POLITICALECONOMY

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the merchants who largely financed and managed such companies became a foundational concern for political economists in the later eighteenth century. For Adam Smith the paradox implied 'a strange absurdity' in corporate political economy. For Smith, this schizophrenia of 'sovereign' and 'mercantile' priorities was inherent to corporate political economy: 'As sovereigns, their interest [the East India Company's] is exactly the same with that of the country which they govern. As merchants, their interest is directly opposite to that interest' .3 These contradictions imply -from a twenty-first century perspective -a strange role for political economy in the careers of the English trading corporations of the late sixteenth to Smith's day.4 Of course, the early modern mind did not always draw hard distinctions between what the modern world can distinguish as separate economic and political realms. But nonetheless -the emerging and increasingly contentious and public debate about political economy -or the theory of the proper role of commercial matters within domestic and international politics -became more avowedly economic across this period. Recent and important depictions of trading corporations as governing and constitutional structures ought not to inhibit us from noting the influence that trading corporations had over this process of separating economic and political phenomena.5 The end result of this separation allowed for the emergence of classical economic theory and -in the context of the global interactions this volume focusses on -the belief (among Europeans at least) that 'sweet' commerce would facilitate mutually beneficial commercial relationships around the world (to substitute for the profound mutual suspicion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries).6 Across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the terms of English thought and practice about political economy broadened from 'civic humanist' to the elastic, versatile languages of commercial and liberal thought.7 This chapter will argue that the distinctive global sociology of trading corporations played a central role in this volte face in global political economy. Trading corporations provoked, nurtured, and focussed debates about political economy. As structures that gave separate legal personality to dynamic networks of individuals, the corporation helped to absorb and shape thinking and writing about political economy and give that writing a public role and audience. To be sure, not all paradigm shifts in political economy derived from corporate settings. The writings of Sir William Petty -a pioneer in this field -appear to owe very little to corporate issues.8 Nonetheless leading members of trading corporations -like Thomas Mun and Josiah Child and Malachy Postlethwayt became celebrated and influential political economists while established writers like Charles Davenant and Daniel Defoe supported trading corporations. The companies financed large-scale state lobbying machines and pamphleteering operations to nurture these views and deploy them in defence of their privileges. As powerful and often-wealthy, privileged entities whose existence upheld controversial positions within prevailing debates about political economy, the trading corporations were central characters in these debates and their development.
This chapter examines the distinctive global sociology of the trading corporation through the lens of political economy. It notes how the corporate arguments in favour of monopoly, to take the most prominent example, remained profoundly static across the period 1550-1750. This chapter focusses, however, on certain moments of conceptual innovation that trading corporations spurred and shaped. It places the relationship between corporate activity and developing political economy into a global framework of cross-cultural interactions. These global corporate debates about political economy channelled the experiences of international contexts into domestic public debates and back again. In this way, corporations help us to demonstrate the global contexts in which mercantilist doctrine emerged and altered and show us how non-Europeans peoples' interactions with European corporations prompted and structured transnational debates about political economy.
Scholars have most often associated corporate political economy with that most colligatory of early modern historians' devices -mercantilism. Corporations articulated and upheld pillars of mercantilist doctrine as part of their special pleading in defence of their corporate privileges -especially monopoly. This intellectual and -for the most part print -history of mercantilist (and therefore nationalist) political economy, however, represents a profoundly restricted view of the trading company's influence on the history of political economy.9 To reduce this influence to the propping up of mercantilist doctrine, is to limit the global history of corporations to the partial pleading of print in London. While historians of corporations and mercantilism have often noted the centrality of corporations to their histories, historians of ideas have not taken corporations seriously -for the most part -as entities and interests who have shaped theory. Intellectual historians have, until recently, been reticent about placing the contributions of corporations (as well as corporations themselves) into the history of ideas. With the important exception of Philip J Stern, historians of political thought have (for the most part) ignored corporations.10 Historians of economic thought have often mentioned trading corporations, but they have usually seen companies only as expressions of mercantilist dogma, or agents bent on upholding that dogma; in short as bodies suppressive of conceptual innovation in economic concepts, rather than nurturing it.11 Because the economic pamphleteering that constitutes our evidence for mercantilist political economy was often written by merchants themselves, its intellectual credentials have been tarred -for historians of ideas -with the brushes of interest and of policy.12 Part of the ambivalence towards corporate writing may come from the belief that corporate authors were -in the most accurate sense of the word -corporate rather than free thinking intellectuals with their own conceptual ambitions. Instead, corporations are offered as emblems of traditional views. For Henry Turner the corporation channelled civic humanist ideas into a commercial context and provided a way of ensuring that private gain served the common good.13 The desire to place corporations into the canon of the history of political thought has often led questions of government to overshadow questions of commerce in accounts of mercantilist doctrine. This has led historians to suggest that the contribution of corporations to the history of political economy ought to be limited to a narrative concerned mostly with the history of governance and the relationship between state and merchant.14 There is great value in resurrecting the political aspects of political economy but there is also a profound irony in doing this which helps to illustrate an important point about the corporation's influence on the theory of political economy. Adam Smith famously invented mercantilism (or the 'mercantile system' as he called it) to discredit it. The trading corporations were pantomime villains within Smith's Wealth of Nations. Smith famously used the English trading companies -especially the East India and Royal African Companies -as the monopolising nemeses of commercial initiative.15 They embodied all that was wrong with excessive governance in trade. Historians have used Smith's critique to recover the governmental imperatives of early modern trading corporations. But Smith's influence has often led to an obfuscation -among historians of corporations (less so historians of political economy) of the constructive (rather than obstructive) effect of corporations on the theory that Smith would develop in Wealth of Nations. Those early political economists who began to reject mercantilist reliance on corporate monopolies on the understanding that individual economic instincts would substitute for government action (through corporations) to sustain and grow economies were as much reactions to corporate political economy as Smith's 'mercantile system' was a straw man to promote the macro-economic advantages of free enterprise. Such was the depth of influence of corporations over debates about political economy in the period 1550-1750 that their sway over these debates can be felt in the way they structured critical and innovative responses as well as those that sought to uphold corporate privilege.16 The shadow of mercantilism has also led historians of political economy to assume the 'Eurocentricism' of some of their historical actors when seeking to explain the intensification of global trade in the seventeenth century. According to this view, mercantilism was a pan-European belief system.17 Ideological debate about mercantilist policy -although it often developed across national borders within Europe -was as rigidly nationalist in its generation as it was in its ambition.18 But the corporate authors of political economy -from Richard Hakluyt to Malacky Postlethwayt -were heavily preoccupied with finding ways to improve commercial policy that reflected experience of and expertise in global contexts. These attempts were sometimes distorted by more local cultural prejudices (for Hakluyt it was the need to accommodate the fruits of foreign travel within Aristotelian political categories), but the distortions influenced the formulation of new political economies.19 In line with the governmental emphases of historians of corporations interested in the history of political thought, the international setting for corporate activity has focussed on issues of jurisdiction and the emergence of international law -rather than questions relating to the development of international markets.20 For historians of empire, however, political economy has been interchangeable with 16 For a volume that has been inspirational for our approach but that nonetheless projects nineteenth century notions of political economy onto the early modern period is J D empire.21 A global field of view offered in this chapter allows for a more textured account of the corporation's relationship with political economy. The lens of political economy therefore illuminates how corporations used their public printed appeals to augment their subordination to state and public concerns. But it also shows how corporations altered economic theory to account for the need to rationalise sharing commercial advantage with non-Europeans. This alteration formed a part of a process of hybridisation in which received mercantilist authority was challenged and altered by international experience and shows how foreign merchants and interests compelled this alteration in corporate political economy. These alterations to corporate political economy were also influenced by employees and opponents who taught the companies the importance of licensing private trade. The overseas experiments with political economy that corporations led in places like Bombay and Madras also demonstrate how the constitutional autonomy of corporate entities facilitated such innovation. Such experiments were often brought back into domestic debates in ways that help the historian clarify the interaction between the corporation's national and global spheres of operation.

…
The most important resort to political economy for trading corporations was the need to fashion public justifications for their privileges. This most often meant their commercial monopolies.22 Long-established opinions rejected monopolies as engrossing of economic opportunity.23 The seventeenth and eighteenth century overseas trading corporation provoked heated debate about the proper role of the state in the management of the national and international economy.24 The corporations were often criticised for raising prices and for restricting access to trade for the ordinary merchant, shopkeeper, and wholesaler. The companies therefore had to articulate public-good arguments This core pro-company argument represents a thin veneer obscuring the complex transnational activities of the corporations. As we have seen, the corporations were not always monopolistic; they were not always nationalist. They were subordinate entities. Their promotional literature often celebrated the ways in which monopolistically organised trade would intimidate non-European peoples and impose prices on them. The strong governmental power over international commerce that the corporation provided was understood in 1604 (even by an advocate of free trade) to be essential to 'keep some port there amongst the infidels' .27 But with experience of international markets and especially the appreciation that durable trading relationships could not be formed without ensuring that non-Europeans enjoyed some benefit from them, the desire to bridle and awe the heathen was tempered. Corporations developed new political economies to rationalise their subordination and uphold their interests to emphasise the need for negotiation with foreign stakeholders. As an East India Company factor explained to the company's directors in 1614, Indian rulers and merchants expected Europeans to be both respectable ambassadors and 'banyans' or merchants -who the local rulers regarded as 'little better than slaves' to sustain trading relationships.28 The contradictions between these two positions helped to generate a corporate political economy derived from global, cross-cultural experience, that did not always paraphrase mercantilist clichés. The contours of this unofficial corporate political economy can be witnessed in print. But the writings of corporate actors like Thomas Mun were only the final, public, printed stage in a process of development for corporate political economy that included international experience, courtroom wrangles, and internal corporate debate.

The Process Sketched
This chapter analyses the effects of global experience on corporate political economy according to a series of overlapping, and non-sequential processes. These processes were: first, the ways in which investment communities in the metropolis required the stereotyping of overseas customers and suppliers of the companies according to mercantilist expectations; second, how experience of subordination overseas trading led company officials to challenge and undermine these stereotypes; third, how overseas corporate officials enjoyed the autonomy to absorb the challenges and opportunities of their local circumstances and translate them into commercial opportunities; fourth, the ways in which the altered political economies that emerged from these translations entered the political (and increasingly public) contests over ideas and practice and rebounded around and informed the intense debates about political economy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that reverberated around this global network again.
Trading corporations often justified their monopoly powers with reference to stereotyped and mannered depictions of their non-European trading hinterlands.29 Non-Europeans became despotic and barbarous in proportion to the monopolistic privileges extended to each company. An instrumental connection was therefore established in corporate political economy between these mannered judgements of overseas peoples and the extent of corporate privilege. Samuel Purchas' Pilgrimes, to take an important example, 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. Their 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 superiority.30 Of course, such stereotypes would be subject to widespread challenge once corporations began to develop large presences overseas; establishing and governing over large communities of non-European peoples whose labour and commercial ingenuity became central to their trades. Very often, high-ranking corporate officials -like Sir Thomas Roe and the governor of the Royal African Company, Sir Dalby Thomas, continued to depict the non-Europeans they encountered in supercilious terms to uphold the mercantilist prejudices of their corporate superiors in London.31 Others, like Paul Rycaut, the private secretary to the Ambassador to the Ottoman Court and a key figure within the Levant Company's factory at Istanbul, proposed to use his experience to influence as well as entertain his readers at home. Rycaut stressed that the stereotyped, mannered depiction of Ottomans by Europeans that assumed their barbarity led Europeans to underestimate Ottomans in ways that could effect European interests. As Rycaut explained 'It hath been the happy fortune of the Turk to be accounted barbarous and ignorant; for upon this perswasion Christian Princes have laid themselves open and unguarded to their greatest danger'32 Those factors of the company involved in private trade (as well as interlopers) were more likely to stress the commercial common ground between English and non-European merchants. Similarly, those lobbyists who sought to deregulate trades proposed that non-European commercial contacts were civilised and that their commercial entrepots were much like the great commercial centres of Europe, such as Livorno. Companies were discredited by their opponents for overbearing treatment of the non-Europeans.33 Those who made the journey to these non-European contexts produced an empiricism of empire that challenged the mercantilist dogma.
Responding to their new environment, the companies' overseas officials used their agency to devise new political economies to strengthen their commercial positions. They did so often in spite of formal instructions from the companies' leadership in London. These disabusals and constitutional experiments were then transported, through company infrastructures, back into the mother country where they entered the emergent debates about political economy. The corporations' were often at the centre of public, parliamentary debates and their international experiences informed how they justified their privileges and deflected charges of self-serving. The dialogic impetus of parliamentary discussion helped to create new binaries of debate to replace the old civic-humanist binaries. Pro-corporate political economy structured anticorporate argument and therefore the classical economic theory of the later eighteenth century. The effects of international corporate activity on English political economy can often be most clearly observed by appreciating how specific arguments to sustain the corporations' privileges produced reflective counter arguments from rival interests. Corporate discourse and opposition shaped broader political economies through debates about free trade, interloping, sovereignty, the state, and jurisprudence. This international process of testing, reforming, and importing the overseas lessons in political economy that the trading corporations facilitated suggests at least six insights about the connections between corporations and the development of political economy across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These fall in the following categories: population, tax, money, rights to trade, and legitimate commerce.

Categories of Change
The question of population's role in stimulating economic growth and in challenging political stability was central to debates about political economy.34 33 HBC 268  International trading corporations were vessels for the attraction, movement, management, and taxing of population. Observing how the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie had integrated Asian trade through a single entrepot at Batavia using immigrant Chinese labour and witnessing the catastrophic failure of early attempts to settle the North American mainland, English corporations began to challenge the early seventeenth century corporate orthodoxy that excess population destabilized a polity. The Virginia Company had promoted itself as a vent for excess population but would within a few years learn the challenges of population movement to a new environment.35 The Virginian environment distorted English culture. An initially high mortality rate celebrated new values of graft, physical prowess, and enterprise, regardless of the rigid social rituals of the old country and prevailing interpretations of gender, and race.36 Within a decade, the Virginia settlers had replaced the indolence and metallic fetishes of the first settlers with a vigorous creed of settlement that highlighted the production of tradable commodities. This led to repeated calls for merchants to take the rein of the colony and that colonists could only be attracted and sustained if they received the full fruits of their labour and a share in the governance of their society. Captain John Smith distilled these hybrid lessons for a domestic audience and became the champion of productive labour in a new world context.37 Such views began to filter into domestic debates about the intrinsic relationships between population growth and national wealth that political economists like Sir William Petty engaged with.
As international trade increased in scale and the flow of international commodities into England increased, political economists saw new opportunities to ingratiate themselves with government by proposing new resources of taxation to finance warfare. Throughout the seventeenth century several company writers articulated the benefits of indirect taxes on consumption (rather than agricultural income or customs) known as excises. Corporate leaders like Josiah Child and the lobbyist and writer Charles Davenant became persistent supporters of this policy. Such taxes were understood to be easy and profitable to collect because they fell on the mass of the population (who could not use 35 For the Virginia' Company's promotion of its activities as a means to employ excess population see William Symonds, Virginia:  Government then under any Government in Asia, or indeed any Government in the known part of the World' .41 The development of successful and selffinancing governments overseas helped the East India Company (and others) convince the public and the state to support their activities. Bullionism -the belief that national wealth is best expressed in terms of stores of precious metals -is often cited as a core tenet of mercantilist political economy.42 The East India Company was partly defined by its chartered right to break one of the best established rules of mercantilist political economy -that specie ought not to be exported. Public orthodoxy -as expressed in particular during the early seventeenth century parliament -insisted that exporting precious metals lessened the wealth of the Kingdom and especially limited the liquidity of the state's finances in ways that impeded warmaking. The East India Company secured this privilege from the beginning, but it did not develop an argument in political economy outlining the macro-economic benefits of this position until the early 1620s. East India Company director, Thomas Mun's famous Discoure of Trade (1621) developed the argument that money ought not to be defined as substance but should be redefined as process. This idea helped Mun to show how exported specie simply assumed new forms around the multipolar trading world of Continental Europe, South and South-East Asia that the East India Company integrated. A series of transactions allowed the exported specie to alter form from silver to textiles to spices and back into European silver. At each stage the amount of silver increased. As such, international trade was not a simple matter of individual trading balances, but of multiple opportunities to convert and therefore increase capital. The exchange rather than the conservation of wealth became the surest means to expand wealth and the Kingdom's essential liquidity would be maintained and enlarged. 43 Mun's famous pamphlet, however, was only the final printed outcome of a distinctively corporate process that distilled the experience of East India Company factor, Thomas Kerridge, in noting how the English could not continue to trade in Surat unless they exported silver. Kerridge's insight therefore reflected the commercial imperatives of the Gujarati merchants he worked with. Kerridge wrote these opinions to the Company's representative at the Mughal Court, Sir Thomas Roe. Roe brought these writing backs to Leadenhall Street and they provided the core of Mun's argument when it was needed to deflect renewed public opposition to the Company's silver exports in the early 1620s. Subsequent writers on behalf of the East India Company (including Henry Robinson, Child and Davenent) would continue this argument and expand it throughout the seventeenth century.44 By 1663, the East India Company was able to lobby to achieve the liberalization of bullion exports with the Act for the Encouragement of Trade (section 12).45 A joint venture between overseas officials of the East India Company and the corporation's network of domestic pamphleteers had translated Asian customer preferences into the foundation stone of a new approach to wealth that would have important consequences for state finance and economic activity in general. In this way, the company integrated international experience, cross-cultural negotiation, and a wellestablished printed persona together into conceptual breakthroughs. The need to defend corporate privileges led to the challenging of traditional mercantilist arguments -rather than the simple deployment of what we might call procorporate mercantilist clichés. The effects of individual license in developing the national economy was also a long-standing subject of debate around mercantilist political economy. In 1604, Sir Edyn Sandys made arguments about the national importance of protecting individuals' access to international trade on the grounds of 'natural right' as well as on the basis of ensuring an 'equal distribution' of wealth within the Kingdom.46 International corporate activity helped -inadvertently -to advance the cause of those who wished to have individual trading rights protected in law. The constitutional celebration of the portability of trading rights around the world would underpin the development of free trade arguments in political economy. The first advances here emerged from the cause of private trade within the East India Company in cases like that against the East India Company factor (and private trader) William Blake in the early 1670s. Blake took his chance in the court of Chancery to describe how, his experience of trade overseas taught him that the East India Company could not succeed commercially without allowing each overseas official to trade freely on their own account. This was a huge assault on the Company's monopoly, but officials like Blake persuaded to Company to liberalise their restrictions on private 44 Henry Robinson, England's Safety, in Trades Increase (London, 1641 trade on the grounds that the Company's trade would benefit if its factors could also be allowed to seek commercial opportunities on the own account.47 The same worked for interlopers. The Royal African Company's failure to consolidate its territorial and commercial hold over its west African trading hinterland proved to be a huge blow for the enforcement power of company monopolies and a great encouragement to those who wished to participate in a free trade in enslaved peoples. The refusal of local African polities to allow their land (as opposed to their population) to be appropriated by Europeans played into the hands of those merchants in England who wished to embark on independent slave-trading voyages. These interlopers began to object to the civil law enforcement powers of the company's 'vice-admiralty' courts for trying interlopers and argued, in a constitutionally pioneering way, that common law rights to trade could travel beyond England.48 These landmark cases that led to the protection of individual commercial opportunity overseas were not absolute in their implications, however. The East India Company became a curious hybrid that combined monopoly at home with a grand superstructure for free trade in Asia. The transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans similarly became a hybrid of corporate infrastructure (in the form of the Company's network of West African forts) and free trade. These curious mixtures reflected the distinctive contribution of corporations to debates about political economy and showed how increasing public opposition to corporations mixed -in parliament -with the state's sustained insistence on using corporations to ensure governmental oversight of international trades.
Alongside the protections of these constitutional rights to trade, emerged changes to theoretical emphasis that supported anti-monopoly argument. The dialogic quality of corporate discourse can best be witnessed in the printed exchanges between pro and anti-corporate interests between the 1690s and 1720s. These decades saw prolonged public debate about the future of corporate monopoly. The most intense and voluminous of these debates was that which focussed upon the Royal African Company. For various reasons, the African Company proved to be an easier target for free-trade arguments Over the course of these debates, lobbyists developed the view -which would later become popularised by Bernard de Mandeville -that individual interest (or acquisitiveness) represented a far more certain guarantee of continued trade than the political will of the state. As one anonymous pamphleteer summarised: There can be no greater Security of the Continuance of any Branch of our Foreign Trade, than the absolute and everlasting necessity thereof, as is the Case of the Trade to Africa, by reason of its being founded on the Commutation of Cloths, and other Merchandize necessary to Human Life, for Gold, Negroes, Elephants Teeth, Dye-woods, and other useful Commodities produced in Africa. So that till Men cease to wear Clothes and rather chuse to go naked; till the Planters cease to cultivate their Lands, and rather chuse to starve; till Gold becomes out of Esteem, and Mankind cease to seek farther after it; till our Sheep cease to produce Wool, and our Poor chuse to perish rather than work; in short, till there is an end of all Commerce in the World, there is a greater Certainty of the Continuance and Security of our African Trade, than of any other Branch of foreign Trade whatever.50 These views received greater conceptual precision in works like Henry Martyn's Considerations on the East-India Trade which advocated a free trade to Asia to allow for low cost goods from India to appear in the English market and promoted the view that labour should be assessed according to productivity, 49 Daniel Defoe repeatedly put this view forward in the early years of the eighteenth century. See Defoe on 'Security ' , in Review, Feb. 22, 1709, 565-568. 50 The trade on their own accounts as long as they paid membership dues as part of a guild-like structure.52 The Ottoman Empire's strong and interventionist state had taught North that 'law is a sorry fence against common convenience' and that the acquisitive individual was a better manager of the economy than the state.53 These arguments represented early break throughs for economic thought that didn't alter the ends of debate in political economy -that is proposing arguments that would uphold the public good, but began to formulate non-corporate means to reach that end. In this sense, they were simply inversions of pro-company arguments with a positive rather than negative effect attributed to individual action. In each case, they derived from international experience or prompting. After the parliamentary onslaught against corporate privilege in the last decade of the seventeenth and first decade of the eighteenth century had abated, the corporation's monopolistic hold over international trade had lessened. Most of the corporations survived, but with a drastically different brief. The pro-free trade argument had become more mainstream and policy makers as well as political economists began to see the connection between trade deregulation and trade expansion as self-evident.54 But because corporations were difficult to dissolve owing to the parliamentary insistence that their shareholders be compensated (and because the Bubble Act gave corporate charter greater value), trading corporations continued to be privileged entities.
With their commercial prowess undermined, however, they had to resort to alternative means of promoting their activities. They were expected, like their municipal and livery forbears, to be philanthropic. But as international entities they learnt to celebrate their transnational experiences and networks as a crucial means to acquire domestic political capital. Their public profile was also assisted by the growing efficiency and success of French state-sponsored companies in the 1740s. 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 towards non-Europeans hitherto dismissed as barbarous became a source of comparative advantage. Political economists began to depict non-Europeans peoples as participants in global markets in radically different ways from their sixteenth and seventeenth century predecessors. Gone was the mutual suspicion of commercial trickery. This was instead replaced with a still-condescending, but more sympathetic view of non-Europeans as primitive victims of international markets. Corporations were again seen as solutions to the unstable ravages of the market. But by the 1740s, they were to be used to protect non-Europeans from the market rather than protecting the English economy from the non-Europeans. 'Incorporation' became a word used to characterise a mutually beneficial commercial alliance between Europeans and non-Europeans. Subject to a further round of parliamentary enquiries in the 1740s, the Hudson Bay and Royal African Companies both depicted themselves as the friend of the non-European. In the case of the Hudson Bay Company, their apologist Thomas White insisted that the 'Indians were always well used and kindly entertained …' by the Company and it had given them provisions and medicines to draw them from the French, and White warned that 'if any ill Treatment or Acts of Injustice were done towards the Indians the trade of the Company would be ruined' .55 Similarly, the Royal African Company promoted its chartered structure with reference to the hospitality it showed to Africans, the opportunities its African network of forts provided for establishing a 'legitimate commerce' with 55 See Africa that did not involve slave trade, and included African signatories in documents to promote itself in London.56 Neither the Hudson Bay nor the Royal African Company proposed to continue as an entity designed solely to benefit its shareholders. Instead, both bodies postured publicly as entities with broader social purposes and -most important -bodies that could develop durable trading relationships around the world based on mutual advantage and respect. These notions helped both companies to endure (though the African Company was re-founded as a regulated Company, the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa). But the idea that the state ought to regulate trade to ensure that international markets did not operate only according to their own logic was sustained by these corporate positions and -in the case of the African trade -nurtured an antislavery political economy that proved formative for the abolitionist movement at the end of the eighteenth century.57

Conclusion
What distinctive light can an examination of the relationship between corporations and political economy shed on the particular global sociologies of corporations? The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was a formative period for British political economy. Although official corporate political economy was rather static in this period, corporations (and their cross-cultural activities) nonetheless developed arguments and influenced political economy in important ways across debates about money, trading rights, economic theory, labour, taxation, and the morality of commerce. The dialogic impetus of corporate debate about political economy worked alongside the adversarial traditions of the common law and the unenforceability of chartered monopolies overseas to challenge justifications for monopoly. In so doing, interloping merchants articulated a vision for English greatness based upon atomised, free, commercial activity, which the state exploited by diffusing the incidence of taxation away from political elites and towards these atomised actors. While these theories acquired evidence to support them, they did not emerge as all powerful. Corporations endured to develop and embody ideas of responsible business that could protect rather than intimidate non-Europeans peoples. In this way, corporate political economy proved formative for both the market and state led polarities of economic debate that would continue into the nineteenth century and beyond.