Revealing the Company of Merchants of England Trading to the East Indies through law and the painted moment

Abstract

Teleological histories frequently identify the emergence of company law in England as originating in the charter corporations of the Elizabethan period. I argue that while the corporations created for foreign trade helped amass the wealth required for the capitalist development which would subsequently shape the modern company, corporations are not its organisational origin story. I demonstrate this using a multi-disciplinary study of the East India Company (the Company). By analysing the evolving rights of Company stockholders and related legal developments, I show how the state shaped a trading venture into a colonial project and strategic force in European military conflicts. Uniquely, I further evidence this through an analysis of art connected with the Company made contemporaneously to the events discussed. This shows that the Company was an aggregate of people and ambitions conjoining private finance with the imperial aspirations of the Crown – a ‘they’ not the ‘it’ of modern companies.