Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations That Built British Colonialism by Philip J. Stern

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/675494 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations That Built British Colonialism Author: Philip J. Stern Narrator: Rick Adamson Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 14 hours 35 minutes Release date: May 16, 2023 Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics Publisher's Summary: Across four centuries, British colonialism was above all the business of corporations. Corporations conceived, promoted, financed, and governed overseas expansion, making claims over territory and peoples while ensuring that British and colonial society were invested, quite literally, in their ventures. Colonial companies were also relentlessly controversial, frequently in debt, and prone to failure. The corporation was well-suited to overseas expansion not because it was an inevitable juggernaut but because it was an elusive contradiction: public and private; person and society; subordinate and autonomous; centralized and diffuse; immortal and precarious; national and cosmopolitan—a legal fiction with very real power. Breaking from traditional histories in which corporations take a supporting role by doing the dirty work of sovereign states in exchange for commercial monopolies, Philip Stern argues that corporations took the lead in global expansion and administration. As Empire, Incorporated makes clear, venture colonialism did not cease with the end of empire. Challenging conventional wisdom about where power is held on a global scale, Stern complicates the supposedly firm distinction between private enterprise and the state, offering a new history of the British Empire, as well as a new history of the corporation.