A Eurasia of Composite Sovereignties

An efflorescence of early modern political and intellectual history over the past decades has without doubt answered the clarion call to bring the state “back in.”Footnote 14 Of course, while adding nuance, depth, and vibrant debate to early modern British political history, most of this work continues to regard the state in fairly traditional terms, tethered as it is to the teleology of a modern Weberian national body politic exerting a monopoly of legitimate violence over a “well-defined, continuous territory,” marked by the use of war and bureaucracy to achieve those ends.Footnote 15 At the same time, much of this work has also offered a vision of a “polymorphous” early modern state, in which violence was barely controllable, borders flexible and permeable, and the state less a “binary” relationship between ruler and ruled than “grids of power” in which individuals from the local to the global “were able to locate themselves on a number of hierarchies,” over both space and time.Footnote 16 Within what J. H. Elliott has identified as “a Europe of composite monarchies,” political communities now appear never to have been straightforward and simple but, rather, overlapping networks of local and regional power that stood in varying and complex relationships to shared and multiple centers.Footnote 17

Despite all this much-needed nuance and complexity, however, there is a way in which all of this work still serves to root the history of politics and political thought instinctively in national contexts. As Patrick Collinson has observed, “notions of the modern state as a norm or a necessary destination of historical development, especially in the form of the nation state” still leads, in European history at least, to the general notion that “political history means the history of states.”Footnote 18 For example, visions of a composite Greater Britain or Atlantic Archipelago, while opening up stimulating new ways of thinking about the “British problem,” still necessarily come back to a British problem: that is, reinscribing the importance of national (or multinational) categories and perhaps even underplaying how awkward and uncomfortable an arrangement this was in the first place.Footnote 19

Certainly for European contemporaries, what constituted legitimate state and sovereign power was a matter of debate, especially amid the great upheavals of reformation, regicide, and revolution that defined Britain's sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As Joyce Lee Malcolm has put it, “Seventeenth-century Englishmen were thoroughly confused about sovereignty, knew they were, but found the ambiguity tolerable.”Footnote 20 The greatest articulations of absolutist forms of government, like Hobbes or Bodin, served not to describe political reality but to prescribe a remedy for the chaos they saw as arising from the complex and unsettled relationship among emperors, monarchs, princes, parliaments, popes, subjects, citizens, local communities, corporations, and even the law itself. And, if the nature of state and sovereignty on land was ambiguous, its status on the seas was positively unsettled, particularly in the world outside of Europe. Whether the seas were open or closed, who or what could claim ownership over them, and when, where, and how they could do so was a central point of debate surrounding European expansion and formative questions in the constitution of early modern international political thought.Footnote 21 Moreover, while it is now clear that overseas expansion helped define early modern European state formation, spawning new institutions, stimulating greater revenues, and determining foreign policy, it also simultaneously opened spaces for a host of other rival political communities that also engaged in the business of empire: from informal merchant networks to transoceanic corporations, from privateers and mercenaries to the “many-headed hydra” of pirates, slaves, sailors, farmers, and other commoners.Footnote 22 As Elliott has recently observed, with his notion of composite monarchy very much in mind, histories of Britain's Atlantic world have revealed not a monolithic imperial system but a “patchwork of different styles of government and jurisdiction,” not the least important of which was proprietary rule by companies.Footnote 23

Even if we were to ignore all of these warnings not to read the so-called Weberian model back into the history of early modern European states and empires, its central tenets would still remain a Eurocentric proposition about the proper organization of political power.Footnote 24 In Asia as well, politics and a political economy, particularly military power, relied on the incorporation of a host of rivals through mediated relationships and fragmented forms of institutional power, such as the Mughal faujdar.Footnote 25 Territorial borders, as in Europe, were nebulous, ambiguously defined, and impossible to patrol.Footnote 26 Peripatetic courts, noncontiguous states, and overlapping forms of local, regional, imperial, and religious authority—what Burton Stein has called the “segmentary state” in South India—rarely corresponded neatly to centralized or territorial jurisdiction, revealing that “different, even conflicting, principles of political association may exist in the same time and place, and among the same people, and that these different principles may also be understood as appropriate, or ‘legitimate.’”Footnote 27 The vibrant and viable “successor states” that emerged in the wake of eighteenth-century Mughal decentralization also testify to the “looser, cascading political structures” and “layered and shared sovereignty” that distinguished the organization of political power in the precolonial Indian Ocean world from its later modern, colonial manifestations.Footnote 28

Thus, across the early modern Eurasian world, composite forms of state, empire, and sovereignty were central to the constitution of political power—so central that this shared aspect of the organization of political community and culture may be what makes it possible to speak at all about a global early modern period.Footnote 29 Moreover, whether one believes globalization has caused the nation-state to retrench or decline, it is at least becoming increasingly feasible to imagine, again with Collinson, a political history that is not conditioned by a world in which “state nationalism proves to have the last, or latest laugh.”Footnote 30 Divorcing, or at least historicizing, the necessary connection between national state and sovereignty, and envisioning them both as composite, opens the prospect of historical contexts in which “entities other than territorial states can begin to make legitimate (externally recognized) claims of final authority.”Footnote 31 Thus, it becomes possible to see a body like the English East India Company, as Jurrien van Goor has suggested for the late eighteenth-century Dutch East India Company, as “best … characterized as an Ancien Régime state, a conglomerate of territorial possessions, rights and pretensions exercised in a certain area without definite boundaries.”Footnote 32 More widely, in the context of the world outside of Europe, such an observation demands focusing our attention less on what a state is and more on what a state does, and just who did the business of state and empire in the early modern period.

“By the Best Right Pretended”

From its inception in 1600, the English East India Company was, constitutionally speaking, a political form: “one body corporate and politick,” charged like other corporations (such as municipalities, universities, incorporated associations, and chartered companies, particularly in the Atlantic) with self-government and the good governance of those subject to its command. As a body politic endowed from 1607 with “perpetual succession” and from 1657 with a permanent joint stock, by the second half of the seventeenth century the East India Company had a formal expectation of political and fiscal immortality. Like other corporations, the Company was endowed with institutional practices, social bonds, and systems of government that regarded its members not simply as investors or employees but as corporators: “freemen” of the Company, which, like the freedom of any corporation, conferred particular rights of membership in return for serious commitments to the corporation's authority, such as oaths of fidelity.Footnote 33 This very old form of corporate political form was, for the Company, only underscored by a relatively novel one. The joint-stock organization, unlike individual traders, regulated companies, or guilds, was designed specifically to separate structures of governance from structures of its business. Capital came not directly from trading profits but from investment, and investment, not expertise in a trade, conferred rights of government. As such, the Company, like other joint stocks, was directed by an executive council of twenty-four committees (known, after 1709, as directors) elected out of a legislative body of stockholders who needed to have no expertise or firsthand knowledge of the trade. Decisions thus were made by these bodies, in theory, not according to individual interest in the commerce but as a collective and unanimous body with a responsibility to the whole. The hierarchical network of ships, settlements, factories, and cities governed by this body in London were each administered similarly, by councils held to the same standard of unanimous, consultative, and consensual government so highly valued in English political culture.Footnote 34

As a corporation and a joint stock, the Company thus had a legal personality and a political constitution, which, as one legal scholar has noted, gave the Company at the very least the “potential qualities … which in case of need were capable of developing into a state.”Footnote 35 At the same time, the Company was unique among English corporations in possessing the rights to all the English trade, traffic, and passages by sea to and “beyond the Cape of Bona Esperanza, to the Streights of Magellan.”Footnote 36 Feeding on anti-Islamic sentiment and broader rhetoric about the volatility and violence of intercourse with arbitrary “Asiatick” governments, Company leaders made the case for specific rights of government, some comparable to its contemporaries in the Atlantic, that reflected its unique position as a global maritime operation.Footnote 37 By 1700, the Company counted in its charters the rights to appoint governors and officers abroad, to make law, erect courts, judge and sentence offenders, erect fortifications, declare martial law, coin money, make war on non-Christians, conduct diplomacy, and in the words of Charles II, to “chastise correct & punish such of Our Subjects as are or shall bee by the said Govern^r & Company imployed or under their Comand.”Footnote 38 As those petitioning for the first charter in 1600 put it, “the trade of the Indies, being so far remote from here” could not possibly be run otherwise, which by the end of the century became an argument for the Company's need of no “less than absolute sovereign power in India.”Footnote 39

Of all these rights, perhaps the most important was that this vast charge over English affairs in the eastern hemisphere, usually understood as a commercial monopoly over the Eurasian trade, rendered the Company as the only body—including the crown—that could legitimately grant licenses to “any [English] Person or Persons, to sail, trade or traffick” into the East Indies.Footnote 40 Such licenses and passes issued in London or Asia by Company officials enjoined the treatment of licensed private merchants “as if the Said persons were actually in the said Right Honorable Company's service,” permitting free and unmolested movement in Asia and, in turn, requiring them to “[conform] themselves in all things to the orders and rules” of the Company.Footnote 41 In determining which English subjects could be in the Indies in the first place and incorporating them into their government when there, Company leaders in essence claimed a jurisdiction over all English subjects (and at times all Britons) when in Asia. Such a claim to extraterritorial authority was a unique facet of European overseas expansion, rendering the very body of a subject, in Elizabeth Mancke's words, a “site of sovereignty.”Footnote 42 Yet, in Asia, that extraterritorial authority over English subjects was vested in the East India Company. This rendered the British subject in Asia a Company subject as well, responsible to its laws and liable to its punishments.

Of course, while Company committees, advocates, lawyers, and pamphleteers in London deployed arguments about the arbitrary and untrustworthy nature of “Asiatick despots,” as James Tracy has shown with regard to the Dutch at Surat, seventeenth-century Europeans on the ground in India had a much more sophisticated and nuanced understanding of Asian politics.Footnote 43 As they relied on charters from the English monarch, English Company officials in Asia also consistently and vigilantly engaged in diplomatic relations in Asia, keeping residents at various courts, corresponding with local officials, and seeking and accumulating agreements, treaties, and its much cherished “firmands” from rulers in the Indo-Persian world. A farman was an imperial command providing immunities, privileges, or autonomies, which was often (like the word “charter”) used by Company officials as a catchall to mean a host of other forms of grants, edicts, and proclamations from both local and imperial powers throughout Asia.

Company officials tended to envision the farman, like the charter, as a form of property and a heritable contract or dispensation. This, as Sudipta Sen has pointed out, was a fundamental misreading of Mughal political culture.Footnote 44 Nonetheless, taken as such, the farman became critical to Company officials’ understanding of their own political system and constitution in Asia. Farmans were used to seek confirmation in Asia of rights granted by English charters. The committees even declared war three times in the 1680s—in Siam, Bengal, and western India—partly in the (somewhat quixotic) hopes of forcing a farman from Aurangzeb and an agreement with the King of Siam that would confer exclusive trading rights and formal recognition of the Company's exclusive and extraterritorial authority over Britons in their territories. In fact, one reason the head of the Company's affairs in Asia, John Gayer, ultimately agreed to convoy Mughal ships in the Indian Ocean in the 1690s was the hope that it would help obtain such a farman.Footnote 45

Yet, while Asian grants and treaties reconfirmed both the commercial and political rights that the Company claimed by virtue of its English charters, they also became sources of power in their own right. This was particularly evident in the foundations for the Company's settlements and cities in Asia. Of its three earliest independent cities, the Company held two on English patents—the islands of St. Helena (1658, reissued in 1673) and Bombay (1668). Madras, however, was acquired from the South Indian nayak Damarla Venkatappa in 1639, and its boundaries expanded over the century by similar grants from Vijayanagar, Golconda, and the Mughal Empire, as the city's environs passed from one to the other. At Madras, the Company administered justice, coined money, and exercised other functions of government under treaties with Vijayanagar almost two decades before any English charter gave it such a right anywhere else.Footnote 46 Even Bombay, where the Company minted coins at some points in English and at others Persian, the committees noted in 1689, “may lawfully exercise that Royall Prerogative of Coinage which is granted us by his Majesties Charter, as well as by the Mogulls Phirmaund and Husball Hookum.”Footnote 47

It was not through charters but through farmans and analogous concepts that Company officials in India began in the later decades of the seventeenth century to enlarge its number of cities and settlements, which would become the backbone of its later expansion in India. In 1687, Bombay was instructed to strengthen its subordinate fort and factory at Karwar, down the southwestern coast, by getting “from Sumbajee [Sambhaji, the Maratha emperor] a Phirmand for a further extent of Territory about that fort into the Country & all that point of land between the fort and the Sea.”Footnote 48 Beginning in the 1670s, the Company also began to pursue plans for a sovereign enclave in Attingal, in modern Kerala; in 1687, two captains were sent to “treat with the Queen and Government about fortifying,” and in 1693, another pair of envoys, Daniel Acworth and John Brabourn, reopened negotiations with the Rani of Attingal to secure “a phirmand for to hold the place Limitts & privildges thereof for ever as long as the Sun & moone indures in the name of the Right Honorable English East India Company as a free possession of theirs for ever.”Footnote 49 The next year, the rani issued her ola, authorizing a Company settlement at the coastal town of Anjengo.Footnote 50 Around the same time, Elihu Yale, the governor of Madras, also secured from the Marathas the Company settlement at Cuddalore and began construction on Fort St. David; in 1691, the Madras council reported that the city “flourish[es] bravely, daily encreasing in revenues, Strength Trade and Inhabitants & bears the best aspect for a future greatness & improvement of any new Europe Settlement in India.”Footnote 51

In negotiating for these settlements, in a number of cases, Company officials insisted that their settlement and fortification would bring not only commercial benefit but, as they argued to the nawab of Bengal, Shaista Khan, would serve as well as “a guard and defence to y^e Mogulls Subjects from any villences that the Dutch may intend against them.”Footnote 52 Privately, though, the committees were a fair bit more blunt, noting to the Madras council that “we look upon the Mogulls Governours, but as Instruments which we hope to compell by fair means, or foul, to use us better hereafter.”Footnote 53 The failure of initial negotiations for a secure settlement in Bengal, coupled with Mughal officials’ new duties on trade and continued refusal to acknowledge Company authority over Englishmen resident in their territory, led the committees to declare war on the nawab in early 1686.Footnote 54 (The war in Siam was also accompanied by the misguided hope that the Company would easily seize the Siamese territory of Tanintharyi “flagrante instante bello.”)Footnote 55 The committees sent out a fleet for the Bay of Bengal and proposed to make a secret alliance with both Sambhaji and the King of Pegu against the nawab.Footnote 56 Hostilities broke out in October. By the next June a truce was settled, and although the settlement to the conflict was complex and took years to conclude, principal among its results was a grant of a zamindari, or landholdership, to the Company for the three villages in Bengal that formed the foundation for Calcutta.Footnote 57

Amid all this activity in South Asia, the Company's leadership in London had also become extremely keen on securing a sovereign independent settlement in Indonesia to replace its factory at Banten, from which it had been expelled at the hands of the Dutch in 1682. The instructions sent by the Company's secret committee revealed the various options Company officials imagined they had at their disposal. The Madras council was told to “settle upon an inheritance (which is certainly best, as we are at Bombay) or upon a kind of Leasehold, as you are at Madrass”; failing this, the council was authorized simply to send settlers to an uninhabited part of Sumatra, where they could then make a claim “by the best right pretended to by any people Viz. prime occupancy”—a source of sovereign power that required neither charter nor farman for its legitimacy.Footnote 58 The Company ultimately made an agreement with the powerful oligarchy, the orang kaya, for a settlement at Bengkulu and began constructing York Fort (later Fort Marlborough) in 1685. Only five years later, the committees had become quite bold in their perception of the Company's power in local politics. Foreshadowing later policies in British India, the committees observed to the Bengkulu council that “the way to govern those people, is to govern them by petty Kings of their own, whom you must honour before the people and make them your Instruments to keep the people in subjection while you governe them and keep them in dependance upon you that is, the antient and true Method for Europeans to maintain their Dominion in those Countryes.”Footnote 59

Although in most cases the farman and charter did not conflict, they could also be used to countermand one another. It is not terribly surprising that the Company used English charters to supplement rights it could not acquire in India, but there were also striking incidents in which the Company used Mughal grants to evade English authority. Company leaders in London were insistent, for example, that their subordinates take their “phyrmaund or agreement in the name of the English East India Company only, & not the English Nacon in general,” so as to reconfirm that it was the Company's government, not the English government, that had jurisdiction in Asia.Footnote 60 Perhaps the most vivid manifestation of this came after 1698, when a syndicate of disaffected former Company servants, interlopers, and rival investors acquired an act of Parliament for a “new” East India Company, intended to replace the “old” one. When Nicholas Waite, its representative and royally credentialed “publick minister” sailed into Surat to take up his presidency, he demanded that the old Company's warehouse on the shore strike its flag in deference to his Union Jack and royal commission. The old council at Surat refused his demand, citing not the century of charters and patents from English monarchs but “our indubitable rights and priviledges by the Divers phirmaunds of the present Mogul, as likewise by them of his Ancestors and predecessors.”Footnote 61 Meanwhile, the new Company's President for Bengal, Edward Littleton, a former interloper, complained that the old Company “took noe notice of his Majestys Character but to [disown] any power his Majesty had on that Account and would owne noe Authority but what came from their Masters.”Footnote 62

Such arguments were not simply made on distant shores or by the Company's enemies. In defending themselves against the attempts of the House of Commons to withdraw the old Company's charter in favor of this new syndicate, the committees insisted that its farmans and other instruments from Asian powers were part of its “dead stock,” both private property as well as public treaties made by the Company. To eliminate the Company would thus not only be to confiscate unduly the property of the Company and its corporators; it would be to destroy in one stroke a century-old diplomatic regime on which the East India trade rested, while making the English crown and Parliament party to the violation of one of the most sacrosanct principles of international law: pacta sunt servanda—treaties must be obeyed and honored.Footnote 63

“A Select & Authorized Council”

Although charters and farmans authorized the Company's aggressive political behavior, from war making to the minting of coins, that behavior in turn came to form an independent pillar for Company leaders’ sense of their power as a body politic. Especially given the Company's ability to amplify, supplement, or countermand one with the other, all three sources of authority together constituted a form of composite sovereignty, best understood as a “structural autonomy,” which rendered the Company a sort of tertius gaudens able to create a discrete space for itself within a network of competing and overlapping forms of power.Footnote 64 The court of committees put it even more simply: “Ballancing of Powers is the truest Art of Government.”Footnote 65

In this context, by the late seventeenth century, Company officials in Asia had come to envision themselves as servants of “publique affairs” as distinct from their role as merchants.Footnote 66 As the Bombay Council wrote to Madras, on the eve of their war with Mughal forces, “Wee Keep our Eyes open & act with Consideration to the best of our Capacities with a true Zeale for the publick Interest which is but our reasonable duty & most highly becomes us, & indeed have noe regard to particular Interest that soe little is in our thoughts that it stands not att all in Computition with the publick, but is layed wholly on one side.”Footnote 67 This is why interloping—by which the Company meant not just the Eurasian smuggling trade but the presence of any English subject in Asia without the Company's license—was so noxious and offensive. The primary problem with interlopers was not that they impinged on the Company's monopoly but that they trespassed on its jurisdiction and resisted and flouted its authority as a government. Thus, to Company officials, interlopers were not merely thieves: they were “worse … then Pirates & deserve as much to be hanged,” “ungovernable persons,” and “unstable minds that are uneasy under a steady righteous Government.”Footnote 68 As the governor of Bombay proclaimed in 1696, interlopers “to [the] Utmost of their power in India endeavoured to bannish all reverence of Governm[ent] out of the mindes of men.”Footnote 69

If interlopers were the primary threat to ordered government in Asia, Company leaders’ understanding of their role in Asia tended to be most clearly and emphatically articulated in their battle against them, both in Asia and in Europe, particularly in the arguments made by the Company's lawyers in its famous prosecution of the interloper Thomas Sandys in the Court of King's Bench from mid-1683 to mid-1684. In 1682, Company leaders received information that one interloper, Thomas Sandys, was outfitting a ship on the Thames and intending to make an unauthorized voyage to the East. The Company had his ship stopped and charges brought against him in the Court of Chancery. When brought to suit, Sandys made a simple, but momentous, counterargument: he could not be held at fault, not because he did not intend to trade to the East but because the Company's charter, as a monopoly, was “in it self void.”Footnote 70 The Chancery, though suspecting Sandys had little chance, agreed that at least it was a legitimate plea, and the ensuing writ of error put the issue before the Court of King's Bench.

The resulting East India Company v. Sandys (1683–84)—or the “great case of monopolies” as it came to be known—drew remarkable attention, becoming a bit of a cause célèbre, both at the time and since. It has most often been taken to be a watershed in which mercantilism itself was put on trial and more recently as even a prolegomenon to the conflicts in political economy that engendered the Glorious Revolution.Footnote 71 While crucial as a case over mercantilism in the British context, however, this case was also host to a striking debate not only about the rights of merchants and English subjects but about the very nature of contact with Asia, the government of trade, sovereignty over the seas, and the nature of Christian intercourse with “infidels.” East India Company v. Sandys can thus be seen as a manifesto of sorts for the Company's role as a government in Asia and a reflection of its leaders’ aspirations to create permanent political foundations in India.

In fact, at least from one perspective, the trial's very sobriquet—the “great case of monopolies”—was a misnomer. The Company's lead lawyers, particularly John Holt, the future lord chief justice, and Robert Sawyer, the attorney general, even demurred to the fact that monopolies were indeed illegal. They merely insisted that a monopoly was by definition the restriction to one party of a right that already existed to everyone. As commercial, diplomatic, or political traffic with Asia could only be said to exist by virtue of the Company's efforts, it was not, strictly speaking, a monopoly. Such an argument, all too easily dismissed as disingenuous and clever legal chicanery, spoke to a wider issue: the Company's leadership had consistently maintained that as a body, it was absolutely necessary to secure order and stability in the commerce with Asia. In one sense, this was a basic principle of seventeenth-century political economy: for trade to prosper it had to be regulated and governed. As Josiah Child put it, “It is the care of Law-makers first and principally to provide for the People in gross, not particulars. … Trade should be regulated and governed by wise, honest and able men.”Footnote 72 The pamphleteer Philopatris, who may have been Child, similarly argued in 1681 that individual merchants “while they are in the busie and eager prosecution of their particular Trades,” cannot be trusted to act for the common good.Footnote 73 For this, he insisted—citing authorities such as Cicero, Bodin, and Oliver St. John (“a principal Engineer in the first act of Navigation”)—government was needed.Footnote 74 In Europe, as Charles Malloy put it in 1677, “on this side the Line,” free trade was possible and lawful because it was supervised by Christian princes.Footnote 75 In Asia, trade without governance would be an invitation to chaos and catastrophe, precisely because it would be lawless, something Philopatris likened to sending untrained military recruits against a “well governed Veteran Army, with an inexhaustible treasure,” or defending Protestantism against popery without “a National Church in England.”Footnote 76 Thus, as the committees put it to the Bengal council in 1683, “the trade of England in India [could not] be preserved by any other Means than the strict Rules and Discipline of an United Stock governed by a Select & authorized council.”Footnote 77

By the later seventeenth century, if there was a broadly mercantilist vision among Company leadership for its business within Asia itself, it was one in which the Company acted in the role of the state, not the monopoly, as the “Select & authorized council,” “the lawmaker,” and the “wise, honest and able men” who ensured good order and government over the English trade and traffic in Asia. As Child had also insisted, corporate companies were absolutely necessary in “countries with which his Majesty hath no Alliance, nor can have any by reason of their distance, or Barbarity, or non-Communication with the Princes of Christendom.”Footnote 78 Thus, in the East Indies, it was the Company, not the English crown, that maintained the physical infrastructure of commerce, such as forts and forces, as well as the political infrastructure, most notably through diplomacy, which made trade and the very intercourse with Asia possible.

This was a crucial point. Pro-Company pamphleteers had long maintained that it was impractical for the English king to maintain diplomatic relations with “above 100 Kings and Rajas,” at such a great distance and expense.Footnote 79 However, the Company's lawyers did not rest on the argument that a century's worth of investment in forts, ships, and arms, as well as farmans, envoys, and residents at various courts, justified its exclusive privilege; in fact, they rejected the very principle that the Company maintained a patent, which could ever lapse or be rendered a public works in exchange for just compensation. Their argument was much more remarkable and was rooted not just in the common law but in canon, civil, and natural law as well. Holt and Sawyer insisted that, as infidels, Asians—particularly Muslim Asians—were in a natural and perpetual state of war (perpetuus inimicus) with Christendom. According to both Catholic and Protestant doctrine, no Christian could have legal intercourse with an infidel until that state of war was relieved by a treaty of peace or commerce. Sawyer argued, both in Sandys and a few years earlier in an opinion to the Privy Council on the legality of interloping, that while the English monarch had treaties with some Muslim princes, like the Ottoman sultan, “as to the Mogull and other Indian Princes there is no League of Peace or commerce between them and the King of England.”Footnote 80 Diplomacy in Asia was Company diplomacy—prosecuted by its representatives, in its name, at its expense, and according to its leaders’ expertise. Thus, in Asia, those belonging to the Company or licensed by it (and under its government) were relieved of the prohibition on intercourse with infidels, but “all other Subjects are merely precarious and have no pretence of takeing any advantage of any peace made by the Company. So as to them the Indians remain to all purposes Alien enemies.”Footnote 81 As such, interloping was not simply a crime against property but a crime against religion, morality, and government.

This was an extraordinary argument but one that fit squarely with the notions of political economy that the Company's advocates had outlined. If one responsibility of government was to regulate and order trade, Sawyer maintained, another “is to take care that there is not an infection, by correspondence with infidels.”Footnote 82 As Holt observed, “This Company is incorporated and made to have the government of this trade; they being Christians, no question, are to take care of the Christian religion; and to take care that their agents and factors that trade under this constitution, keep up to that religion they profess; but certainly it is quite another thing when people trade of their own head; there they converse only with infidels, they cannot have divine offices.”Footnote 83 Thus Sawyer—a crown lawyer no less—was arguing that no one, not even the king, could undermine the Company's charter or alter its political rights without putting Christianity itself in jeopardy, which no government or law could justifiably do.Footnote 84

Of course, Sandys's lawyers objected strenuously to this argument but in so doing also provided a good deal of insight as to its profound implications. William Williams, one of Sandys's lawyers and later solicitor general, argued that vesting in the Company such responsibilities and autonomy altered the very constitution of England and rendered the Company no less than “a sort of republic for the management of trade.”Footnote 85 Sir George Treby, Sandys's lead counsel and also a later lord chief justice, expressed sardonic surprise “to hear merchandizing to the East-Indies objected against as an unlawful trade, and did not expect so much divinity in the argument,” dismissing the religious argument as “a conceit absurd, monkish, fantastical and fanatical.”Footnote 86 A later pamphleteer echoed this sentiment, insisting the position was “a meer Chimera of Popish Original, without any other Foundation.”Footnote 87 Another explicitly recognized that a charter “for half the circumference of the Globe of the Earth,” which he credited (erroneously) to have originated with Cromwell, was almost identical to that sanctioned for the Portuguese by the papal dispensation; as he observed, “However Oliver would, in his Zeal, have the Pope to be Anti-Christ in exalting himself above God, and in disposing the Kingdoms upon Earth, wherein the Pope and he were Simeon and Levy.”Footnote 88

Thus, the Company's adversaries recognized as embedded in its arguments aspirations for independent political foundations and jurisdiction in Asia, which were remarkably similar to those the Company had once so strenuously rejected when employed by the Portuguese, and even the Dutch, earlier in the century. While citing precedent in the common law, primarily in a fourteenth-century statute forbidding aiding foreign enemies of the king, The Company's lawyers clearly drew as well on a medieval scholastic tradition that envisioned war against the Muslim infidel as the most just war (bellum iustissimum), which in turn formed the ideological foundations for defenders of the papal dispensations and the Iberian claims, such as Seraphim de Freitas.Footnote 89 At the same time, the Company's advocates also cited in their defense Hugo Grotius, Freitas's main interlocutor on behalf of the early Dutch Company and the seventeenth-century standard-bearer for mare liberum. Parting from earlier Protestant doctrine that regarded any intercourse with infidels as prohibited, Grotius had importantly established the possibility of making treaties with Asian princes. At the same time, he cautioned that doing so was of such questionable wisdom that it required the extreme circumspection and caution of which only a prince or a responsible council was capable.Footnote 90 Closer to home, Holt also offered as evidence English overseas charters, which, like that of Sir Walter Raleigh, authorized their holders “to discover new countries that were heathenish and under infidels”; as a number of historians have recently shown, despite the anti-Iberian rhetoric associated with them, these early Atlantic charters were deeply rooted in doctrine worked out in theory and practice by the Spanish and Portuguese.Footnote 91 Sawyer also cited the expulsion of the Jews as evidence of government's responsibility to protect against infidelity, a common trope in fifteenth-century discussions around the papal bulls, which reasoned through Christian relations with infidels by thinking “in terms of Jews living in Christian Europe or in terms of the wars with the Moslems.”Footnote 92 Given all this evidence, Sawyer insisted, to deny that there was a prohibition against intercourse with infidels or to fail to take it seriously would be “a difficult task, in rowing against the stream of the laws of all christian countries.”Footnote 93

Interlopers also objected to the Company's arguments, insisting—as the Company had once done against the Portuguese and Dutch—that the Company could not possibly occupy, use, or improve commerce within the entirety of its vast jurisdiction, and, thus, as thinkers from Grotius to Locke argued, particularly in the extra-European context, “one can have true, private property only in things which one can either personally consume or personally transform in some way.”Footnote 94 Company advocates did not deny this premise but insisted instead that they met its test not by trading everywhere in Asia but by making possible and securing the English contact with Asia in the first place. Again, these arguments echoed claims made by both the Portuguese and the Dutch that continual traffic and navigation were the sea's substitutions for permanent occupation or plantation on land, especially if reinforced by exclusive contracts, grants, and treaties.Footnote 95 By opening the trade, cultivating a diplomatic relationship with Asian powers, and protecting passage and settlement in the Indies, the English Company could claim a sort of just proprietorship, akin to the kind of stewardship over the sea lanes asserted by the Portuguese by virtue of their papal bulls as well as their efforts to police the Indian Ocean.Footnote 96 To assault such an exclusive privilege was unthinkable, since “this Company have no more in their Charter, than all the East-India Companies in Christendom have in their Charters: and from thence infer, that either so much as is in the Charter ought to be for publick Utility; or else all Christendom, except those few gentlemen that complain, are mistaken in their Politicks.”Footnote 97

“Politicall Science” and “Martiall Prudence”

By the second half of the seventeenth century at least, the kinds of theoretical arguments the Company deployed in defense of its exclusive rights in England reflected in theory what had become a reality in Asia: the English Company was very much like its Portuguese, Dutch, Danish, French, and Asian rivals in attempting to project its maritime and littoral power onto the sea and sea-lanes, in part to reinforce its authority over those subject to its command both at sea and on land.Footnote 98 The most practical expression of this was found in the Company's use of shipping passes, which, like Portuguese cartazes or Dutch pascedullen, were certificates issued for a fee by the European companies to European and Asian merchant shipping—“from local chieftains up to the great emperor of the Mughals”—in exchange for safe passage and occasionally protection.Footnote 99 Passes served a number of purposes, aside from the revenues they generated. Giving passes to one's European rivals was an effective tool used by each of the companies to harass one another, while threatening to withhold passes could serve to leverage political concessions from Asian powers. Most importantly, though, passes marked their holders as participants in the Company's regime. They distinguished between interlopers and licit English traders, while also indicating those Europeans and Asians who were subject to the Company's authority more broadly. Thus, when a small galley belonging to some residents of Bombay was seized by Danes in 1693, John Goldsborough, who briefly held the post of Company General, protested to the governor of Tranquebar that restitution should be made immediately, as they were “Subjects to the Right Honorable East India Company, having a pass from the Deputie Governor there.”Footnote 100

That the Company could have “subjects” was perhaps the most vibrant expression that late seventeenth-century Company leaders had come face-to-face with problems that could not necessarily be solved with mercantile principles. In this instance, for Goldsborough, passes were an extraterritorial manifestation of the Company's authority, protecting the Bombay merchants as much as if they had been under the guns of Samuel Annesley's floating castles. Of course, the fact that they held the pass as residents of Bombay also reminded them that Company power was rooted in actual castles: a growing network of fortified, sovereign settlements with a cosmopolitan Eurasian population under their command.

A remarkable amount of the discussion, debate, and effort by Company policy makers and officials in London and Asia in the later seventeenth century was directed toward how to make their settlements populous and prosperous and to link them into a global maritime system around which goods, officials, inhabitants (free and unfree), and both commercial and political expertise could circulate. The attitudes of the committees in London as well as local officials and councils in Asia mirrored the issues at stake in the Sandys case. Encouraging the commercial, civic, and moral prosperity of those subject to its authority was both the key to stability, security, and power, as well as the Company's basic obligation as a government. Company leaders seemed guided by a political economy that envisioned the Company as responsible for creating the conditions that would attract and encourage both a landed and commercial elite, rooted in the welfare of the city and encouraged by a free but governed commerce in Asia. The vision of the Company's role mixed paternalist and republican attitudes toward governance; it also sought to encourage order and prosperity by cultivating a virtuous subject attentive to duty, as expressed primarily through obedience, obligation, and service to the polity.Footnote 101 This was the key to independent, self-sustaining, sovereign plantations and cities, “thriving … in point of revenue and Subjects” and founded upon good policy and just law; again, for evidence, one only needed to look toward the “foundation … first laid by the Portugueez and since refined and improved by the better policy of the Dutch.”Footnote 102

The center of this system, by the later seventeenth century, was quite literally built on Portuguese ground. In 1674, the Court of Committees desired that their new island of Bombay ought be “settled in the way of a colony”; a decade later, it was announced to be the “principal seat of our trade as well as of our power,” the base of operations for the Company's head of its affairs in Asia (styled a general, not unlike its later manifestation as governor-general) and its western Indian presidency.Footnote 103 There were short-lived plans in the 1670s to populate this colony with English immigrants. The Company made (largely unsuccessful) overtures to English fishmongers and their families to settle, as well as to the governors of London's Christ's Hospital for “young maidens that have had virtuous education” and women of “honest and civil behaviour” willing to emigrate there, as well as to St. Helena and Madras.Footnote 104

Of course, other than at St. Helena, the Company's one Atlantic plantation, the reality was that the vast majority of those subject to Company rule were not to be English and not even European.Footnote 105 By the 1680s, Bombay estimated upward of sixty thousand, mostly Indo-Portuguese and western Indian, inhabitants under its jurisdiction.Footnote 106 By the beginning of the eighteenth century, various estimates also put Madras's population anywhere between eighty thousand and four hundred thousand, ever increasing as the city's leaders received grants incorporating more South Asian villages into its environs.Footnote 107 By the 1680s, the committees (again like the Dutch at Batavia) abandoned their small-scale plans to bring European women to these settlements, instead attempting to root the English sailors and soldiers at Bombay and Madras by providing incentives for them to stay in the cities and marry “native” women: the men to receive payment upon marriage but the women only upon the christening of a child.Footnote 108

Over these decades, the committees and their subordinates actively engaged in a project to attract settlers to both of these older settlements as well as its newer ones, such as Fort St. David, Bengkulu, and Calcutta. They sought in particular to attract highly mobile artisans, weavers, merchants, and “money’d men” to their cities through policy, such as land or tax relief, but also by investing in security, hoping such settlements would prove attractive against the backdrop of Aurangzeb's relentless expansion into the Deccan and ongoing conflict with the Marathas.Footnote 109 Investment in security was also a source for immigration in itself; the Company offered employment in the “Gentue” companies of its garrison, while the increased traffic of ships careened and repaired in Bombay Harbor would create “all manner of workmanship as well as trade, will encrease our Inhabitants & all increase of them will increase revenue.”Footnote 110

Those involved in the Company's military and militia also held offices in the Company's government, which served to fasten their allegiance more closely to the polity and the city. As Mark Goldie has argued for early modern England, allegiance and belonging in this kind of early modern polity was expressed and measured much more often in republican, not liberal, terms: that is, as in “the active involvement of the citizen rather than the passive exercise of the franchise.”Footnote 111 As Bombay reported to the committees in 1695, the Rajput soldiers in the garrison “have sworne themselves to your Honors for ever, & by promises they have rec[eive]d from the Government to be continued, have rejected many offers from Rajahs of their owne Nation & Call’d all their families hither.”Footnote 112 Even slaves, unlike those in St. Helena (where the slave code was modeled on Barbados), were considered another caste or nation that could have an allegiance to the Company but only if untainted by contact with other Europeans. Thus, the committees instructed Bombay to acquire “fresh youths brought immediately from Madagascar” and not at slave entrepôts in Dutch Indonesia or Portuguese Goa. “After they are landed with you and have acquired the English tongue,” they continued, these slaves “will know neither Father nor Mother nor Countrey of their owne, but the English East India Company.”Footnote 113

These extreme sentiments reflected more generally both the form of paternalist government and the types of civic allegiance at which Company leaders aimed. In their imaginations, under sound policy and sage guidance, Bombay could become for western Asia what London was to England, what Amsterdam and Livorno were to Europe, and what Batavia was to Dutch Asia. Madras was even spoken of, in rhetoric reminiscent of Cromwell's godly republic, as a new Jerusalem: that is, as “a mart for all nations.”Footnote 114 Echoing the arguments made in Sandys and elsewhere about the Company's role in governing trade, the committees reminded Bombay that it was the duty of “a Wise and prudent Councill” to “promote or create a trade [among inhabitants] … in a place so admirably situated and so full of people.”Footnote 115 Both the Madras and Bombay councils sought at various points to organize merchants into corporate trading bodies, modeled both after English guilds as well as the mahajan system in Surat.Footnote 116 In the late 1680s, the committees designed to establish an insurance office at Madras, even sending ledger books and blank policy forms from London.Footnote 117 Bombay was instructed to establish a post, which, as in England, could promise both great convenience for “Merchants & Trade in generall” as well as the promise of revenue to the Company's government.Footnote 118 In 1684, the Madras Council built four shops in the bazaar to rent out to local merchants.Footnote 119 Elihu Yale invited fifty weavers to the town, offering them their own settlement in the newly styled “Weaver's Street.”Footnote 120 Not yet a decade old, the Bengkulu council was instructed to build four “publick Houses,” two English and two Chinese, and to offer up to £1,000 in loans to encourage the opening of Chinese-owned taverns, sugar refineries, indigo farms, cotton mills, gardens, “or any other busyness” that would encourage immigrants.Footnote 121 Around the same time, Company leaders in London and India engaged in negotiations with Armenian representatives to encourage their settlement in Company cities, even instructing the creation of a special Armenian quarter in Madras named “Julpha.” Their settlement, with their trade and wealth, the committees considered “as good a Security to our Garrison and trade as 100 hired English Soldiers.”Footnote 122

As Child wrote of England and its American plantations, “Whatever tends to the populating of a Kingdom, tends to the Improvement of it,” but, he specified, “the Means is good Laws, whereby any Kingdom may be populated and consequently enriched.”Footnote 123 Company leadership in the late seventeenth century seemed likewise convinced that it was only “the free Enjoyment of Liberty and Property that makes our Territoryes worth courting.”Footnote 124 The first principle of this liberty was an economic policy that allowed for the “just freedom of Trade to Men of all Nations” where possible, coupled with a system of relatively light taxation, which was thought to be the key to attracting naval traffic, commerce, and settlement, as well as undermining the “too great extreme rigour” of the Dutch in Asia.Footnote 125 As the committees wrote to the Bombay council, “the encrease of the Inhabitants by money’d Men is never to be hoped for unless Trade be as free there as water does run in the Rivers to all People equally of all Nations paying the Company duties as if they were Native English men or the Companies owne Servants or Councillers.”Footnote 126

More broadly, as the committees put it to Madras, such policies were rooted in “that great Justice we would have you impartially exercise toward all Inhabitants, being such foundations as must in time induce a great & famous superstructure.”Footnote 127 Such justice did not only apply to broad principles of political economy nor merely to the “moneyed men.” The Company's councillors also took on the role in protecting against engrossing and other unfair trade practices. Madras took up collections for the poor and provided rice in times of famine and in 1687 ordered monthly inspections of the price of bread.Footnote 128 It also progressively “rated” its public houses, charging more to the more lucrative ones and less to the less profitable “native” taverns.Footnote 129 Bombay and St. Helena also monitored and controlled the prices of punch and wine.Footnote 130 Company law and orders not only covered capital crimes, such as treason, piracy, and murder, but also covered issues such as religious observance and piety (such as breaking the Sabbath), the protection of property, and the regulation of probate and usury. Laws were to be monitored and enforced, at least in theory, through registrars, judicature courts, regularized administration, as well as the public establishment of fines, forfeitures, prisons, and corporal and capital punishments. Unmoved by individual complaints about some of these laws, the committees reminded Madras in 1682 that they were the town's “Governors and Legislators,” responsible not to “y^e private Interest of some particular persons,” since “a handful with respect to the multitude are not to be regarded in y^e making of Lawes.”Footnote 131

It was important to Company leaders as well that these laws were Company laws. At St. Helena, the council was told that its laws were “as good Law as Magna Charta is to England” and that “the Company must always have the Preference in India as his Majesty justly hath here.”Footnote 132 As in particular American proprietary colonies, a council's legal or political decisions could only rarely be appealed even to the Court of Committees and never to the English king or the parliament; the authority of the last, they insisted, extended no farther than “the Kingdoms of England, the Dominion of Wales, and the Town of Barwick upon Tweed.”Footnote 133 And though the Company relied on English courts, such as king's bench, chancery, or admiralty, when it was to its advantage, its leaders much preferred trying offenders in India, where “we are under another Law.”Footnote 134

While law and policy in India were clearly meant to keep discipline and order, they were also a means of political participation that could invest inhabitants much more deeply in the polity. Perhaps the boldest experiment in doing this came in 1687, when the committees incorporated the town of Madras, complete with a mayor, a mayor's court, aldermen, and burgesses, to be drawn from among the various “casts” of Madras (including Christians, Jews, and Muslims as well). This model, which would soon be followed in Calcutta and Bombay, was an exercise in (limited) self-government, another form of “wise Councill” that could “enduce all the Inhabitants to contribute cheerfully to some publick workes such as a Courthouse publick Schools Hospitalls and other things for the good of the Place and the severall Nations therein inhabiting … and may be of great ease in the punishing of small criminall offences to our standing supreme authority.” The school, in turn, could serve to teach “the Gentues or Native Children to speak, read, and write the English tongue, and to understand Arethmetick and Merchants’ Accompts,” while “Publick Good works” would “tend to the Ornament or advantage of the place,” whether in “stately Buildings,” like the guildhall, or in fortifications, such as walls and trenches.Footnote 135

This emphasis on immigration, prosperity, civic order, and limited self-government all came back ultimately to the committees’ almost single-minded desire to create a self-sustaining political and military establishment in India founded upon the raising of local revenue, of the sort that “enables [the Dutch] to secure … their soveraigne state in India.”Footnote 136 The committees observed with envy that for every one paragraph Dutch directors wrote about trade, they wrote ten about “government, their civill & military policy, warfare, and the increase of their revenue … the Soul and life of all the rest.” The committees observed to Bombay, “the increase of our Revenue is no less the subject of our [concern] & must always be yours, as much as our trade; 'tis that must make us a nation in India, without that we are but as a great number of Interlopers, united by his Majesties Royall Charter, fit onely to trade where no body of power thinks it their interest to prevent us.”Footnote 137 If profit was the prime end of commerce, revenue was the ultimate goal of politics: the lifeblood of a polity, “essential to all Governments in y^e World,” which could not be made formidable “by the form and with the methods of trading Merchants, without the politicall skill of making all fortified places repay their full charge and expences.”Footnote 138 Increasing revenue, Bombay was told, “is as absolutely & indispensably necessary to support the English dominion in India, as Armes, Powder & Shott.”Footnote 139

The Company sought revenue where it could, from land taxes, excise, customs, shipping passes, licensing fees for taverns and other businesses, administrative fees for courts and town registrars, and so on. Yet, revenue, like the law, was not only a source of income but a source of political legitimacy and sovereignty as well. Customs and excise farms served as offices, which at Bombay, for example, served to bind Indo-Portuguese and Gentue inhabitants more closely to the Company's government and the city's political life. The committees also argued that the ability to collect revenue was in itself a source of political authority, rendering irrelevant the “manner of their first entrance, whether by Conquest or Compact or treachery.” Footnote 140 The Bengal council began farming the zamindari rights at Calcutta even before the rights had been formally settled through a grant from court. Their reasoning was that “farming of y^e Towns Adjacent will soon cause, & procure us the liberty of Collecting such Duties of y^e Inhabitants as is consistant with our own Methods & Rules of Government.” Although yielding only at first about 2,000–2,500 rupees a year in actual revenue, the very act of farming allowed for the Company to “pretend a Right to the place.” The committees agreed, noting that collecting taxes could “make the place bear its own charge, without which it is a vain thing to imagine the Company can ever attain to any lasting Dominion in India.”Footnote 141

If collecting taxes was the key to a self-sustaining government, paying them was the prime evidence of a committed and virtuous subject. As the committees opined, “All Mankind must & doe defray y^e charge of their protection & preservation in all parts of y^e World wherever the Sun or Moon shynes.”Footnote 142 It was revenue that allowed the Company government to fulfill its basic obligation to cultivate civil society, even preserving it from the state of nature itself. Responding to objections to new taxes levied at St. Helena in 1683, the committees wrote, “It hath been our Care and our Cost, to nurse them up to what they are now, as it shall be to raise them to a better Condition, But whether they are willing or not, they must be reduced to Such a Form of civil Government and Expense for their Protection & preservation as is necessary to all Societies of Mankind and without Which the world would returne to its first Chaos.”Footnote 143 Again mirroring arguments raised in Sandys, Company leaders consistently maintained that they were the chief prophylaxis for disorder—the wise, objective, and paternalist council that was responsible not just for preventing the anarchy of individuals pursuing their own interests but also for raising them to a better moral and material condition in the context of civil and colonial society. Taxation, the committees wrote to Madras, provides “a security to their Lives, Houses, Wives and children and all that belongs to them.”Footnote 144 It increased the value of land, improved their city, and thus “shall doe them good against their Wills, which when they are older and wiser, they will thanke us for.”Footnote 145

Some Conclusions

By the closing decades of the seventeenth century, the Company's leadership in London was convinced that to have a permanent foundation in Asia, their subordinates needed not simply to be good merchants but good rulers. For example, in 1687, the committees excused the quick promotion of one official through the ranks of the Madras council, despite his relative lack of experience in India, since it was “for the publick good knowing him to be a man of learning & competently well read in ancient histories of the Greeks and Lattines, which with a good stock of naturall parts onely can render a man fit for government and politicall Science Martiall prudence & other requisites to rule over a great city … knowledge of the Laws & Customes of Nations can onely qualify men for such a government & for Treaties of peace or war or commerce with foreign Princes.” Having spent a lot of time in India or understanding its commerce was absolutely necessary for the trade, “and little other science was necessary when we wee [were] in the State of mere trading Merchants. But the case is altered from that since his Majestie has been pleased by his Royall Charters & during his Royall Will & Pleasure to forme us into the condition of a sovereigne State in India.”Footnote 146

However, while this “Royall Will & Pleasure” formed a foundation for Company ambitions in Asia when available, it was only one aspect of Company leaders’ efforts through the seventeenth century to build, as the committees put it to Madras in 1687, “a Politie of civill & military power and create and secure Such a large Revenue … as may be the foundation of a large well grounded sure English Dominion in India for all time to come.”Footnote 147 The Company's very structure as a joint-stock corporation, its royal charters, its farmans, and its officials’ own sense of their role as government over trade, people, and a vast jurisdiction in Asia, came to constitute a political system in itself and on its own terms, a form of layered sovereignty quite familiar in the early modern world. Together this crucible of rights, responsibilities, and aspirations had only one possible conclusion: as a Company critic warned in 1696, unchecked, its “establishment in India” would become, like that of the Dutch, “another Common-Wealth.”Footnote 148

Realizing the political ambition and potential implicit in the attitudes and policies of late seventeenth-century Company officials in London and Asia suggests a narrative of the rise and fall of Company power in Asia that rests on comparisons and continuities rather than the usual distinctions between a colonial Atlantic and a trading world of Asia, the capitalist northern Europeans and supposedly medieval Iberian models of empire in Asia, and, of course, between a commercial and imperial era in the Company's history and its analogue, the first and second British Empires. From this perspective, Company officials’ aggressive political behavior appears less as the aberrant ambitions of misguided or megalomaniacal merchants than as the work of men distinctly convinced of their roles as a “Select & authorized council” over a government, with a destiny to become the progenitors of “a great & famous superstructure” for the British in Asia. Behind these ambitions stood a remarkably earnest set of political ideas, which deserve to be taken seriously on their own terms, rooted as they were in a political economy and a political science that envisioned the Company not as a mere merchant but as a form of early modern government in itself, responsible for providing conditions under which their European and Asian subjects—and thus the Company's own power—could flourish and prosper. In turn, these ideas gave rise to any number of political institutions, behaviors, and endeavors, from the very settlement of Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta, to the Company's ability to share in different forms of sovereignty, which would become so crucial to the expansion of its polity against the backdrop of a fragmented and decentralized Mughal empire a half century later.

If understanding the Company as a form of early modern corporate and composite sovereignty offers an alternative way of understanding the rise of its power in a fragmented eighteenth-century Mughal empire, it also accounts for the simultaneous dismantling of its authority in Britain: not as the “reform” of a kind of corruption or the misdeeds of a trader accidentally thrust into sovereignty but the death (or perhaps dormancy) of one of a number of forms of fragmented power in the face of the seemingly inexorable rise of the modern nation-state and its expanding empire. Perhaps the Company's territorial acquisitions in the late eighteenth century—through which in Edmund Burke's words, “the same power became the general trader, the same power became the supreme lord”—so threatened the British state and constitution not because it was new, strange, and anomalous.Footnote 149 Rather, in the face of the real novelty, the emerging, singular national, territorial sovereign state and empire, the “merchant-sovereign and the sovereign merchant” was dangerous precisely because it was old, a vestigial form of hybrid sovereignty that was quickly going the way of pirates, mercenaries, composite monarchies, and other alternatives to the nation-state.Footnote 150 Thus, when Samuel Annesley imagined the Company as a faujdar of the “Saltwater,” he was anticipating the Company's very potential—realized most famously some seventy years later in the diwani of Bengal—for the kind of corporate polity dual sovereignty that contemporaries like Burke would find so troubling but that also formed the very foundations for the modern British Empire in India.