Seeing (and Not Seeing) like a Company-State: Hybridity, Heterotopia, Historiography

"The East India Company returns after 135-year absence," announced the BBC in 2010 ("East India Company returns").¹ Though referring to the re-emergence of the East India Company as a fine foods and gold retailer with a flagship store in London's Mayfair and an increasingly global footprint, the sentiment could have easily applied to studies of the East India Company's history as well. While the Company had hardly disappeared as a subject of study, for much of the modern period it had remained a rather specialist enterprise, particularly for those working on the period prior to the mid-eighteenth century, before the Battle of Plassey and the Company's subsequent expansion as a territorial power in India. In the current era of global and imperial turns, however, the Company at all phases of its development has seemed to have taken on new meaning and interest, spilling far over the traditional boundaries of the history of British India and "Company studies"; scholars ranging from Atlantic historians to literary critics, sociologists, and legal theorists continue to look to the Company for new subjects or to shed light on old ones.² This has been paralleled by a seemingly growing sense beyond the walls of the academy that the Company represents something germane to our contemporary world, from its villainous role in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies to the not infrequent feature pieces in the economic press meditating on the lessons offered for today by the "first multinational."³ It endures as a sign and symbol, to either cast away stones or gather them together: somehow serving as both a metonym for the triumphs of global capitalism and for the evils of neo-colonialism at the very same time. As easy as it is to find someone on social media castigating something or someone as the "new East India Company," for others, like that newly revived East India Company, it can still be mobilized as a source of nostalgia, pride, and even luxury: "one of the most recognized brands in the world … established by pioneering English merchant adventurers," who "controlled the waters of the world," not unlike how "Google or [the] World Wide Web" commands the information economy today (Strausl, "East India"; "21st-Century Version").⁴

Though we do not reflect upon it very often, all of this attention has inevitably shifted the ways in which we talk, think, and write about the early Company. Just a decade ago, the period in the East India Company's history prior to the mid-eighteenth century, as well as the hemisphere in which it operated, was almost universally understood as a "trading world," whose objectives were almost so obvious as to not require too much revision since the pioneering cliometrics of Kirti Chaudhuri.⁵ As I have argued elsewhere, such a vision of the English East India Company misses its distinct social and political character as an institution, as well as the political thought and ideology that underpinned it; as a corporation, the early East India Company had far more in common with the early modern world of the church, city, and university than it did the postmodern one of Google, WalMart, and private military contractors.⁶ Others have drawn similar conclusions with respect to the Dutch Company, as it navigated its world between "company" and "state."⁷ Though continuing to emphasize in one way or another the Company as a form of business, at least four current or recent major UK, European, and foundation-funded research networks have focused in whole or in part on the East India Companies at home and abroad, self-consciously identifying some aspect of "culture" as part of their research goals: material culture, global history and culture, or cross-cultural networks and interaction.⁸ Moreover, each in its own way, these projects echo a range of recent work that has, for example, sought to reintegrate the early Company into the history of domestic political culture, or the history of the material culture of global empire.⁹ Others, meanwhile, have come to focus on the nature of...