IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/bushst/v67y2025i3p913-955.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

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

Author

Listed:
  • Lorraine Talbot

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Lorraine Talbot, 2025. "Revealing the Company of Merchants of England Trading to the East Indies through law and the painted moment," Business History, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 67(3), pages 913-955, April.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:bushst:v:67:y:2025:i:3:p:913-955
    DOI: 10.1080/00076791.2024.2305327
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00076791.2024.2305327
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/00076791.2024.2305327?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:bushst:v:67:y:2025:i:3:p:913-955. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/FBSH20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.