Risky Business: The Seventeenth-Century English Company Chaplain, and Policing Interaction and Knowledge Exchange

Abstract

In order to secure the success of their commercial and political missions, England’s seventeenth-century companies had to ensure that they maintained strict control over the social, religious, and commercial interactions of their personnel with local communities. The company chaplain became a leading figure in the companies, policing their personnel, imposing strict moral control or a form of religious governance, and ensuring that their own behavior did not damage the companies’ diplomatic or commercial mission. On top of policing the interactions of the companies’ personnel, chaplains, whether as intellectual pursuits or for evangelical and political purposes, engaged and interacted both with the communities to which they belonged and with those whom they had met abroad. Company experience offered chaplains unique opportunities as educated men, whether in the early stages of knowledge exchange, the policing of corporate interactions abroad, or the organization of how company experiences would be received back in England. This essay highlights the importance of the chaplain in shaping the interactions and exchanges of England’s seventeenth-century commercial world.