A Framework for Integrating Overseas Expansion and Constitutional Change in 17th-Century England
p. 401-413
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1What was the historical relationship between overseas expansion and constitutional change? In the English case, answers to this question have been offered for the 12th and 13th centuries when England finalized its control over the British Isles. Rees Davies viewed the crystallization of features of English political identity as a process catalyzed by the need to project power over the Welsh, Scots, and Irish. Expansion tested and defined the surest means of political control and these definitions produced constitutional truths that informed the political determinants of English identity. As Rees Davies summarized: “[…] the character of the medieval English state […] is best glimpsed, by refraction […], through the story of the advance of its power in the British Isles1.”
2The instrumentality of English expansion overseas and constitutional concerns is also conspicuous for the 19th century. Apologists for empire (as well as many historians of the British Empire) viewed English government as the non-European’s prize for subjection to that government. The English constitution provided the means of subjection and the ends of being subjected. The British constitution (as an emblem for enlightened European government) became the standard for political modernity against which non-European (and especially Asian) governmental forms failed to measure up and in this failure came the justification for imposition of the English constitution overseas2.
3Curiously, the possibility of integrating constitutional change with overseas expansion has not been attempted by historians of the 17th century when constitutional change and overseas expansions represent the two most important (though rarely connected) signature narratives for the century. Explaining this reticence is a difficult task. Whig histories of constitutional improvement and progress in the 17th-century die-hard and their 19th-century roots, which necessitated a centrifugal direction of constitutional development within England and an Empire which received these constitutions from outside, are difficult to enervate3. In what follows, I propose an exploratory means of integrating the 17th-century’s broad but separate narratives of constitutional change and overseas expansion.
4The 17th century was a period of profound overseas expansion. From the outset, the English began to embark on long-distance trading adventures that proved more ambitious and markedly more successful than anything attempted in the 16th century. The orientation of English commercial activity began to move beyond Europe and the Western Mediterranean to North America, East and then South Asia, the Levant, Persia, the Caribbean, Hudson’s Bay, and then Africa. By the end of the century, England had a durable commercial presence in four continents, had transported many thousands of English men, women, and children to new continents, and achieved considerable trade growth, as a result of commercial expansion beyond Europe. The figures are impressive. The value of overseas trade almost doubled from £7.9 million in the 1660s to £14.5 million by the 1720s. Most of this growth derived from enlarged trade in commodities from America and Asia and the increase in the variety of export goods (lowering dependency on traditional wool exports from 74 % in 1663-1669 to 69 % in 1701). Trade in plantation commodities such as tobacco, sugar, and Indian cotton increased as a proportion of all imports from 7 % in 1621 to 34 % in 1701 as their reducing price made them accessible to English and continental European consumers. Demand for British goods increased with the expansion of her colonies as the Navigation Acts ensured that the colonies provided a closed market for English exports. Imports increased by a third and exports by more than half between 1663 and 17014.
5The 17th century was also a pivotal and formative period for the English constitution and English governance. It was a period of profound constitutional change. Historians have now done much to challenge the 19th-century “Whig” view of the 17th-century constitutional shifts. It is no longer possible to characterise the century’s constitution changes in terms of a liberalising process of reform in which absolutist monarchy succumbed to the progressive force of parliamentary sovereignty. Historians instead stress the ways in which deliberative institutions collaborated with a more commercial economy to assist in developing the power of the state and its martial prowess. Across the period, the terms of English thought and practice about political economy broadened from “civic humanist” to the elastic, versatile languages of commercial and liberal thought5. It is therefore possible to view constitutional change in terms of the abstraction of state power from the monarchy and the emergence of a political economy that celebrated the civil rights to trade and the importance of consent to state authority and rejected the earlier view that subjects exercised those rights at the expense of state power. In short, individual freedom and the freedom and grandeur of the state power would not be understood as oppositional. The constitutional thinking that reflected and accompanied these changes altered during the 17th century from what might be termed a humanist conception to one that could be summarised as commercial and statist. The humanist binaries of representative vs. absolutist, monarchical government were replaced by the end of the 17th century with a focus on rights and the political benefits of a commercialised society.
6As the remit of English governance expanded with England’s commercial reach, so the context for English governance also shifted. William III’s coronation oath was the first to promise to extend the constitutional privileges of being English to those Englishmen who lived beyond the Kingdom6. Settlers in colonial America celebrated their rights as Englishmen and merchants in Bombay sought the protection of the English common law. The constitutional provisions of the English constitution began to extend beyond England and this experience began to nurture a capacious, distinctive trans-oceanic English constitution.
7How might this remarkable overseas expansion and profound shift in emphasis on English constitutional and governmental thinking be integrated? Three specific (but overlapping) means of integration appear possible. First, the fruits and means of controlling overseas expansion proved to be an important bone of contention between those throughout the 17th century who disagreed about what the English constitutional actually was. James I had proposed to monopolise the fruits of overseas trade to prevent economic reliance on parliament. He received legal backing for this position, but could not entirely rid himself of the legal opinion that such authority was not of ancient standing. This policy continued throughout the Stuart reigns of Charles I and Charles II, but was resolutely undone by the assertion of common law traditions into trade regulation and by the extension of parliamentary supremacy into the management of overseas trade.
8A second means of integration shows how the pace, concentration, and success of overseas expansion itself depended upon constitutional factors. Within England the shifting constitutional practices of the state helped to propel expansion. In particular the collusion of executive and coalitions of merchants via state-sponsored trading corporations helped to induce the most impressive period of overseas trade expansion of the century – that in the two decades after the Restoration7. Similarly, the distinctively variegated and heterodox qualities of the English constitution allowed the English a degree of governmental versatility during the trial and error process of establishing English dominion overseas.
9A third related means of integration involves the reversal of this formulation by asking how overseas expansion altered the English constitution. Beginning the process of answering this question brings the common denominator of both overseas expansion and constitutional thinking into view: governance and overseas trade both involve the attraction, movement, and management of population. But it also highlights two paradoxes: first that old constitutional forms were revitalised by New World contexts. The palatinate form that had separated both Durham and Chester from subordination to the state in a parliamentary context was finally integrated in 1672, but not before providing the constitutional model for the colony of Maryland in the 1630s8. Second, the exceptionalist, rigid, timeless (and jingoistic) notion of the English constitution developed at a time of profound constitutional certainty and proliferation. This was a signature process of the 17th century as constitutional instability and contest came to increase the determination to codify English governance more comprehensively and more resolutely. Edward Coke’s Institutes of the Lawes of England and Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan represent the two most impressive (and contrasting) attempts to write an irrefutable account of how the English constitution worked at a time of constitutional uncertainty.
10But such codification’s cover for the international proliferation of English governance and the extent to which that expansion depended upon the local, federalist, adaptability of English governance (when compared with European rivals) has not been fully examined. The distinctive 17th-century instability and contestability of the English constitution therefore gave the English a varied means to develop their commercial presence overseas. Competition between European nation states intensified this process of constitutional proliferation. Non-European territories provided a new arena for the intensification of state competition within Europe and England’s inspiration for commercial expansion beyond Europe, her techniques for, and at times the capital and personnel that enabled her to begin this process, derived from a acute appreciation of what her European rivals (in this century, primarily the Dutch) were up to9.
11Connexions between constitutional change and overseas expansion depend upon modes of international cultural transmission that are distinctive to the early modern, pre-colonial period of globalisation. These were often literary in character. Since the beginning of European presence in the New World, politicians and political theorists had used the New World as a space in which they could locate constitutional experiments. Thomas More’s Utopia is the prime example and he helped to develop a genre that remained popular throughout the 17th century. The emergence of utopian fiction provides the clearest means for integrating overseas expansion and governmental thinking within an intellectual context10.
12Writers also took advantage of the ways in which non-European settings allowed for what Stephen Greenblatt has called “Machiavellian anthropology”. As Machiavelli noted how the inert constitutional settings of empty land allowed for purer implementation of constitutional forms11. At initial contact, Englishmen in North America (to take a special case) began to rationalise the sparsely populated territories they encountered as constitutional blank canvasses in which their own constitutional ideas could be easily implemented. Or, in more densely populated regions, they accommodated the local governmental styles for commercial reasons. Such implementation often involved some distortion of the English models deployed at home12. At other times, it involved the implementation of constitutional forms whose English antecedents had long since been corrupted.
13But as the 17th-century English overseas expansion and the proliferation of constitutional forms gained momentum and as the need for labour and a tax base became more acute, overseas commercial interests and settlers came to appreciate that choice of governmental style could influence the numbers of people that could be attracted to settlements. Beyond discursive, literary traditions of peripheral constitutional experimentation, and the realities of either lack of or distance from authority, a further vehicle for international, cross-cultural transmission of governmental ideas existed: the overseas trading corporation.
14As the principal means of achieving overseas expansion and of enhancing national commercial prowess and as institutions with a long, specific constitutional provenance the overseas trading corporations are key to appreciating the international contexts for English government. With their own constitutions, with explicit charter privileges (bargained for with the state and profoundly altered over the course of the 17th century that defined their powers at home and abroad) the trading corporation demonstrate the changing constitutional settings for overseas commercial expansions. Subordinate to the state, but autonomous from it, with public, political, legal operations contesting state governance and using it for commercial advantage, the company could be both the agent of institutional uniformity overseas but also the cause of diversification. As trans-oceanic operations they acutely demonstrate the challenges of international governance and the contrasts between missives from the centre and the governmental latitude experienced by overseas servants of the companies. What business historians have called the agency problem often allowed the companies to formulate new constitutional wisdom from the periphery that would compel alterations to the companies’ constitutional position at home.
15Whether organised as joint stocks or as regulated companies, as perpetual legal structures, the companies also allowed different coalitions of investments and ideas to endure and shift as the century continued. The companies financed large-scale state lobbying machines and pamphleteering operations to alter political economy in their image. The companies became strident commercial interests and lobbies who concentrated opinions about government. But they also aroused powerful opposition who deployed countervailing constitutional power to develop counter arguments to their existence, methods, and ideas. A dialogic impetus of debate between pro and anti company interests did much to push the alteration of the theory and practice of government in the economic and non-economic realms both overseas and at home. Over the course of the century, they became more subordinated to the interests of the English state, but less subject to its extractive impulses; and more effective vessels for state authority overseas. Effectively collapsing the distinctions between the public and private realms by expanding their constitutional status as they became more private. Blending centre and periphery, deployed in Atlantic and Asian zones of operation, the companies asserted, mutated, hybridised governmental thinking and practice throughout the 17th century.
16At the centre of this exploratory examination of the integrated histories of 17th-century constitutional change and overseas corporate expansion is one influential device that post-colonial critical theorists have deployed: the notion of hybridity. An elastic concept, hybridity has most famously been defined with reference to the “disavowal” by victims of European colonisation of the “denied knowledges” deployed by Europeans overseas to legitimate their authority. It suggests that national narratives are based on forgetting the cross-cultural contexts in which national identities are determined. It therefore seeks, by design, to capture subaltern influence on imperial action and proposes to restore non-European agency into narratives of European expansion beyond Europe. But Bhabha and other critical theorists have not examined how the corporation, as the primary early vehicle for cross-cultural interaction, encouraged the “subaltern” to not only speak but also to declare their supremacy in ways that hybridised European and non-European governmental forms13. Hybridity also allows us to understand the mechanics of international and trans-cultural interactions without deploying the epistemological categories that transformed those interactions into the coercions of Europeans over non-European subjects. It disabuses the related concept of “creolisation” of its nationalist, teleological connotations. English overseas experience informed domestic practice as a result of hybridised insights about governance.
17Why does the early modern corporation enable us to view this process of hybridisation most clearly? Company charters often stereotyped non-Europeans according to their perceived barbarity. The despotic government of the representatives of overseas markets became, according to company argument, a justification for monopolistic organization of these trades. Because of the prevailing intense competition between different European nation’s corporations overseas and their (sometimes shared) attempts to prevent interloping in their respective trades, companies often placed the health of their relationships with non-Europeans ahead of their national, regional affiliations. Companies therefore provided infrastructures that encouraged intercontinental cultural dialogue. Cultural sensitivity of this kind became a source of comparative advantage.
18How did this process of corporate hybridisation work? This subject is necessarily vast and its full range cannot be adequately confronted in a paper of this size. Instead I wish to outline the contours of the subject, explore a tentative methodology and framework, and offer some suggestive case studies. I analyse this process according to a series of subordinate, overlapping, and non-sequential processes that allow, overall, for an appreciation of the interaction between theories and ideas of government that emanate from the centre, the experience of experimenting with government overseas, and the hybridised notions that are fedback once the interaction between alternative non-European ideas and contexts has taken place. I analyse the 17th-century corporate hybridisation of governance according to four subordinate stages: first, the ways in which investment communities in the metropolis required the often-constitutional stereotyping of overseas customers for the company; second, how experience of overseas trading led company officials to disabuse these stereotypes; third, how the so-called “agency-problem” associated with multinational corporations – that is how overseas officials could not be relied upon to act in the company’s commercial interest – became a commercial opportunity as these officials absorbed the challenges and opportunities of their local circumstances and translated them into commercial opportunities through constitutional experimentation; fourth, the ways in which these positions on government entered the political (and increasingly public) contests over ideas and practice of government and rebounded around and informed the intense constitutional frays of 17th-century English politics.
19First stereotyping: this had a number of key characteristics: it was always fixed on the mother country, mostly in the early part of the 17th century; often literary, and typically focussed on governmental styles, and can be witnessed in the charters of the trading corporations14. It deployed stereotypes based on government that, broadly speaking, reflect humanist and “mannered” binaries; i.e. government as either despotic of free, virtuous or corrupt. These stereotypes, which often concentrated on the manners and civility of Englishmen and barbarity of the non-European, served to justify monopolistic organisation and portray overseas expansion as heroic, exotic, and Protestant. It therefore played a critical part in developing investment for the companies and creating a market for the consumption of non-European goods. These stereotypes determined how those who actually experienced the non-European world expressed that experience. The best example of this kind of corporate literature is Samuel Purchas’ Pilgrimes series in which Purchas continued the vast task begun by the two Richard Hakluyts of anthologising all of the writing they could get their hands on that focussed on non-European peoples. Despite this academic approach, their own ruminations confirmed that such writing, if digested solely in a domestic context (though they were circulated on board East India Company ships) was only palatable in so far as it reminded Europeans of their own cultural superiority15.
20Second, disabusal of these stereotypes: this took place beyond Europe. Corporate (and free trading) experience of non-European environments (as opposed to “arm chair” internationalists) could quickly undermine these stereotypes delighting in the variety and inspirational examples offered by non-European cultures. They could also challenge the models of colonisation and trade that the stereotyping process was designed to applaud. Here was a characteristic 17th-century celebration of the empiricism of empire over and above the theory and dogma of those who had not actually made the journey beyond Europe. The contexts that the English encountered overseas often proved hugely challenging for English cultural prescription and one of the fascinating things about these encounters for historians was the ways in which, for example, the colonial North American environment distorted English culture and how a high mortality rate celebrated new values of graft, physical prowess, and enterprise, regardless of the rigid social rituals of the old country. Those who distilled their experience of the overseas environment and relayed it back home (via a corporate structure) did so to secure preferment from their metropolitan superiors.
21The best and most famous example of this disabusal stage is the person and writings of Captain John Smith. Smith became the great celebrator of labour and experience, and trading commodities over the indolence, entitlement of the social elites who had initially represented the Virginia Company and were motivated to colonise solely by the prospect of the discovery of precious metals16. In the end, his critique of the Virginia colony helped see the company itself dissolved, but his career cannot be separated from the corporate context. Other less well known examples include those factors of the East India Company based at Surat in 1616 who began, via correspondence with England’s ambassador to the Great Moghul, Thomas Roe, to challenge the mercantilist critique of trade to the East Indies on the grounds that it led to a drain on specie. They instead suggested that wealth was best developed through the exchange rather than the storage of precious metals and commodities. In corresponding to challenge this old view, they began to develop some of the pillars of monetary theory that would directly influence the writings of Thomas Mun (who wrote the Discourse of Trade in 1621 and corresponded with some of the same factors)17. Non-European influence over Europeans was mediated by several layers of interpretation, but the shift in attitude is clear to see. The experience of overseas trade led many company merchants to challenge received dogmas about the theory of money, labour, and regulation.
22Third, officials of the companies often used their agency to innovate new constitutional means to underpin commercial success. They often did this in spite of explicit instructions from the company directors. These constitutional shifts again were not the simple response to non-European compulsion. They involved the more complex, hybrid combination of a European education, an awareness of the political needs of commercial success overseas, and the company’s inadvertent means of allowing them freedom of experimentation. These tendencies led companies in various contexts to develop communities far more tolerant of those possible at home: especially with regards to religious toleration often inspired by the observation of tolerant regimes overseas such as that of the Moghul empire18. These constitutional innovations were almost always means of addressing the central problem of any governance – that is the control of population: in the Atlantic, these populations were small, in the Indian Ocean they were large, but the same techniques were used in both settings.
23In the American setting, corporations played in part in assisting the development of a notorious constitutional hybrid for the Atlantic world: the use of enslaved African labour to solve the colonies acute problem of labour supply. As English law turned away from accepting chattel slavery within England, colonists used alternative legal means to legitimate the enslavement of Africans in America. The first African slaves arrived in North America under the aegis of the Virginia Company – a body that derived its legitimacy from the belief that conquered territories should be governed by the royal prerogative and could therefore dispense with common law resistance to the use of chattel slavery. English courts countenanced the way in which these separate jurisdictions helped facilitate the escalation of slavery. By the 1660s, Charles II established a corporation to transport the slaves to America: the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa. This company was to become one of the most prolific slave trading organisations in human history19.
24Overseas environments also challenged the English to develop means of moving free populations. Many examples of this phenomenon can be mentioned: the inauguration of representative institutions in Virginia and elsewhere in colonial British America was often justified as a means of attracting the scarcest of colonial commodities – labour. Legal reformers such as Gerald Aungier of Bombay and Streynsham Master of Madras also developed common law style courts overseas that extended common law rights to non-Europeans in ways that would have been inconceivable at home in England and which contrasted markedly with the civil law courts imposed on English traders who thwarted the East India Company’s monopoly. Aungier and Master understood that such rights would encourage population movement to centres of trade controlled by the company. This would allow for taxation by the company and would help to make the company’s operation (including its fortifications) self-financing20.
25But company activities overseas also interacted with local political forces and shifting constitutional thinking at home to encourage interloping merchants to pioneer new constitutional traditions. Perhaps the best example of this was the Royal African Company’s failure to consolidate its territorial and commercial hold over its west African trading hinterland. Led by Sir Dalby Thomas, this attempt was thwarted by the refusal of local African polities to allow their land (as opposed to their population) to be appropriated by Europeans. This undermined the viability of the company’s operation there and encouraged interloping. These interlopers began to object to the civil law enforcement (vice-admiralty) of the company’s courts for trying interlopers and argued, in a constitutionally pioneering way, that common law rights to trade could travel beyond England. Once they had been feedback into a domestic political setting, these views became celebrated features of the English common law by the early years of the 18th century21.
26So constitutional experimentation overseas allowed for the continued denial of humanist binaries by offering purer examples than were plausible at home until the 1690s of how delegating rights to local populations in exchange for tax revenue would strengthen rather than weaken the state. The portability of these rights across cultural lines (to non-European customers ahead of European interlopers who often objected to be being treated “worse than Turks”) did much to re-invent trading rights as property rights. These experiments became celebrated examples of English constitutional tendencies at a time when they were being directly threatened at home. In the long run they helped to cement the paradoxical connection between rights based government and empire.
27Fourth, “feedbacking”: these disabusals and constitutional experiments were then transported, through company infrastructures, back into the mother country where they entered the intense constitutional frays that define the 17th century. Old constitutional positions received greater legitimacy from successful testing overseas. Party political rivalries ensured that reflections on constitutional innovations would be polarized. The dialogic impetus of parliamentary discussion helped to create new binaries of debate to replace the old, pre-colonies, humanist binaries. For example, the parliamentary debates about the East India and Royal African Companies helped to reverse the earlier humanist formulation of non-European barbarity by reconciling the experience of non-Europeans with the dictates of and cultural concern about a more commercial society. By the end of the 17th century the argument in favour of monopoly had altered from one which stereotyped non-Europeans as barbarous to one that noted the barbaric treatment meted out to Africans by unregulated, “free” slave traders. Cultural reaction to commercialized politics of the later 17th century would lead to a late 18th-century commercial jeremiad against free trade and would propose the ultimate form of regulation for the African trade – that is the abolition of the slave trade and of slavery. The constitutions of the corporations themselves would be reformed to bind them more closely to the state and to parliamentary oversight and prevent directors from engrossing their capital22.
28So, by way of summary and conclusion, the experience of English traders within a largely corporate framework in the 17th century nurtured new constitutional forms. It allowed for the successful testing of hitherto abstract constitutional positions in new, more open, international environments, celebrated new commercial values, and generated new political economies that altered perceptions of money, labour, and property. All accrued constitutional form once government responded to and embraced the martial power of government based upon consent. The English (and then British constitution) was therefore nourished by global interactions and experiences centuries before it began to be used to define the superiority and modernity of European constitutions over their non-European alternatives.
29By integrating the history of 17th-century overseas expansion and 17th-century constitutional change we can “globalise” the English constitution and disabuse it of its imperialist connotations. By politicising the early modern trading corporation, and ending the intellectual apartheid between the history of international trade and the history of national, exceptionalist canons of political thought, we can begin to characterise the early modern stage of globalisation as a series of experiments with government. Government was the means of overseas trade before it became the ends of empire. As such the history of Empire had an empirical preface and the success of English government was often authored by non-Europeans. Furthermore, the corporate hybridisation of English governmental thinking and practice in the 17th-century places international and commercial considerations at the centre of constitutional change. Overseas expansion in this period had important constitutional determinants and constitutional change had economic triggers and remits as well as international inspirations and settings. The formative 17th-century phase of constitutional change in England underpinned and responded to overseas experience. The constitutional history of England at this fascinating juncture was therefore part domestic reification and part international proliferation. Both parts worked to compel constitutional change and overseas expansion simultaneously.
Notes de bas de page
1 R. R. Davies, The First English Empire: Power and Identities in the British Isles, 1093-1343, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 195.
2 D. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2008, pp. 34, 43, 100.
3 For a recent discussion of the omission of overseas expansion from the foundational Whig account of constitutional improvement in the 17th century – that written by Thomas Macaulay – see C. Hall, Macaulay and Son: Architects of Imperial Britain, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2012, pp. 319-329.
4 D. C. Coleman, The Economy of England, London, Oxford University Press, 1977, pp. 133, 137; R. Davis, English Overseas Trade, 1500-1700, London, Macmillan, 1985, p. 36.
5 J. Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688-1783, London, Unwin Hyman, 1989, and P. O’Brien, “The Nature and Historical Evolution of an Exceptional Fiscal State and its Possible Significance for the Precocious Commercialization and Industrialization of the British Economy from Cromwell to Nelson”, Economic History Review, 64/2, 2011, pp. 408-446.
6 F. W. Maitland, The Constitutional History of England, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1919, p. 287.
7 W. A. Pettigrew, “Constitutional Change in England and the Diffusion of Regulatory Initiative, 1660-1714”, History, forthcoming.
8 F. W. Maitland, The Constitutional History of England, op. cit., p. 289.
9 K. Macmillan, Sovereignty and Possession in the English New World: the Legal Foundations of Empire, 1576-1640, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006; D. Armitage, The Ideological of the British Empire, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 90.
10 C. Houston (ed.), New Worlds Reflected: Travel and Utopia in the Early Modern Period, Farnham, Ashgate, 2010, chs. 1 and 8.
11 S. Greenblatt, “Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and its Subversion, Henry IV and Henry V”, in J. Dollimore, A. Sinfield (eds.), Political Shakespeare, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1994, 2nd ed., pp. 18-47.
12 K. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wives, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1996.
13 H. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London/New York, Routledge, 2004, rev. ed. [first ed. 1994], p. 2.
14 C. T. Carr, Select Charters of Trading Companies, 1530-1707, London, B. Quaritch, 1913.
15 Samuel Puchas, Purchas his Pilgrim. Microcosmus, or the historie of Man. Relating the Wonders of his Generation, Vanities in his Degeneration, Necessity of his Regeneration, London, s. n., 1619, I, I, 93.
16 K. Kupperman (ed.), Captain John Smith. A Select Edition of his Writings, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1998.
17 “Letter of Surat Factors to Sir Thomas Roe, 23 July 1616”, in W. Foster (ed.), The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to the Court of the Great Mogul, 1615-1619, London, The Hakluyt Society, 1899, p. 165.
18 The Diary of William Hedges, Esq, During his agency in Bengal, 1681-1687, London, The Hakluyt Society, 1887, vol. 2, p. CCCVIII.
19 W. A. Pettigrew, Freedom’s Debt: the Royal African Company and the Politics of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1672-1752, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2013, pp. 36-37. See also C. Tomlins, Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1680-1865, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010.
20 H. D. Love, Vestiges of Madras, 1640-1800, London, s. n., 1913, vol. 1, p. 470.
21 W. A. Pettigrew, G. Van Cleve, “Parting Companies: the Glorious Revolution, Company Power, and Imperial Mercantilism”, Historical Journal, 57/3, 2014, pp. 617-638. See also W. A. Pettigrew, Freedom’s Debt…, op. cit.
22 W. R. Scott, The Constitution and Finance of English, Scottish, and Irish Joint-Stock Companies to 1720, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1912, vol. 1, p. 340; vol. 2, p. 155.
Auteur
-
William A. Pettigrew
University of Kent (United Kingdom)
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