Company states and international relations theory

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This project aims to investigate the role of chartered companies in European colonialism. Chartered companies, profit-driven forerunners to today’s multinational corporations, wielded extensive sovereign powers (e.g. rights to wage war, conduct diplomacy, and raise taxes) normally reserved for governments. This project intends to establish the importance of chartered companies – not sovereign states – as Europe’s pre-eminent agents of colonial expansion before c1800, and uncover how their rise and fall shaped modern understandings of the distinction between public and private authority.