This is a welcome addition to a fast-growing literature on the corporate origins of European empire in the early modern world. In Outsourcing Empire: How Company-States Made the Modern World, Andrew Phillips and Jason C. Sharman spin a largely compelling argument that European states—represented here by England/Britain and the Netherlands—were fiscally and militarily too weak to pursue overseas expansion from the turn of the seventeenth century, and as a result “outsourced” the effort over the next three centuries to a constellation of corporate enterprises, from the English Hudson's Bay Company in North America to the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (United Dutch East India Company) in Asia. These chartered companies were distinguished from the crowded landscape of guilds, regulated companies, and other corporations by their sweeping sovereign powers that allowed them to enjoy a range of state powers, from minting their own coinage to waging war. Central to the interpretation put forward by Phillips and Sharman in this wide-ranging book is that these “company-states” were not only highly autonomous political actors in their own right, but ones whose unique public/private hybrid character allowed them a sense of fluidity in international relations that saw them nimbly insert themselves in a geographically and culturally diverse set of economic and political systems. As such, they operated far and wide from 1600 to 1900, a prominence and durability that, for Phillips and Sharman, made company-states “vital, but previously neglected actors in world politics” (199).

Outsourcing Empire begins with an exploration of the emergence of these company-states, which, according to Phillips and Sharman, emerged from beleaguered Protestant powers reaction to the sixteenth-century expansion of the Habsburg Empire. In response, the English and Dutch looked overseas to compensate for their meagre resources. Yet the militarization of regions such as the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean by the Iberian powers presented formidable challenges to Anglo-Dutch capabilities, pushing them to devolve the initiatives onto nonstate actors whose private character could not only attract greater investment and marshal more significant resources, but also absorb the risk and cost of operating in spaces contested by the Spanish or Portuguese. It was a win-win for the English crown and the Dutch States. With a brief overview of the expansion of the two most successful company-states, the English and Dutch East India Companies, chapter 1 argues that their success was largely the result of their institutional strengths, “Most fundamentally, company-states were hybrid creatures, combining sovereign prerogatives with the pursuit of profit” (61). And it was this hybridity that made them more suitable to operating within a diverse array of environments in a way that their domicile nation-states were not able to. In contrast, chapter 2 analyzes the diffusion of the company-form, charting the emergence of a wave of company-states in the Atlantic. From the Dutch West India Company to the Royal African Company, these imitations of their more successful Asian counterparts witnessed company-states operating from the Arctic to the Amazon. In comparing the two different theatres, however, the authors discover the importance of proximity in allowing the autonomy of company-states to operate effectively. Ultimately, the more intense rivalry of European nation-states in the Atlantic, and the shorter distances between the operations of the company-states in America and the halls of power in London and Amsterdam, combined to frustrate their independence and subordinate them more strictly to national ambitions and limitations.

In contrast, in the second half of Outsourcing Empire, Phillips and Sharman turn to the decline and fall of company-states in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and their surprising resurrections in the late nineteenth century. For Phillips and Sharman, after 1750 “Intensifying geopolitical competition, ideological delegitimating, and functional redundancy” effectively overwhelmed the ability of company-states to continue their delicate power-profit balancing act that had made them so successful in Asia in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries (109). For instance, the Dutch East India Company's failure to maintain profits through territorial overstretch and expensive military infrastructure meant revenues remained static, while expenses soared. Meanwhile, the increasing dominance of the English East India Company pushed the Dutch East India Company's resources to the limit, and exasperated its institutional limitations into a lethal cocktail of exhaustion and competitiveness. While the English East India Company suffered an equally problematic failure to balance power and profit, especially after its extensive territorial conquests at the turn of the nineteenth century, it suffered the additional challenge of a sharpening of public and private divides in Britain, a process that helped to delegitimize the hybridity that had made this particular company-state so successful. Private trade was now “corrupt,” political or administrative failure was scrutinized in parliament, and the increasing capability of the British nation-state in comparison with its early modern English predecessor, provided less autonomy for company policies. By the mid-nineteenth century, “creeping nationalization by a thousand cuts” (149) had shorn the East India Company of its powers, with its rule replaced by the British crown after the disastrous Indian Rebellion in 1858. Despite the seeming collapse of the company-state model, Phillips and Sharman conclude Outsourcing Empire with the resurrection of the chartered company in the later nineteenth century, the heyday of European empire. Despite being revived without the extensive sovereign powers of their early modern forebears, Phillips and Sharman suggest that these new company iterations were once again a response to fiscal necessity, with European empires in Africa, the Atlantic, and the Pacific looking for more cost-effective ways to manage their vast territorial holdings. But whether the Russian-American Company or the German Pacific Companies, the world had changed, and without the autonomy afforded by vast distances and the considerable sovereignty wielded as a result of delegated powers, these new company-states found themselves marginalized and undermined by their own nation-states.

Outsourcing Empire is a highly accessible work of scholarship that will appeal particularly to students of international history. Phillips and Sharman's strength is in their synthesis of existing research by historians, particularly that of Philip J. Stern, which over the past decade has convincingly established a new emphasis on European expansion in which nonstate actors played critical political roles in early modern empire. Yet in doing so, this also highlights some of the works’ limitations. In particular, in a book about a “world order,” it is typically a work of Eurocentrism in which unique European institutional forms helped to “make the modern world,” a claim that any historian should be immediately skeptical of. The dangers of such an approach are readily apparent when Phillips and Sharman largely ignore the vast non-European imperial systems that were in fact far more capable of shaping their surroundings well into the nineteenth century—and of reshaping Europe's company-states according to their own interests. The Ottoman, Mughal, and Chinese empires are readily dismissed as territorial constructs, relegated for their failure to expand “via the high seas” (62). This ignores the rich seams of scholarship in recent years that have shed light on the dominance of Chinese maritime diasporas, for instance, or the commercial networks of Turkish or Mughal merchants that largely shaped the parameters of the Indian Ocean maritime system. An over-privileging of the European institutional form enjoyed by company-states means that for much of Outsourcing Empire, the non-European world remains a hazy backdrop for European success.