Although it has become common enough to emphasize the importance of private corporations in developing European empires, the focus is usually on one or two famous chartered companies. In the British case, these have included the East India Company (EIC), which first traded with and then governed much of South Asia; the Royal African Company, which monopolized the British slave trade for half a century; and Cecil Rhodes’s British South Africa Company, which annexed the colonies that would become Zimbabwe and Zambia. What Philip Stern has accomplished in this important book is to place what most people already know about such companies in an exquisitely detailed context. A rich culture of what he variously calls “portfolio colonialism” (8), “venture colonialism” (10), and “sovereignty speculation” (266) unfolds over six densely packed chapters, revealing the pervasiveness of joint-stock enterprise as both a mechanism for financing colonization and a forum for communicating the lure of imperial expansion. The fact that most such firms struggled to get off the ground—Stern mirthfully recounts numerous “get-poor-quick” schemes (143)—did not diminish their persistent appeal from Elizabethan to Edwardian times.

A leading theme of Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations That Built British Colonialism is the continuity of both the company form and the motley crew of colonial boosters who hovered around it like moths around a flame. Early innovators, like the serial adventurer Humphrey Gilbert (1539–1583), lurched from Russia to Ireland to North America, leaving in their wake a set of “somewhat legally defensible” yet “geographically vague … property rights” (37). The story of Gilbert and his rivals, told in Stern’s opening chapter, sets the tone for the rest of the book, as each new generation of speculators risks their own and their friends’ wealth on proposals to settle or trade with faraway lands. The few success stories to emerge from this landscape, including the EIC in 1600, appear more as lucky accidents than far-seeing exemplars of mercantile wile. And although Stern, whose previous book carefully surveyed the EIC’s early fortunes, does closely follow it up to its demise in 1858, he spends as much time on the misses as on the winning tickets in this colonial corporate lottery.

In each chapter, Stern bites off roughly half a century’s worth of company promoters and the crown’s love–hate relationship with them—torn, as it was, between milking them for revenue and cleaning up the messes they created. Chapter 2 takes us to Virginia and Guyana under the Stuarts, before returning to India and Ireland under Cromwell. Chapter 3 follows Robert Boyle from the Royal Society (itself a joint-stock company) to the East India, Hudson’s Bay, and New England Companies, the latter of which chartered new towns while pooling resources to acquire indigenous land. In Chapter 4, Stern intriguingly maps such American land grabs onto the EIC’s eighteenth-century territorial acquisition. The latter, he argued, led directly to its partial loss of autonomy in 1784, while the former led to the companies’ replacement by the United States—which modeled its constitution on its members’ various written corporate charters. He cites contemporary arguments (by Thomas Jefferson among others) that “charters had not made colonies; colonists had,” by aggregating their wealth and building the nuts and bolts of governance (163).

Stern’s final two chapters trace a resurgence of the company form during the second British Empire, with many echoes from earlier times. A broadening pool of investors after 1815 proved every bit as interested in colonies as their forebears, and there was no shortage of company promoters to sate the demand. Chaotic start-up opportunities in Latin America vied with staid settlements in Canada and the Antipodes. The leading emigration advocate, Edward Gibbon Wakefield, spawned several such schemes through his mantra of systematic colonization, whereby investors would pay emigrants to voyage abroad and then collect dividends from their rented property after they arrived. One section in Chapter 5, “Global Wakefield,” rapidly follows an interconnected set of speculators from South Australia to Central America and on to the Pacific Northwest and Hawai'i, before settling in New Zealand: around the world in eight pages. Stern’s final chapter pairs fascinating vignettes set in the Falkland Islands and Borneo with a sweeping survey of various African colonial projects, most of which borrowed extensively from pre-existing corporate structures and justifications. All these cases show, he argues, that the “‘new’ imperialism … could look quite old indeed” (243).

The sheer volume of companies covered in this book—there are 370 listed in the index—means that Stern’s scrupulous attention to their varied legal constitutions can make for dense reading. This dense forest of legal terminology also has a tendency to obscure the human costs of colonization, although examples of those do peek through here and there. Overall, though, Stern makes it abundantly clear that Britain most certainly did not acquire its empire in “a fit of absence of mind,” as J. R. Seeley once famously asserted. Rather, as Stern convincingly claims, what drove imperial expansion over the course of four centuries was a spasmodic series of aggressively proactive, if not always very competent, rival company promotions. This scrum of corporate interests, he concludes, produced an empire that did not “see like a state” (12), but still “proved to be quite deliberate and effective weapons of colonial expansion and violence” (11). Stern doggedly follows the ensuing chaos from its Elizabethan origins to its Edwardian end.