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

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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.