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

作为全球一体化的经济和政治参与者，早期的现代企业是如何运作的？我的研究试图通过观察印度背景下的法国印度公司（Compagnie des Indes）来回答这个问题。学者们早就认识到，特许贸易公司是欧洲国家向海外投射主权的一种手段（Thomson 1996; Adams, 2005）。近年来，历史学家开始将这些公司作为具有自身合法性、主权和宪法形式的组织来研究（Stern, 2011； Pettigrew和Veevers， 2018）。我的论文通过许多不同的媒介考察了公司主权的形成。它以英国、法国、印度、比利时和荷兰的档案为基础，使用了广泛的资料来源，包括私人和官方信件、法律记录、税收账簿、期刊、船舶日志、报纸、旅行写作、地图、图像和物质文化。我展示了该公司是如何被许多不同的利益渗透的，这些利益以特定的方式推动了它的国家制定过程。这包括自上而下和自下而上的方法，考虑到法国政府部长、印度商人和公司员工在印度出生的妻子的行为。它认为，该公司的多孔性是由它与大都会君主制国家的密切关系形成的。我的研究挑战了长期以来关于国家在企业商业中的作用的假设。该公司与其母国的紧密联系通常被解释为阻碍其发展的衰弱弱点（haurdr<e:1>, 2005; Wellington 2006）。相比之下，我的研究发现，法国政府能够利用该公司来追求超越直接商业目标的关切，比如传福音项目或与亚洲国家的外交接触。相反，该公司能够利用王室世袭网络，财政支持，并利用国家支持的宗教使团作为中介，教育工作者和翻译。最终，法国公司的国家/公司混合性质使得将两者分开是不可能的。尽管如此，我的研究提供了一个法国远距离贸易组织的历史案例研究，展示了国家在商业领域的创造性力量，有助于关于国家在当代经济中的作用的政策讨论。ESRC奖学金将使我能够传播我在目标中概述的研究成果。它也将使我开始一个新的研究项目，将应用计算文本分析方法，以现有的公司资源或“语料库”。该项目最初将重点放在官方通信和审议等已发表的资料上（martinau, 1920-30），将分析这些文本中的词频和关系含义，以理解和说明公司贸易和治理的潜在特征。例如，共现词的模式将用于检查和说明某些术语的文本接近性，例如贸易商品或外国竞争对手。地名也将被地理标记，以生成公司交易世界的网络地图。这建立在我最近在伦敦政治经济学院的博士后职位上，在那里我从事了一个项目，使用自然语言处理（NLP）和地理信息系统（GIS）方法来生成关于皇家非洲公司的新视角。在兰开斯特大学，我将在计算方法方面获得新的技能和能力，这将补充我以前的经验。历史计算文本分析在过去几年中取得了快速发展（Jenset和McGillivray， 2017），并且随着技术的进步和更多来源的数字化，它只会继续变得越来越重要。

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.