The Company: London and the Political Economy of Empire

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This course is a cultural and critical history of the East India Company: its evolution, its transformations, and its cultural impact, from the city of London to the consolidation of the modern world economy. The East India Company is a curious institutional formation. The result of private merchant consolidation, it actively engaged in the work of the overseas expansion of state power. Conceived as an organ of political economy (namely, trade), it was at the same time a war machine, with private security that morphed into militias and ultimately a colonial force that can only be described as a conquering army. The Company’s power was so massive in scale that the commodity chains that it articulated would transform the human shape of the globe, and so intimate that they would transform everyday London life in ways that ranged from culinary taste to fashion. When we hear the cliché about the sun never setting on the British Empire, what we are really sensing is the echo of the material reach of the Company. The largest prize in the tragic history of violence that we call colonization—India—was both captured and administered by the Company. But the East India Company’s operations moved in all directions, south to Africa, out to East Asia, and west to the Americas, which it also approached from the east, across the Pacific. Working to expand the reach of the crown through its chartered monopolies, at times it stood as the crown’s chief rival for political, economic, and military power.