A Company State of Mind: The Textual Worlds of the Compagnie des Indes, 1719-1769

公司心态：印度公司的文本世界，1719-1769 年

基本信息

批准号：
ES/V011375/1
负责人：
金额：
$ 11.81万
依托单位：
Lancaster University
依托单位国家：
英国
项目类别：
Fellowship
财政年份：
2020
资助国家：
英国
起止时间：
2020 至无数据
项目状态：
已结题

来源：
https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=ES%2FV011375%2F1
关键词：
Company State Mind Textual Worlds

项目摘要

How did early modern corporations operate as globally integrated economic and political actors? My research seeks to answer this question by looking at the French Company of the Indies (Compagnie des Indes) in its Indian context. Scholars have long recognised that chartered trading companies were a means for European states to project sovereignty abroad (Thomson 1996; Adams, 2005). In recent years, historians have begun to study these corporations as organisations in their own right, with their own legalities, sovereignty and constitutional forms (Stern, 2011; Pettigrew and Veevers, 2018). My thesis examines the creation of Company sovereignty through many different mediums. Drawing on archives in Britain, France, India, Belgium and the Netherlands, it uses a wide range of sources, including private and official correspondence, legal records, revenue books, journals, ships' logs, newspapers, travel writing, maps, images, and material culture. I demonstrate how the Company was permeated by a number of different interests that drove its state-making processes in specific ways. This involves both a top-down and bottom-up approach, considering the actions of government ministers in France as well as Indian merchants and Indian-born wives of Company employees. It argues that the Company's porosity was shaped by its close proximity to the metropolitan monarchical state. My research challenges longstanding assumptions about the role of the state in corporate commerce. The close ties of the Company to its home state have typically been interpreted as a debilitating weakness that held back its progress (Haurdrère, 2005; Wellington 2006). In contrast, my research finds that the French state was able to use the Company to pursue concerns beyond straightforwardly commercial objectives, such as projects of evangelisation or diplomatic encounters with Asian polities. Conversely, the Company was able to take advantage of royal patrimonial networks, financial support, and draw on state-backed religious missions for intermediaries, educators and translators. Ultimately the hybrid state/corporate nature of the French Company makes disentangling the two impossible. Nonetheless, by providing a French historical case-study for the organisation of long-distance trade, my research demonstrates the creative force of the state in the commercial sphere, contributing to policy discussion on the role of the state in the contemporary economy. An ESRC fellowship will allow me to disseminate my research findings as outlined in my objectives. It will also enable me to begin a new research project that will apply computational text analysis methods to extant Company sources or 'corpora'. Focusing initially on published sources such as official correspondence and deliberations (Martineau, 1920-30), this project will analyse word frequencies and relational meaning in these texts in order to understand and illustrate underlying features of the Company's trade and governance. For instance, patterns of co-occurring words will be used to examine and illustrate the textual proximity of certain terms, such as trade goods or foreign rivals. Place names will also be geotagged to produce network maps of the Company's trading worlds. This builds on my most recent postdoctoral position at LSE, where I worked on a project that used Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Geographical Information Systems (GIS) methods to generate new perspectives on the Royal African Company. At Lancaster University I will gain new skills and competences in computational methods that will supplement my previous experience. Historical computational text analysis has seen rapid advances in the past few years, (Jenset and McGillivray, 2017) and will only continue to gain in importance as technologies improve and more sources are digitised.

早期的现代公司是如何作为全球综合经济和政治参与者运作的？我的研究试图通过在印度的背景下查看印度的法国公司（Compagnie des Indes）来回答这个问题。长期以来，学者们已经认识到，特许贸易公司是欧洲国家在国外投射主权的一种手段（Thomson 1996； Adams，2005年）。近年来，历史学家已经开始以自己的合法性，主权和宪法形式作为组织来研究这些公司（Stern，2011; Pettigrew and Veevers，2018）。我的论文通过许多不同的媒介来研究公司主权的创建。利用英国，法国，印度，比利时和荷兰的档案，它使用了广泛的来源，包括私人和官方信件，法律记录，收入书籍，期刊，船只的日志，报纸，旅行写作，地图，图像，图像和物质文化。我证明了如何以特定方式推动其国家建设流程的许多不同利益渗透到公司。考虑到法国政府部长的行动以及印度的商人和公司雇员的印度妻子，这涉及一种自上而下和自下而上的方法。它认为，公司的孔隙率是由于其与大都会君主制国家的近距离塑造的。我的研究挑战了有关国家在公司贸易中的作用的长期假设。该公司与其本州的紧密联系通常被解释为令人衰弱的弱点，阻碍了其进步（Haurdrère，2005； Wellington 2006）。相比之下，我的研究发现，法国国家能够利用该公司追求直接商业目标的担忧，例如传福音的项目或与亚洲政体的外交遭遇。相反，该公司能够利用皇家遗产网络，财政支持，并利用了为中介，教育工作者和翻译人员提供的国家支持的宗教任务。最终，法国公司的混合国家/公司本质使两者不可能。尽管如此，通过为长途贸易组织提供法国历史案例研究，我的研究证明了国家在商业领域的创造力，从而促进了有关国家在当代经济中的作用的政策讨论。 ESRC奖学金将使我能够在目标中概述的研究结果传播。它还将使我能够开始一个新的研究项目，该项目将应用计算文本分析方法对广泛的公司来源或“ Corpora”。该项目最初着重于诸如官方通讯和审议之类的已发表资源（Martineau，1920-30），将分析这些文本中的单词频率和关系含义，以便理解和说明公司贸易和治理的基本特征。例如，同时发生词的模式将用于检查和说明某些术语（例如贸易商品或外国风险）的文本邻近性。位置名称也将被挖掘出来，以生成公司交易界的网络地图。这建立在我最近在LSE的博士后职位，在那里我从事一个使用自然语言处理（NLP）和地理信息系统（GIS）方法（GIS）的项目，以对皇家非洲公司产生新的观点。在兰开斯特大学（Lancaster University），我将获得新技能和计算方法的能力，以补充我以前的经验。历史计算文本分析在过去几年中取得了迅速的进步，（Jenset和McGillivray，2017年），随着技术的改善和更多来源的数字化，只会继续获得重要的重要性。