Philip Stern has written a book filled with marvelous details held together by big insights. These recast what we mean by otherwise simple-sounding words like “state” and “sovereign” or “public” and “private.” What looks like a superb account of the early modern East India Company—and this book is certainly that—turns out to be so much more: a history that forces us to reconsider the nature of empire by asking us to reconsider the nature of the modern state.

Legal forms mattered to how states and empires worked. Stern begins by noting that the Company was a corporation, many people made one in law. The crown incorporated trade companies and overseas plantations for the same reason it incorporated towns, colleges, and hospitals in England: to serve the public good, even as such corporations served the interests of their residents or owners. This dual charge appeared in the royal charters that created each corporation as a semiautonomous being. Given this, the East India Company and the empire, like England, was “an interlocking matrix of commonwealths … a layered and hybrid affair” (9–10): beings created by but not entirely contained within the state as we usually conceive it. The Company was a state unto itself.

The life of this “Company-State” reveals how hard it was and is to distinguish domains labeled private and public. The Company simultaneously ran factories that administered trade and courts that administered justice. Like other businesses, it made contracts; unlike them, it minted coins. The Company paid profits to shareholders while paying to build orderly cities. Neither commerce nor governance was uppermost; one did not give way to the other, as previous narratives of Company history suggest. Private profit and public power required one another as an English company bestrode the globe.

This conflation of private gain and public good reached its zenith in the 1685 conclusion to the Company’s lawsuit against Thomas Sandys, an interloper or merchant trading illegally within the Company’s domain. Sandys claimed that the Company’s trading privileges amounted to an illegal monopoly. But the court concluded that the Company served the public good as it regulated the conduct of English subjects in a massive zone running from the Cape of Good Hope to the Strait of Magellan. Or, as Stern puts it, “interloping was more an offense against jurisdiction than commerce” (56). That jurisdiction was the rationale for the Company’s commerce; commerce funded the exercise of the jurisdiction.

The Company’s conduct of relations with other princes was the clearest marker of its autonomy from the crown that gave it life. Company agents at Bombay, Madras, and beyond negotiated agreements with local potentates. Doing so required navigating the narrow diplomatic space between warring Mughal and Maratha empires and resulted in distinctive privileges gained from the tributaries of those empires. Such agreements were often recorded in farmans: a Mughal legal practice quite like the letters patent by which English kings made corporations. The Company created a distinctive legal-political capacity for itself at the intersection of the authority of two sovereigns. Doing so, the Company made itself sovereign.

Thus, Stern’s most important accomplishment is to disturb persistent assumptions about a so-called Westphalian sovereignty: about the supposed legal uniformity of territory and similarity of persons subsumed under a unitary power. In the many places across the Indian Ocean where its agents appeared—and at St. Helena, an Atlantic island well outside the massive dominion originally granted by its English charters—Company sovereignty operated in different ways according to fluctuating local conditions. At Madras, the Company chartered its own corporation to govern the town, thereby exercising the generative power otherwise belonging to monarchs. In Bengkulu, the Company adopted the Sumatran use of bichara—consultative assemblies—to make policy and settle disputes. Wherever Company courts offered justice to its polyglot subjects, bits of Dutch, Portuguese, and multiple South Asian legal regimes were combined with pieces of English law to create a distinctive Company law. In short, the Company rested on and enacted kinds of authority that are utterly at odds with expectations that sovereignty naturally flows along channels carved by nation-states.

The Company’s sovereignty began to erode after 1689. Bombay, the jewel in the Company’s crown, came under attack. Piracy intensified. But the most serious threats arose in England. In 1689, the House of Commons appointed a committee to consider complaints against the Company’s “tyranny.” By the late 1690s, the judgment in Sandys’s case had been effectively reversed by legislation authorizing the creation of a new East India Company: statute enabled what amounted to a hostile corporate takeover of the old Company by outsiders, many of them interlopers. Legislation cut the old chartered Company and its jurisdiction down to a size more easily managed by a parliamentary state with growing pretensions to unfettered dominion.

Has Stern thus charted a regression to some unavoidable political mean? Had the Company—having briefly broken the bounds of national sovereignty to become a sovereign itself—been pulled back within those bounds? Perhaps. But Stern resists this interpretation. As he notes in closing, the practices of the Company-State’s late seventeenth-century heyday persisted in the eighteenth century. What some saw as a new Company sovereignty acquired after the Battle of Plassey in 1757 was actually a reversion to jurisdictional practices that had marked the Company-State’s sovereignty generations earlier. There is no simple tale to be told of the East India Company’s progress from commercial to governmental enterprise. Instead, Stern has given us an account of the mutually constituting interaction of commercial and political power and has thereby brought into view the tensions and obscurities generated by the analytic language we use to talk about states and empires.