacerbating strained relations with theIberians;15 just over a decade later, East Indian affairs brought DutchCompany envoys, including Hugo Grotius, to London for tense talks, whichmay also have been the occasion for Hakluyt’s now famous translation ofGrotius’ Mare Liberum.16 Meanwhile, the Company reflected Grotius’ argu-ments, which had defended Dutch treaty-making in Asia against the Portu-guese, in their own attempts to establish diplomatic relations in Asia. Theletters of both the Company and English monarchs to their opposite numbersin Asia spoke of the ‘amitie’, ‘friendship’, and ‘entercourse’ that came fromthe traffic not just of goods but correspondence.17 Thomas Roe, the ambassa-dor for James I and the East India Company to the court of the MughalEmperor Jehangir, for one, snidely regarded the ways in which establishingcommerce in India – which included not only the right to trade itself but tobuild and occupy a factory, fly a flag, pass coin, contract credit, and so on –required distinctly public (and frequently unsuccessful) acts of supplication,ritual, and gifting at court.18

From its very beginnings, the East India Company’s ‘private’ trade was aninherently public act and the Company, as a commercial body and a corpo-rate body politic, an inherently political actor.19 This was both reflected in

14 On these concerns and their legal ramifications more broadly, see James Muldoon, Popes, Lawyers, andInfidels: The Church and the Non-Christian World, 1250–1550 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1979);Richard Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and the International order from Grotius to Kant (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1999); Edward Keene, Beyond the Anarchical Society: Grotius, Colonialism and Order inWorld Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

15 [Richard Hakluyt], ‘Notes of information one the behaulfe of the Merchants entending trade to the EasteIndies’, Huntington Library MSS El 2360; See also Heidi Brayman Hackel and Peter C. Mancall, ‘RichardHakluyt the Younger’s Notes for the East India Company in 1601: A Transcription of Huntington LibraryManuscript EL 2360’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 67, 3 (2004); Peter Mancall, Hakluyt’s Promise: An Elizabethan’sObsession for an English America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 237–43.

16 David Armitage, ‘Introduction’, in Hugo Grotius, The Free Sea, or A Disputation Concerning the Right which theHollanders Ought to Have to the Indian Merchandise for Trading, trans. Richard Hakluyt, ed. David Armitage(Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2004), xxii.; Sinnappah Arasaratnam, Pre-Modern Commerce and Society inSouthern Asia: An Inaugural Lecture delivered at the University of Malaya on December 21, 1971 (Kuala Lumpur:University of Malaya, 1972), 9; Peter Borschberg, ‘Hugo Grotius, East India Trade and the King of Johor’,Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 30 (1999), 227–8, 241–8; G. Norman Clark, ‘Grotius’s East India Mission toEngland’, Transactions of the Grotius Society 20 (1934); Tuck, Rights of War and Peace, 93–4;. Mancall, Hakluyt’sPromise, 278–9.

17 Ogborn, Indian Ink, 45.18 Alison Games, Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560–1660 (New York: Oxford

University Press, 2009), 88, 109–10; Sumathi Ramaswamy, ‘Conceit of the Globe in Mughal Visual Practice’,Comparative Studies in Society and History 49 (2007), 756–9.

19 Stern, Company-State, 7–9; Subrahmanyam, ‘Frank Submissions’, 70.


and reinforced by a political economy that sought to defend its trade andindeed very existence from the many, many critics of foreign trade generallyand the East India Company in particular. In response to accusations ofengrossing and private greed, the Company’s advocates tended to contrast its‘public’ nature with the ‘private’ ambitions of its rivals; in so doing, theyinevitably sought to rescue the Company by stressing the ways it promotedvirtue and thus vitiated the inherent threats found in foreign commerce inAsia. This Company political economy, at least until the end of the centuryand even beyond, was framed not only as a defence of the East India tradeitself but much of its constituent features, such as the propriety of exportingof specie and borrowing and lending at interest, and its value in maintaininga positive balance of trade. Very few emphasized the virtues of East Indiagoods per se; indeed, many, to a greater or lesser extent, regarded foreigntrade itself, and luxury trade particularly, to be an evil. Yet, the rising costs ofwarfare, the need for provisions, and the unavoidable fact that other Euro-peans – both landed, Catholic empires and Protestant rivals, like the Dutch –participated in it, rendered overseas commerce an unfortunate and ‘neces-sary evil’.20

In this sense, the value of trade rested not necessarily in itself but in itsservice to the commonwealth. The degree to which that trade could bemanaged as such determined the degree to which its benefits could outweighits dangers. The Company was hardly alone amongst merchants and politicaleconomists in stressing what it provided to the commonwealth directly, mostnotably customs to the king and much-needed raw materials for warfare,shipping, and manufacturing, from indigo to saltpetre.21 To Dudley Digges,the East India Company did ‘good service to the state’, like ‘laborious Bees’who ‘fetch and bring hony to the Hive’.22 This was an argument for traderoutinely articulated in the vocabulary of service; the Company in this sensefigured itself, like other merchants across the Anglo-Atlantic world, as a sort ofcorporate Ciceronian merchant-citizen.23 Yet, the Company’s service to thepublic did not simply arise from victualling the commonwealth but also byemploying it in active and productive enterprises. As Digges continued, theCompany as an institution was itself necessary for the functioning of thecommonwealth, as it drew people, particularly merchants and mariners,into productive work, inducing ‘the private man into such dangers, for the

20 J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 443.

21 E.g., [Robert Ferguson], The East-India-Trade A Most Profitable Trade to the Kingdom And Best Secured andImproved in a Company, and a Joint-Stock (London, 1677), 8–13.

22 Dudley Digges, The Defence of Trade, In a Letter to Sir Thomas Smith Knight, Governour of the East India Companie,&c., From One of that Societie (London, 1615), 1–2. Ogborn, Indian Ink, 117–19; Phil Withington, Society in EarlyModern England: The Vernacular Origins of Some Powerful Ideas (Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2010),229–30.

23 Mark Valeri, Heavenly Merchandize: How Religion Shaped Commerce in Puritan America (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 2010), 20.

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publique good’.24 Thomas Mun, whose early century writings would serve as afoundation for Company thought, argued similarly that the Company trans-muted both money and things into a range of public goods:

the great Revenue of the King, The honour of the Kingdom, The Noble Profes-sion of the Merchant, The School of our Arts, The Supply of our wants, Theemployment of our poor, The improvement of our Lands, The Nurcery of ourMariners, The walls of the Kingdoms, The means of our Treasure, The Sinnewsof our wars, The terror of our Enemies.25

Foreign trade ensured the value of land, the wealth of merchants and artisans,and an industrious populace; it employed idle hands both in itself and in theother trades it inspired, provided the means for martial and maritime valour,and underscored the reputation and credit, in all senses of the word, of thekingdom. Luxury was of course always a danger. However, it was not foreigntrade per se but rather a poorly managed and imbalanced trade that led to theidle and excessive overconsumption of luxury goods, through which the‘Commonwealth shall decline and grow poor by a disorder in the people’.26

Thus, overseas merchants like the Company laboured on behalf of thecommonwealth, yet far more like a citizen than a servant. Edward Misseldeneven likened traders to landed gentry, noting that in the end, a trader soughtwealth for precisely the same reasons a gentleman preserved his estate: fame,fortune, and family.27 To Mun, he was more like an artisan or a manufacturer,the very act of successful foreign traffic adding ‘Art to Nature, our labour to ournatural means’.28 Only with merchants’ particular expertise, knowledge, andeffort could commodities be properly preserved, selected, marketed, andtransported; moreover, he risked capital (in the form of shipping, freight,taxes, and insurance) as well as life and limb to obtain them and employedskill to reduce their price and increase their quantity. In this sense, themerchant added art to raw material, converting goods into commodities andadding to their value, almost as if he was fabricating something himself. Herewas a vision of the overseas merchant not as a mere middleman or conveyor ofcargo, and certainly not a drain on the commonwealth; rather, his workaugmented the ‘Publique wealth, Strength, and Happiness’.29

Such an argument shifted focus from the idleness of merchandise to theindustry of the merchant. Lewes Roberts expressed it pointedly in suggesting

24 Digges, Defence, 32.25 Thomas Mun, England’s Treasure by Forraign Trade, or, The Ballance of Our Forraign Trade is The Rule of Our

Treasure (London, 1664), 67.26 Mun, England’s Treasure, 67; Carl Wennerlind, Casualties of Credit: The English Financial Revolution, 1620–

1720 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2011), 33.27 Andrea Finkelstein, The Harmony and the Balance: An Intellectual History of Seventeenth-Century English Economic

Thought (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2000), 92.28 Mun, England’s Treasure, 181.29 Mun, England’s Treasure, 26, 219.


his Merchants Mappe of Commerce was for the use of a ‘Merchant, Factor, or anyother active person whose occasions may draw him to see or abide in forraigneparts’.30 Though not defending the East India trade per se, Roberts took thegeneral argument even further: it was not ‘sufficient that a Merchant doe knowhow to preserve his wares and Commodities in their first splendor, goodnesse, andvertue, but their skill must extend, if possible, to give it new vigour, life, strength,and beautie’.31 It followed from this argument that even specie, the maincommodity Europeans had to offer in Asia, was not simply bartered for goodsbut, as Valerie Forman has argued, figured as ‘investment’, a process whichconceptually and etymologically was rooted in notions of transformation andpower, as in the vestments of ecclesiastical or royal authority; investment inthis sense transformed money almost alchemically into commodities, which inturn, the industriousness of the merchant managed to domesticate. Speciethus became pepper, which, much like tea in the following century, somehowthrough the Company’s work became an English not an Asian good.32

Moreover, overseas corporations like the East India Company protestedthey did far more for the commonwealth than simply exchange goods. Forone, the Company was the diplomatic arm of the English nation in Asia;reflecting Machiavelli’s dicta on the purposes of an ambassador,33 EdwardReynolds, later Bishop of Norwich, preached a sermon to the Company in1657 that listed first in its litany of lessons the Bible had to offer such ‘greatmen’ the ‘care of Forein and remote intelligence and correspondence’ – evenbefore love of country (number two) and service to God’s people (numberthree).34 Company advocates also echoed a familiar notion that the East Indiatrade played a crucial role in maintaining England’s naval power; beyondproviding necessary supplies, like hemp and saltpetre, the very act and fre-quency of traffic encouraged navigation, the building of ships, and the train-ing of sailors, ‘the Walls and Bulwarks of our Country’.35 These argumentsechoed the almost clichéd humanist-inflected notion that maritime power wasthe only means to preserve English Protestantism, liberty, and virtue againstthe threats of popery, corruption, and despotism represented by standing

30 Lewes Roberts, The Merchants Mappe of Commerce (London, 1638), 1.31 Roberts, Merchants Mappe. 19–20; Finkelstein, Harmony and the Balance, 74.32 Valerie Forman, ‘Transformations of Value and the Production of “Investment” in the Early History of the

English East India Company’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 34, 3 (2005), esp. 612–25; See also,Valerie Forman, Tragicomic Redemptions: Global Economics and the Early Modern English Stage (Philadelphia:University of Pennsylvania, 2008), esp. 5–6. On the connections between alchemy, money supply, and credit inthe seventeenth century, see Carl Wennerlind, ‘Credit-Money as the Philosopher’s Stone: Alchemy and theCoinage Problem in Seventeenth-Century England’, History of Political Economy 35 (2003), 234–61; Wennerlind,Casualties of Credit, Chap 2.

33 G. R. Berridge, ‘Machiavelli’, in G. R. Berridge, Maurice Keens-Soper, and T.G. Otte (eds.), DiplomaticTheory from Machiavelli to Kissinger (Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 22.

34 Edward Reynolds, The Comfort and Crown of Great Actions in a Sermon Preached, Decemb 4 1657, Before theHonorable East-India Company (London, 1659), 2–3.

35 [Ferguson], Most Profitable Trade, 2.

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land armies.36 The success of the Dutch, Hamburg, and Italian city-statesserved as evidence for this, as did, conversely, the failure of Louis XIV to erecta powerful maritime East India Company that could compete with the Dutchand English.37 As the aptly pseudonymous Philopatris (most likely Companydirector and political economist Josiah Child), put it:

a Naval Power never affrights us; Seamen never did nor ever will destroy theLiberty of their own Countrey: They naturally hate Slavery, because they see somuch of the misery of it in other Countreys. All Tyrannies in the World aresupported by Land-Armies: No absolute Princes have great Navies, or greatTrades . . . Now under God’s Providence, what can best secure us from them butour Naval Strength, and what doth especially increase and support that, but ourEast-India Trade.38

The trade not only trained English sailors but also brought the sort of wealthand renown necessary to keep them and attract others. ‘Seamen are Inhabit-ants of the Universe,’ Child wrote, ‘and where ever they are bred, will resort tothe best Pay, and most constant Employment.’39 Maritime trade, particularlyone as extensive as the Company’s, also gave sailors a global experience, whichin a sense had the potential to cultivate them far beyond the inherentlydisorderly soldiers of a garrison. For Charles Davenant, another late-centuryCompany advocate, such an ‘empire of the seas’ was the prime way to rescuevirtue in empire and, as David Armitage has put it, ‘offer greatness withoutendangering liberty’.40

The political economy marshalled to defend the Company – whichregarded luxury consumption as a true danger but one that, like fortune,could not be ignored and had to be confronted with the best weapons avail-able – was ultimately articulated, as Andrea Finkelstein has described Mun, ina ‘moral vocabulary rather than a strictly economic one’, in which a positivebalance of trade (itself already inflected with an Aristotelian-humanist vocabu-lary), good government, and the industriousness of merchants themselveswere the only means to convert what was a threat to social good into a ‘properlydisciplined prosperity’.41 Throughout the seventeenth century, defenders ofbullion export and balance of trade, which most defenders of the East IndiaCompany were, came back in one way or another to these sorts of arguments:the Company imported goods more cheaply than were they bought in other

36 Amongst others, see Lois G. Schwoerer, ‘No Standing Armies’: The Antiarmy Ideology in Seventeenth-CenturyEngland (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1974); Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, 401–22.

37 Glenn Ames, ‘Colbert’s Indian Ocean Strategy of 1664–1674: A Reappraisal’, French Historical Studies 16(1990).

38 Philopatris, A Treatise wherein is Demonstrated, That the East-India Trade is the Most National of ForeignTrades . . . (London, 1681), 27–9.

39 Philopatris, Treatise, 26; Josiah Child, A Discourse Concerning Trade, and That in Particular of the East-Indies(London, 1689), 6–7.

40 Armitage, Ideological Origins, 142.41 Finkelstein, Harmony and the Balance, 181–5.


markets, thus lessening not increasing the costs (both financial and moral) ofluxury consumption; luxury consumption was unfortunate and perhaps betternever having been, but now that England had European competitors it hadbecome a necessary evil, better in England’s hands than the Dutch andassuaged by maintaining a positive balance of trade; it certainly had no impacton most English manufactures and stimulated productive competition inothers, like silk weaving; and, whatever it took away (as all economic activitymust) it more than accommodated with producing employment, improvingnavigation, and stimulating industry. To this, Josiah Child added a full-throated defence encouraging the investment of money by keeping interestrates low; a cheap price for money meant easier borrowing, the increase ofmercantile activity, and thus good for the nation. To object to that was to‘prefer their own private Gain to the Common Good’.42

If the Company’s function – given its emphasis on service, virtue, andphilopatria, on the one hand, and corruption, decline, and luxury on the other– was defended within a vocabulary of activity, vitality, industriousness, consu-lar government, balance, and public good, so too was its form: the incorpo-rated joint-stock corporation. The Company, amongst others, had longargued that the particular conditions of the extra-European world required asingle, exclusive company. According to this model, competition in Asia inevi-tably drove prices up not down, as English merchants would inevitably overbidone another for both goods and the rights, privileges, and diplomacy neces-sary to trade in them securely.43 Yet, the arguments for a joint-stock corpora-tion went even further, turning the very premise of the critiques of ‘monopoly’on their head. To its advocates, the joint-stock company could never, by itsvery nature, be a private or restricted body. Mun suggested that it was in facta remarkably beneficial way to mobilize the idle and stagnant capital of the‘industrious’: only by adventuring that money – extending of credit to mer-chants in the form of investment – are ‘the moneys of Widows, Orphans,Lawyers, Gentlemen and others . . . employed in the course of ForraignTrade, which themselves have no skill to perform’.44 Trade under the EastIndia Company was thus far more ‘national’ than an open and free tradecould ever be, since such a trade offered an outlet for money, which otherwisewould be hoarded and hardly employed in useful ways. One later Companyadvocate, essentially recycling Mun’s language and argument, noted that itwas precisely because the East India Company employed the wealth of ‘Noble-men, Clergy-men, Gentlemen, Widows, Orphans, Shop-keepers and all others’that it was far more of a public good than the work of guilds, regulatedcompanies, or consortia, let alone individual and private merchants – who, by

42 [Josiah Child], A Short Addition to the Observations Concerning Trade and Interest of Money by the Same Hand(London, 1668), 13.

43 See, for example, Samuel Fortrey, England’s Interest and Improvement Consisting in the Increase of the Store, andTrade of this Kingdom (London, 1663), 40–41.

44 Mun, England’s Treasure, 145.

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restricting trade to traders only were indeed the true monopolies.45 Neitherthe nobleman nor orphan could be a qualified or effective trader to the EastIndies, were it not for a structure that allowed others to employ that money ontheir behalf. Critics decried this as unnatural: a trade ought to allow noneother than ‘legitimate’ merchants, who had undergone apprenticeships orwere otherwise certified for the task. To Josiah Child, on the other hand, ‘Itmatters not two Straws to the Kingdom, whether they be legitimate or illegiti-mate.’46 In other words, it was the incorporated, exclusive joint-stock companythat was – albeit in a different way than we mean the term today – the moredistinctly ‘public’ company.

What was true of the Company’s investors was true of its leadership who,after all, were simply large shareholders elected by their fellow investors. AsRobert Ferguson observed,

according to the Proverb, That which is every mans business, will be no mans business;when there is none by particular obligation of place, duty, and interest, engagedto mind the general security and priviledg of the English-Trade, but every oneminds only his own private concern, the National Honour and Interest willdecline.47

An open trade was an ungoverned trade, which might be fine locally and evenin Europe but would prove devastating in Asia. For Child, governing trade wasakin to making laws, something that had to be done ‘for the People in gross,not particulars’, and by ‘wise, honest and able men’.48 The virtue of the EastIndia Company’s governing court of committees (later directors) was pre-cisely that they did not work on their own behalf but rather like a council oftrade; and, as Philopatris put it, only a ‘mixt Assembly of Noblemen, Gentle-men, and Merchants’ could ensure ‘publick Utility to the Kingdom’.49

The most immediate referent for such arguments, which of course conjuredthe humanist affinity for balanced and mixed constitutions, was the Dutchrepublic and its East India Company, but at least one advocate also recalledRoman comites commerciorum, as both an argument for the regulation of tradeand for vesting its supervision in the Company.50 Davenant observed, citingFortescue along with many other authorities, that even the most absolute ofmonarchs never ruled effectively alone or independently; he, for one, seemedto place a great deal more faith in a commonwealth ‘steered’ by the ‘soundAdvice’ of advisors like Richelieu or Colbert, than in the king himself. EchoingChild, he insisted that ‘Men in their Private Capacities may be allowed to

45 [Ferguson], Most Profitable Trade, 25.46 Child, Discourse, 1.47 [Ferguson], Most Profitable Trade, 15.48 Josiah Child, A New Discourse of Trade, Wherein Are Recommended Several weighty points relating to companies of

merchants (London, 1694), 106, 110.49 Philopatris, Treatise, 2.50 W. A., An Apology for the East-India Company (London, 1690), 6.


prefer their Single Profit, but should Consult only the General Good in PublicCouncils.’51 Moreover, liberty could only be maintained ‘by Men who had laidaside their Luxury, Corruption, Self-ends, and private Ambition, and whohad devoted themselves intirely to the Common Good’.52 The East IndiaCompany, its advocates insisted, did precisely this.

The Company, as both a foreign merchant and a public council, was,according to this line of reasoning, the only means to ensure an orderly andprofitable commerce, which in turn was critical to every aspect of Englishpolitics and economy from the price of land to the provisioning of the poor.Foreign trade in this sense was tethered to a grab bag of traditional forms ofvalour and virtue: agrarian life, active labour, martial valour, service to thecommonwealth. Arguments on the Company’s behalf thus modified but didnot resist outright the fairly common humanist-inflected arguments, such asthose of Francis Bacon, that merchants could provision but were incapable ofbuilding empire, because they were by nature and profession pacifist, xeno-phobic, and only cared about ‘present gain’.53 This might be true of ‘meremerchants’, but the East India Company, its proponents suggested, was some-thing of a different order. Most notably, its officials consistently protested that,unlike individual traders, they did what they did for future generations; as thecommittees wrote to Madras, in 1682, ‘without vanity We may say, that Weagonise strive and Labour not so much for our selves as our Country andPosterity . . . (whatever weak or malicious men think or say).’54 Such concernsas much for now as for posterity attached to endeavours as dramatic as wagingwar – which, as in the case of conflict with the Mughal Empire in 1688, had tobe prosecuted with ‘Zeale’ for ‘publick’ not ‘particular Interest’55 – and asmundane as infrastructural improvements to Bombay’s port, which were‘most acceptable to us, who do not think ourselves borne meerly for inrichingof ourselves or the Compa[ny] Singly, tho that be a nationall interest, butmore largely for the good of posterity, & the Nation in generall’.56

THE COMPANY’S PUBLIC

The peculiar logic that underpinned the ideological defence of the East IndiaCompany in seventeenth-century England rendered private merchants asthose who sought their own immediate particular interest potentially at theexpense of the republic but corporate companies – not unlike nobility, gentle-

51 Charles Davenant, An Essay on the East-India-Trade (London, 1696), 6, 10; Finkelstein, Harmony and theBalance, 223, 228, 337 n51.

52 Davenant, Essay, 17–18.53 Withington, Politics of Commonwealth, 63.54 London to Madras, 20 September 1682, British Library, Asia, Pacific, and Africa Collections, India Office

Records [hereafter IOR], E/3/90 f. 26.55 Bombay to Madras, 5 December 1688, IOR E/3/48 f. 200.56 London to Bombay, 15 February 1689, IOR E/3/92 f. 9.

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men, and councils of state – as those that were by status, form, and functionconcerned in and for the public good and for posterity. Yet, the concerns withcorruption and luxury on the one hand and virtue and service on the otherfurther served to define the Company’s policy within its system across Asia. Inthis sense, the tension between virtue and corruption in both commerce andpolitics not only informed the Company’s relationship with the English publicbut with a public of its own.

Concerns with corruption were unsurprisingly omnipresent in a Companythat offered such great potential wealth and managed employees halfwayacross the globe, sometimes at over a year’s distance, well beyond the world ofChristendom. In this context, comportment, behaviour, and transparencywere the keys to trustworthiness and credit. In its ships and stations abroad,the Company placed a great deal of emphasis on publicizing laws, regulations,commissions and pronouncements. Council minute books and factors’ letterswere supposed to be shared and signed by the whole and distinctions madebetween the private and public papers of Company governors, all of which wasoriented towards preventing arbitrary or despotic power assembling in anyone leader or coterie.57 It was not insignificant that Company employees wereknown as ‘servants’; corruption, interest, and disobedience was thus morethan a commercial problem of embezzling and efficiency but a moral andpolitical failure. Refractory factors, merchants, and writers were ‘Idle’,‘debaucht’, and ‘insolent and negligent Persons’.58 They were guilty of ‘Pro-figality carelessness and folly’.59 In fact, a factory that had become inured toprivate interest was so ‘corrupt and depraved’ that even simply changing outits head ‘may make a partial but can never make a thorough Cure’, since ‘aperson once inhabituated to and contaminated with Infidelity Sloth or Luxurywill never mend to that degree as is fit for us to trust him again’.60 ForCompany leadership, frugality was a political value as much as an economicone, a sign of good husbandry and discipline. As in humanist discourses morebroadly, luxury and idleness – with which Asia was supposedly ripe – were theroot causes of disobedience. They were diseases that rendered a body politicsickly and moribund. Frugality, including rooting out private interest andcorruption, was not just good commercial practice but the duty of well-regulated and virtuous citizens.61 Or, as the Company’s governing court ofcommittees put it in 1687, ‘Thrift’ was ‘a Cardinall vertue & leading to goodEvents, as well in War as in peace’.62

57 Ogborn, Indian Ink, 81–82.58 London to Madras, 8 April 1687, IOR E/3/91 f. 145; London to Surat, 26 September 1684, IOR E/3/90

f, 208.59 London to Bombay, 25 September 1682, IOR E/3/90 f. 36.60 EIC to FSG, 20 Sep 1682, IOR E/3/90 f. 26.61 Istvan Hont, ‘Free Trade and the Economic Limits to National Politics: Neo-Machiavellian Political

Economy Reconsidered’, in John Dunn (ed.), The Economic Limits to Modern Politics (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1990), 62–3.

62 London to Bombay, 3 August 1687, IOR E/3/91 f. 162.


If the Company was responsible for defending public virtue, its critics,enemies, and rivals – that is, interlopers – were driven by private interest toundermine government itself. Their behaviour, both in principle and prac-tice, ‘not only ruins Trade’, but was on a spectrum of disorderly behaviour thatinfected others, leading to mutiny, rebellion, and even piracy.63 As in England,the Company’s critique of its critics was deeply imbued with the moral lan-guage of virtue. Interlopers – many of whom were indeed former, dismissedCompany servants – were ‘debauched’ and ‘wicked’ people who led ‘naughtylives’. They were ‘Idle naughty People . . . Englands Enemies & disaffected toChurch and State, Selfish pittifull meane Spirits that for a little private gaineCares not w[ha]t becomes of The publique interest’.64 Perhaps even morethan its Asian and European rivals, it was the behaviour and disposition ofinterlopers that the Company regarded as the prime threat to the Englishestablishment in India. What was needed to confront them, thus, were pre-cisely the sorts of active and masculinized features that preserved civic virtueitself: only with ‘Courage’, ‘a more hearty vigorous & active spirit’, and ‘stick-[ing] Close to ye publique interest’ could the Company ‘Shine in Glory andmay make some repent of their naughtyness’.65

The Company’s concern for cultivating and preserving virtue was perhapsgreatest amongst its soldiers, whose potential for ‘debauchery’, refractoriness,and rebellion was certainly the greatest.66 Policing soldiers’ behaviour was theprime means to prevent their degeneracy; the Company attempted everythingfrom special licensing hours on taverns to strict adherence to ‘Martiall law,without which no foreign garrison especially and so remote and in a place ofso much luxury, can bee kept in due order and obedience’.67 Disobedienceamongst the garrison was not to be tolerated, to which a spate of rebellionsand mutinies in the 1670s and 1680s stood as testimony: ‘Too much pity’, theyinsisted on more than one occasion, ‘spoiles a City’.68

Of course, such cities were home to much more than just soldiers, and theirgarrisons meant to protect far more than fortified trading posts. While inits one Atlantic plantation of St Helena the Company fantasized about agenteel plantocracy that could both protect and model virtue,69 in Madras,first obtained in the late 1630s, Bombay, acquired in the late 1660s, and thena host of others founded after the 1680s, including Calcutta, the Company

63 London to Madras, 3 October 1690, IOR E/3/92 f. 58.64 Surat to London, 21 April 1685, IOR E/3/45 f. 30; London to Bengal, 27 Aug 1688, IOR E/3/91 f. 285;

Surat to Bombay, 14 May 1686, IOR G/3/3 (2) pp. 206.65 Surat to Bombay, 14 May 1686, IOR G/3/3 (2) p. 207; London to Madras, 20 September 1682, IOR E/3/90

f. 26; London to Surat, 3 Oct 1684, IOR E/3/90 f. 220.66 For an expansion on this theme, see Philip J. Stern, ‘Soldier and Citizen in the Seventeenth-Century

English East India Company’, Journal of Early Modern History (2011), 83–104.67 Secret Committee to Surat, 26 September 1684, IOR E/3/90 f. 210.68 London to St. Helena, 6 May 1695, IOR E/3/90 f. 274.69 See Philip J. Stern, ‘Politics and Ideology in the Early East India Company-State: The Case of St Helena,

1673–1696,’ Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 35, 1 (March 2007): 1–23.

522 Philip Stern

continually stressed the importance of cultivating virtue for maintaining agrowing and thriving establishment in India. For both its European and Asianinhabitants, such civic virtue rested appropriately enough in the civitas: that is,in the infrastructure and good government of the city-colony. From More toSpenser to Hakluyt, cities – with their walls and buildings as well as laws,revenues, and defences – were central to planting, preserving, and promotingnot just the existence but the civic and spiritual well-being of a colonialpopulation; in deed and quite often even in name, colonies, like cities, wereforms of early modern res publica, or ‘commonwealth’, responsible for thecultivation of virtue on a distant and barbarous frontier.70 In classicalhumanist thought, the governor of a city took as his goal to ‘shape publicinstitutions’; this meant tending not just to the institutions of civic life but tothe civilis disciplina itself, through sound laws that ensured the moral health ofsubjects and encouraged their active participation in civic life. In this pursuit,justice and the vita activa were the keys to civic virtue, the ideal achievementsof the city, and the prime end of politics.71

There were thus several very common concepts at play here: a politicaleconomy rooted in a civic republican language in which balance of trade andbalance of power were inseparable and complementary;72 an ideal Aristotelianbalance amongst extremes; and a political theory that rested on the typicallyHobbesian foundations of the ‘mutual relation between protection and obe-dience’.73 Perhaps most crucial to this concept of the city was the notion ofservice and officeholding as a means of political participation, stability, andthe cultivation and preservation of virtue.74 Foremost amongst these respon-sibilities was taxation: ‘The Fundamentall Law and originall compact of everyKingdom, Citie, Corporation, Company or Fraternitie of men in the World’,William Prynne wrote in 1643 was ‘that every Member of them should con-tribute proportionably upon all occasions . . . without which contribution theycould be neither a Kingdom, Citie, Corporation, Company, Fraternitie, or

70 Christopher Tomlins, Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580–1865(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 139–42; Fitzmaurice, Humanism and America, 6.

71 Maurizio Viroli, ‘Machiavelli and the Republican Idea of Politics,’ in Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner, andMaurizio Viroli (eds.), Machiavelli and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 145–52;Eco Haitsma Mulier, ‘The Language of Seventeenth-Century Republicanism in the United Provinces: Dutch orEuropean?,’ in Anthony Pagden (ed.), The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1987).

72 Finkelstein, Harmony and the Balance, 181–5.73 John Dunn, ‘Political Obligation’, The History of Political Theory and Other Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1996), 69; David Wootton, ‘Thomas Hobbes’s Machiavellian Moments’, in Donald R. Kelleyand David Harris Sacks (eds.), The Historical Imagination in Early Modern Britain: History, Rhetoric, and Fiction,1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 214.

74 Patrick Collinson, ‘De Republica Anglorum: Or, History with the Politics Put Back’, (Inugural Lecture,University of Cambridge, 9 November 1989) in Patrick Collinson (ed.), Elizabethan Essays (London and RioGrande: The Hambledon Press, 1994); Fitzmaurice, Humanism and America, 16–25; Mark Goldie, ‘The Unac-knowledged Republic: Officeholding in Early Modern England’, in Tim Harris (ed.), The Politics of the Excluded,c.1500–1850 (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2001); Hseuh, Hybrid Constitutions, 68–9.


have any contiunence, or subsistence at all.’75 The Company, as both a cor-poration and a network of cities, also sought to incorporate European andAsian settlers as colonists into the polity through civic duties and offices, suchas farming revenue, militia service, and so on.76 The life of an urban enclavedemanded such responsibilities; at Madras, for example, ‘Jewes and otherforeigners & Natives which enjoy their liberties and properties in perfectsecurity & the meanes of increasing their fortunes by our expence and charge’should in turn ‘be no less forward to every good & publick work & to contrib-ute liberally to all publick charges.’77 In turn, only the cultivation of wealthyand vibrant inhabitants and the collection of revenue from them could serve,like the Dutch, as the ‘founda[ti]on of their greatness & power’.78

Such concerns with virtue also manifested themselves, at least in principle,in a strict concern to the Ciceronian notion that courts, laws, and jurispru-dence were the key to civic health and good government.79 As Child andothers had argued, security in property, both land and moveable, was key tosuch prosperity and greatness of a polity. Company officials constantlyreminded their subordinates ‘to use the Natives that are obedient to ourLawes, with all Justice humanity and kindness, giving them an assurance thatwe will never oppress them, nor their posterityes, but they shall for everremain in the same freedome, as if they were English men borne.’80 Theyemphasized that ‘wisdom vertue & justice’ was the only route to expelling‘Vice profanness & debauchery’; there was no other route to ‘always beesteemed reverenced & feared by neighbour Nations’ and governors werecommended – one to the tune of a gratuity of 1000 guineas – so that he mightbe a model of ‘self denial industry courage vertue & fidelity’ to others.81

London chastised Bombay for allowing its court fees to grow too high anddelays in trials too great, ‘so apt are the most vertuous institutions to run intovicious habits which its your part to correct before they take root’.82

Officials in London as well as in India and St Helena were perpetuallyanxious to maintain the basic trappings of civil government, including officeslike attorneys general, public law books and warrants, jury trials, public exami-nation of witnesses and proceedings on findings of fact for imprisonment,confiscation of property, or the infliction of corporal or capital punishment.There was a great anxiety about transparency of the law as well. At St Helena,all court decisions were to be ‘duly Recorded, or registered in Books’, and atable of court fees and other business with the island’s government publicly

75 William Prynne, The Soveraigne Power of Parliaments and Kingdoms (London, 1643), part IV, 22.76 Stern, Company-State, 90–93; Stern, ‘Soldier and Citizen’, 83–104.77 London to Madras, 12 December 1687, IOR E/3/91 f. 232.78 London to Madras, 14 January 1685/6, IOR E/3/91 f. 19.79 Fitzmaurice, ‘Ideology,’ 7–8.80 London to Madras, 22 March 1696/7, IOR E/3/92 f. 139.81 London to Bombay, 15 February 1699/9, IOR E/3/92 f. 10.82 London to Bombay, 27 August 1688, IOR E/3/91 f. 275.

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advertised and occasionally adjusted so as not to be burdensome to poorerinhabitants.83 In 1680, Streynasham Master at Madras issued a regulationinsisting that no transfer of land title at Madras would be valid if not recordedin English and certified with the Company’s seal.84 The Madras choultry’sdecisions were also to be recorded, in English and Portuguese, and newlypromulgated laws and orders were to be proclaimed ‘by Beat of Drum’ andposted to the town’s gates ‘in the English Porugueez Gentue & Malabarlanguages’.85

The fortified city-colony was similarly crucial as another bulwark against thecorrupting, unmoored influence of the English interloper. Interlopers, bydefinition, were Englishmen who resided outside the Company’s cities,without permission; in turn, living in, serving, and paying obedience to the cityand its government was proof to the Company of legitimacy. This was exem-plified in the late 1688 order from London to Bombay to impose consulageduties on ‘all English that live not in our fortifyed Towns’. The reason for sucha tax was for them obvious:

to make a difference between English house-keepers that live within our Garri-son who are & shall always be as free as the Company’s own Servants or ourGovernor Deputy Governour or Committees here themselves if they were inIndia, and such English as live for their private advantage in other PrincesDominions, where neither their persons nor their estates are of any use for thecountenance or defence of English Garrisons.86

Cities thus marked who belonged and who did not; they also kept people ingood order. When free Englishmen had previously lived outside the Compa-ny’s cities, the committees argued, they ‘did interlope keep Punch houses &do a thousand ill things formerly like irregular & outlaw’d persons, withoutany order or obedience to the Chiefs of their own Nation’.87 There was aproductive circularity to such logic: the failure of an Englishman to live withinand contribute to the city marked him as an interloper, while an interloperwas defined by one who failed to contribute to the defence, health, andwelfare of the city and polity. This interest in creating and cultivating a formof colonial citizen in early British South Asia in contradistinction to therebellious, depraved interloper thus served a number of complimentary pur-poses: to help cultivate a loyal, virtuous, and self-sustaining population; to

83 St. Helena Consultation, 18 Dec 1682, IOR G/32/2, I, p. 72; EIC to St. Helena, 10 Mar 1681, IOR G/32/1p. 19, 21; St. Helena Consultations, 25 Oct [1694], IOR G/32/2, IV, p. 37–38.

84 Memorandum of the Good Services of Mr (afterwards Sir) Streynsham Master to the East India Company,from the year 1656 to 1681, British Library, Asia, Africa, and Pacific Collections, MSS Eur E210 f. 27.

85 London to Madras, 5 July 1682, IOR E/3/90 f. 3; ‘A Law Concerning the Natives’, 27 Oct 1682, IORE/3/90 f. 48.

86 London to Bombay, 27 Aug 1688, IOR E/3/91 f. 272.87 London to Bombay, 27 Aug 1688, IOR E/3/91 f. 272.


combat the inherent corruption threatened by foreign garrisons, Asian com-merce, and colonial life; and to distinguish between legitimate and illicitEnglish behaviour in Asia.

This attempt to make colonial citizens out of its Asian inhabitants was mostevident in the Company’s efforts to create urban corporations of its own: thefirst charter for the corporation of Madras was issued in 1687, followed by onesfor Bombay and Calcutta in 1726. While an institutional innovation in BritishAsia, it was an idea that drew quite upon a range of examples of urbancitizenship in England, Europe, the Atlantic, and even amongst the castecouncils and other self-governing bodies already in the Company’s Asianplantations.88 These corporations, complete with their mayors, aldermen,burgesses, Mayor’s Courts, and the like, were was designed specifically toinvest inhabitants – Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Hindus, Armenians, andMuslims alike – with a direct responsibility both for administering pettyjustice, maintaining city infrastructure, and contributing to the ‘Publick Goodworks.’89

Incorporated or not, the Company’s Asian settlements were thus not simplya prima facie means to the assertion of virtue but ones whose political andlegal institutions had to be constantly vigilant to counter the corruptinginfluence of commerce, and Asian commerce in particular. A self-sufficientcity or town, Lewes Roberts wrote in the 1630s, required six ‘principall parts’:its own source of food, and thus farmers and husbands; defence, and thussoldiers; ‘wealth and riches’ for both ‘private and publicke’ employment, andthus a rich town elite; laws and a judicial establishment, and thus ‘counsellorsand senators of state’; religion and piety, and thus a priesthood; and finally, ‘tomake it a compleate, able and absolute Citie, it must have Trade and Arts,practiced therein, and this is the proper taske and duetie of the Merchant andartificer that inhabit it.’90 The merchant underpinned the work of artisans,labourers, and statesmen. He brought goods for the farmer and shepherd,supplies for the soldier, experience for the seaman, employment for the poor,customs for the city, wisdom and intelligence of travel to foreign parts for thepolitician, and repute: ‘to make the City and place of his abode famous andeminent by sundry other meanes’.91

Here was where the Company’s ideological defences in England and itspolitical economy abroad met. All of this attention to justice, virtue, anddefence was a means by which the Company sought precisely to attractmerchants, artisans, and others to settle, and invest in the land, trade, and

88 Jean Gelman Taylor, The Social World of Batavia: European and Eurasian in Dutch Asia (Madison: Universityof Wisconsin Press, 1983, repr. 2009); H. J. Leue, ‘Legal Expansion in the Age of the Companies: Aspects of theAdministration of Justice in the English and Dutch Settlements of Maritime Asia, c.1600–1750’, in W. J.Mommsen and J. A. de Moor (eds.), European Expansion and Law: The Encounter of European and Indigenous Lawin Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Africa and Asia (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1992), 134–5.

89 London to Madras, 22 Jan 1691/2, IOR E/3/92 f. 174; 3 Jan 1693/4, IOR E/3/92 f. 301.90 Roberts, Merchants Mappe, 19–20.91 Roberts, Merchants Mappe, 20–21.

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navigation of its urban and insular empire. In this formulation, it was theCompany that was the public, to be served by a well-regulated but protectedcommerce. The greatness of its colonies abroad required thus the promotion ofmartial valour, discipline, and good government; such was the only thing thatin many respects prevented these cities from being swallowed up, either fromwithin by corruption or without from invasion. Regular government, security inproperty and person and regular systems of justice were, in the end, the key tothe ‘life & vigor’ of trade, whether of the Company or its subjects.92 It was alsocrucial to confronting the omnipresent threats to the Company from without.To govern ‘all your affairs with wisdom vertue & justice discountenancing allkind of Vice profaneness & debauchery’, was in the end the key to maintaininga ‘steady serious government’ which ‘will always be esteemed reverenced &feared by neighbour Nations’.93

Of course, classically one also cultivated such fear through actual demon-strations of martial strength and valour. Company officials protested continu-ally that they would never baulk at the necessary charges for making theircolonies impregnable, their writing in print and correspondence mixing asense of frugality and good husbandry with that common notion in earlymodern political economy, as Jacob Viner described it, that ‘economic sacri-fices might have to be made in order to assume national security or victory inan aggressive war’.94 Or, as the Company’s government at Bombay put it: it wasfrom time to time, absolutely necessary to ‘Venture a good bloody nose’.95 TheCompany’s strength, like England’s, was in its ships not its garrison, and muchemphasis was placed on the maritime dimensions to Company warfare. Yet,not only was the Company’s establishment at this point far too weak andinchoate compared to its European rivals – let alone its imperial neighboursin Asia – to exercise such strength constantly or aggressively; military policydid not always sit comfortably with the values of thrift, wealth, and civility uponwhich this coastal, port city empire was constructed. Martial valour, in theCompany, was defined as being prepared for war – not necessarily alwaysfighting it. Even a commission to a ship captain at Bombay during the Com-pany’s war with Siam and the Mughal Empire in the 1680s reminded him that‘wee must have peace againe as soone as wee can for a Continuall Warr is notpropper, especially for our Masters, whose business is trade.’96 And as thosemasters themselves succinctly put it not long after, ‘the end of all just Warr isPeace.’97 Its instructions to build forts and discipline garrisons not infre-quently echoed Cato’s ‘good old Addage Non minus est virtus quam querere

92 John Gayer to I’timad Khan, 24 August 1694, IOR G/3/10 f. 81.93 London to Bombay, 15 February 1688/9, IOR E/3/92 f. 9.94 Jacob Viner, ‘Power Versus Plenty as Objectives of Foreign Policy in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth

Centuries’, repr. in David Armitage (ed.), Theories of Empire, 1450–1800 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 293.95 Bombay to Bartholomew Harris, 24 Dec 1687, IOR E/3/48 f. 164.96 Commission to Captain William Wildey, Commander of Ship Modena, 23 April 1687, IOR E/3/47 f. 18.97 London to Madras, 15 February 1688/9, IOR E/3/92 f. 4.


parte tueri’: that is, it is no less virtuous to defend than to acquire.98 As thecommittees insisted, another lesson to be learned from the Dutch at Bataviawas that to ‘always to be in a posture of defence is a sure way to preserve yourPeace draw Esteem and respect honour and Obedience from the Natives withlittle or no charge to the Company.’99

For the Company, martial readiness and military service was a necessaryelement to a thriving civic life. Internally, it meant, as it had for Machiavelli,the cultivation ‘respect for law, authority, and religion; a love of peace andorder; loyalty; a spirit of self-sacrifice; and exceptional personal courage’.100

Externally, however, it was an instrument of diplomacy, oriented towardsmaintaining respect and the Company’s rights, more directed towards estab-lishing the threat or ‘idea’ of potential rather than actual violence.101 If thiswas a somewhat un-Machiavellian but nonetheless humanistically sympatheticposition, it was one articulated at times in the albeit superficial and digestedlanguages of a Machiavellian psychology of power: Company stations werereminded to keep their enemies ‘honest for fear of us, which is the surer andmuch Stronger Passion than Love’;102 a strong garrison and a growing networkof fortifications was the only way to keep the Company’s opponents at bay asthey ‘will do more for fear then love of us’.103 The desire to appear strongcoupled with the reluctance, even at its most aggressive points, to engage infrequent, protracted, or territorial war was rooted in a typical fear of over-extension, particularly when encircled by far greater and wealthier powers.The Company’s politics was in this way oriented towards defending its treaties,agreements, and corporate privileges in Asia – the surest means to protect itscities as safe and flourishing civic spaces, that would thrive on security of bothland and commerce and a form of colonial virtue.

CONCLUSION: PUBLIC AND PRIVATE EMPIRE

‘We would have all Men sober and vertuous if it were in our Power,’ the courtof committees wrote to its relatively new colony in Sumatra in 1697, butunfortunately ‘the beginnings of all Plantations, and the greatest Cityes thatever appear’d in the world have been from such loose and wicked People atfirst, So it was in Rome Naples, and in most our English Plantations, especiallyVirginia, Jamaica and Barbadoes.’104 With the possible exception of NewEngland, the Company argued, history showed that all colonial settlements

98 London to Madras, 2 July 1684, IOR E/3/90 f. 192.99 EIC to FSG, 29 Feb 1691/2, IOR E/3/92 f. 192.100 Berridge, ‘Machiavelli’, 23.101 I. Bruce Watson, ‘Fortifications and the “Idea” of Force in Early English East India Company Relations

with India’, Past and Present 88 (1980).102 London to Bombay, August 1688, IOR E/3/91 f. 273.103 London to Madras, Feb 1684/5, IOR E/3/90 f. 256.104 London to Bengkulu, 16 April 1697, IOR E/3/92 f. 669.

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had insecure moral foundations. Yet, if settlers and soldiers tended to disor-derly, corrupt, and debauched behaviour, it was the job of a colonial propri-etor and city to demand obedience, cultivate service, and promote virtue.Only in this way could one remake those settlers, and thus preserve the health,success, and expansion of a ‘Christian Plantation’.105

There were, of course, many people who found the suggestion of Companyvirtue preposterous, but it was not until the late eighteenth century that theCompany would really ultimately begin to lose this argument and becomeassociated more pervasively and permanently with corruption, vice, and impe-rial decline. It was perhaps no coincidence that this came at precisely thepoint that the nature of the Company’s empire itself began to transform, as itslongstanding attempts to maintain a naval system connecting urban, civilbulwarks supported by rights and privileges gave way to a territorially expan-sive empire. The political debate that followed recycled many of the samearguments as a century earlier. A flood of nouveaux-riches ‘nabobs’, perhapsembodied most famously in Robert Clive and Warren Hastings, representedthis excess, combining the corrupting influence of commerce with overtonesof Asiatic luxury and despotism.106 As before, both individually and collec-tively, the East India Company was depicted by critics as monstrous: overlarge,unwieldy, and a threat to the constitutions of both Britain and MughalIndia.107 Now, however, the Company’s conquests were articulated in a newcontext, against the backdrop of the twin publications of Gibbon’s Decline andFall of the Roman Empire and Smith’s Wealth of Nations and amidst a post-1763British empire that increasingly sought to capitalize upon and exert greaterfiscal and political control over a range of corporate, proprietary, and non-state forms of colonial expansion. The Company was, as Edmund Burkepersonified them in Warren Hastings, guilty of ‘no offences, that have nottheir root in avarice, rapacity, pride, insolence, ferocity, treachery, cruelty,malignity of temper; in short, in nothing, that does not argue a total extinctionof all moral principle; that does not manifest an inveterate blackness of heart,died in grain with malice, vitiated, corrupted, gangrened to the very core’.108

A territorial expansionist ‘merchant-sovereign’ could no longer be sus-tained as a bulwark against corruption and infection; instead, it was now theworst of ‘all political tyrannies’.109 As Smith argued, monopoly had corrupted

105 [Streynsham Master], ‘A Letter from Surratt in India giveing an Accott of ye Manner of ye English Facoors&c. their way of Civill Converse & Pious Comportment & Behaviour in these Partes,’ AAPC MSSEur E.210 f. 5.

106 Tillman Nechtman, Nabobs: Empire and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 2010).

107 H. V. Bowen, The Business of Empire: The East India Company and Imperial Britain, 1756–1833 (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2006); Robert Travers, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth Century India: The British inBengal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

108 Edmund Burke, The ‘Works’ of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 13 (London: FC and J Rivington,1822), 12.

109 William Bolts, Considerations on India Affairs; Particularly respecting the present state of Bengal and its dependencies(London, 1772), vii, 75, 209–10.


the Company as a trader and its territorial conquests created the ideal condi-tions for the private corruption of its servants; as he put it, ‘a company ofmerchants are, it seems, incapable of considering themselves as sovereigns.’110

Where American revolutionaries could successfully mobilize republican lan-guage in defence of corporate rights, for the Company, the older urban, civic,and commercial arguments for virtue were unsustainable amidst a new kind ofterritorial empire and a new notion of virtue in commerce, one in whichmerchants resembled less Digges’s corporate bees dutifully bringing honeyfor the polity than Mandeville’s grumbling hive, where order and wealth – butperhaps not sovereignty – was found in the pursuit of each individual’s owninterest. ‘Corruption’ now served as a political and legal foundation for Par-liamentary intervention into the ‘private’ Company’s empire on behalf of the‘public’, rescuing the British Empire in India while, in the long run, condemn-ing the Company to a gradual loss of autonomy and political power.111 If it wasin this sense that the modern British Empire in India was born in scandal,112

it was ironically the very same languages of virtue and service, corruption anddecline, which had in fact conceived and incubated that nascent empire in thefirst place.

Duke University

110 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations, 3 vols. (Dublin, 1776), Vol. 2.,Bk 4, 512–15, 518–19.

111 P. J. Marshall, ‘A Free Though Conquering People: Britain and Asia in the Eighteenth Century’ (Inau-gural Lecture, Rhodes Chair of Imperial History, King’s College, 1981).

112 See Nicholas Dirks, Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain (Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 2006).

530 Philip Stern

corporate virtue: the languages of empire in early modern british asia

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