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“Empire, Incorporated: Companies, Colonialism, and the Early Modernity of the Modern British World”

This talk is drawn from Professor Philip J. Stern's current book project on the role of the corporation in the British empire from the 16th to the 20th centuries. It traces the ways in which the chartered corporation—an early modern form supposedly done away with by reforms in the nineteenth-century—reemerged as a core of colonial ideology and practice in the mid- to late-Victorian period.  Looking at the “early modernity” of these quintessentially modern forms of imperial expansion suggests an alternative model for conceptualizing and narrating imperial history, not in familiar geographical, chronological, or demographic terms but rather along institutional and spatial lines, troubling any fast historical and historiographical divisions between "early modern" and “modern” models of state, sovereignty, and empire. 

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  • Emily Anderson

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