Outsourcing Empire aims to reinstate the various early modern European trading companies to their rightful place as key agents in creating the modern international order. Scholars of international relations, Andrew Phillips and J. C. Sharman contend, have been insufficiently attentive to the role of such hybrids of sovereign authority, trading capacity, and military prowess in shaping the evolution of the relations between Europe and the rest of the world from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Borrowing and building upon the concept of the “company-state” from the historian Philip Stern's influential work of the same name, Phillips and Sharman argue that the companies were the primary means of European contact with the rest of the world at a time when the current divisions between public and private entities had not yet solidified because sovereignty was not then seen as indivisible and located in nation-states. It was thus only in the second half of the eighteenth century that the increasingly centralized European nations began to strip such entities of their privileges, creating the world of sovereign nations and imperial entities, on the one hand, and a depoliticized economic realm of corporate actors, on the other.

Phillips and Sharman make their case in a comparative study of a wide variety of trading companies over four brisk and lucid chapters. As might be expected, the Dutch and English East India Companies receive the greatest attention. But a valuable contribution of this work is to contextualize these among the many other such companies, which in some cases simply copied the charters of their more successful counterparts, and ended in failure.

The first chapter examines the rise of company-states in their early modern context and their violent irruption into the trading arena of the Indian Ocean in the seventeenth century. The second chapter turns to the performance of companies in the Atlantic world, where their tighter subordination to the interests of territorial states hampered the companies’ pursuit of profit (with the Hudson's Bay Company proving a notable exception). Chapter 3 offers a comparative account of the end of company-states as a viable form in the late eighteenth century, again productively analyzed in terms of their varying inability to balance military and economic exigencies. The last chapter discusses the brief revivification of companies as vehicles of imperialism in the late nineteenth century. In conclusion, Phillips and Sharman argue, the chartered companies had at least as much a role to play in originating the modern world of nation-states as the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648.

As should be clear from its impressive range, Outsourcing Empire is a work of synthesis. Perhaps its most noteworthy achievement is thus in presenting a clear and, in many respects, persuasive comparative account of the birth, evolution, and death of the chartered company as a form. Yet the broad sweep of the argument restricts Phillips and Sharman to relatively shallow incursions into the bodies of scholarship on particular regions. Thus, to take the case of South Asia alone, notable historians such as Sushil Chaudhary, Partha Chatterjee, and Kumkum Chatterjee are missing from the bibliography. Such absences have consequences for the argument. When Phillips and Sharman contend, for instance, that the companies were confronted primarily by the problem of balancing expenditures on military power with profit, they inadvertently echo without citing the argument already made by the late C. A. Bayly and S. Subrahmanyam about early modern “portfolio capitalists,” one that, moreover, was not restricted to seeing the companies as the sole actors in the Indian Ocean.

While Phillips and Sharman can hardly be faulted for pursuing the stated theme of their book, the focus on companies to the general exclusion of other actors raises conceptual problems. Take their treatment of sovereignty, which is key to their understanding of the success and failure of the companies. Phillips and Sharman assert that sovereignty in early modern Europe was seen as a “bundle of divisible prerogatives” (p. 22, 36 passim), which is surely a simplification belied by the considerable scholarship of Richard Tuck and others. They further regard the companies as extending claims to sovereignty in their overseas possessions (p. 52). But what, then, of the (presumably impinged) “sovereignty” of their host societies? Here we are told that the companies found an easy place because of the more or less “segmentary” nature of their Asian hosts in which “ritual suzerainty” was separate from “political sovereignty” (p. 63)—a conceptualization generally rejected by historians of South Asia for some decades now, and certainly inapplicable to the East India Companies’ key trading partner, the Mughal Empire. Despite Phillips and Sharman's avowed and laudable intention to dismantle Eurocentric accounts of the making of the international order, this lack of engagement with the perspectives on political and economic order emanating from the Indian Ocean states under consideration leaves the companies in their time-honored place as the principal agents of historical transformation in South Asia and beyond. Outsourcing Empire may thus convey exciting new tastes to the students of international relations to whom it is addressed. However, for historians of Asia, its provenance and vintage will be as recognizable and familiar as the pipes of Madeira carried season after season on the Hon'ble Company's ships to Fort William.