Merchants, commerce, and the state: The East India Company in early Stuart England

This dissertation examines the complex relationship between chartered trading companies, particularly the East India Company, and the state in the early Stuart period. Rather than treating the Company primarily as a business institution, this dissertation views the Company as a political institution, and argues that the relationship between the Company and the crown---the form of the relationship, and the balance of power between the two---was not simple or easily resolved; rather, that the period saw a constant negotiation of the relationship between the economic and the political. Using state papers and the court minutes of the Company, this dissertation explores how the court of committees of the East India Company constructed and understood this relationship as they experimented with how and what kinds of pressure they could bring to bear on the crown to secure their various objectives, and in response to the changing political and diplomatic circumstances of the early decades of the 17th century. The same questions that informed the political life of the Company---of Company and state, and Company versus state---found expression in the conceptual explorations of economics and international trade made in printed pamphlets by merchant writers in the period. By focusing on the Company as a political institution, this dissertation examines questions of state formation in the early modern period, as the merchants posited themselves within and in relationship to what they conceived of and named "the state," as well as their experiments with the developing politics of publicity and the public sphere. It highlights the close ties between the Company and the state that were present from its inception, thus challenging any simple categorization of the early Company activities as apolitical and solely commercial, and investigates some of the ways political action and engagement could be conceived of outside of the traditional political arenas of court and parliament in the early Stuart period.