This volume situates the trading corporation within a resolutely non-Eurocentric vision of global history. It is divided into two parts of unequal length. Part 1 of the book focuses on the English corporations, especially the English East India Company (EIC). The heart of the book, part 1 comprises ten chapters on such unexpected topics as religion, gender, and science, as well as more obvious candidates such as political economy and governance. Part 2 evaluates the revisionist approaches used in the first part by motivating comparisons to other contexts: Swedish, French, Dutch, and Iberian trading corporations. On the whole, the essays included in the volume take the guise of historiographical interventions rather than the presentation of new research.

The introduction nicely summarizes the volume's ambitions. The editors aim to provide a global sociology of the corporation, positioning themselves within the integrative aims of global history as it has recently emerged out of comparative and connective approaches. They propose five aspects of this sociology: (1) corporations’ subordination to state authority at home and abroad; (2) their involvement in constant processes of negotiation among foreign merchants and states, European as well as non-European, as well as assorted other actors such as interlopers or local women; (3) their basically constitutional structure, often indebted to prior medieval political forms; (4) their relative autonomy in conducting their operations (which meant that notwithstanding their constitutions and formal subordination, they could often act with great flexibility and fluidity); and (5) the integrative role of corporations in connecting the local, the regional, the national, and the global.

For scholars of business history, the volume may be summed up by the argument that European trading corporations functioned in many respects like other diasporic networks, such as those of Sephardic Jews, Armenians, and Banyan traders. Corporations had complex and flexible interactions with host societies; they were venues for intellectual, cultural, and religious life; and they relied more often on informal than formal sanctions. Thus, even if their peculiar institutional form grew out of late medieval European corporations (i.e., guilds or liveries), in actual behavior they fully partook of early modern life across Eurasia.

It is difficult to deny that the early modern individuals who worked with or within the trading corporations must have embodied many of the practices typical of the epoch. Yet two aspects of European trading corporations that are central to business history are absent from this volume, and their absence left this reader a little perplexed as to what an economic historian is to make of the volume's intervention. First, the volume mainly ignores the question of commercial organization—and with it, questions of relative efficiency or profitability; and second, it neglects the issue of violence, and how the capacity of state-supported corporations to wield arms shaped the commercial environments they entered (a point that Edgar Pereira notes in chapter 13). Some of the scholars who loom large in the economistic literature—such as K. N. Chaudhuri and Ann M. Carlos—are largely absent in this volume. Instead, the main points of departure are the work of Philip Stern, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, and Francesca Trivellato.

In part, the authors’ efforts to avoid recapitulating a Eurocentric narrative end up consigning the older scholarship on trading companies to the dustbin of outmoded historiography. More fundamentally, though, the editors accept Kenneth Pomeranz's argument that European economic superiority emerged sometime after 1750, as a sudden and contingent irruption onto global history. Before that period, accordingly, there were not major differences in economic performance; the corporation therefore need not be treated as an exceptional vector of capital accumulation for Europe. Instead, it may be treated as one more style of business life, broadly analogous to practices elsewhere in Eurasia, and the interesting questions thus concern social, cultural, and political interactions across the globe—without requiring invidious questions about the West and the Rest.

Yet, even accepting key aspects of Pomeranz's interpretation of the Great Divergence, the commercial specificity of European trading companies is not so readily dismissed. For instance, trading corporations were relatively weak in the Mediterranean while they flourished in the Americas and Asia, perhaps because the costs of employing violence in the Mediterranean were growing even as the benefits were diminishing—a hypothesis that might in turn imply something about the role of trading corporations in other regions. Whatever the reasons, however, it is clear that the commercial differences between informal and formal trading networks remain an ongoing question for inquiry, with important implications for our understanding of commercial organization in the early modern period. To that extent, then, the state-like form of the corporation might indeed be a key to understanding its commercial potentialities. As Leonard Hodges remarks in his chapter on the French corporations, “Philip Stern may have taught us to see how companies could be states, but the French case shows that states could be companies” (p. 298).