Global Trade and the Shaping of English Freedom

Through the histories of English trading companies -- the Levant Company, the East India Company, and the Royal African Company -- this book shows how non-European peoples in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, West Africa, and Western India used their control over these companies to shape the emergence of English freedom.

This book offers a new account of the connections between seventeenth century English history and the history of the rest of the world. Eschewing nationalist narratives, it demonstrates how greater engagement with the world beyond Europe shaped signature aspects of the English experience. Early modern trading corporations are the central actors in the story. Global Trade and the Shaping of English Freedom offers a profoundly altered reading of the practices of these entities. The companies were not monolithic entities pursuing narrow nationalist interests overseas. Nor were they inefficient monopolies doomed to commercial failure. In the seventeenth century, as this book shows, they were driven and transformed by the immediate and local interests of Company agents and their foreign networks. Because the trading companies were the most important bridge between international contexts and English legal and political debates, they connect non-European power and preference to those debates. These unappreciated actors within the corporate sphere play leading roles in this book as the shapers of English debate about the meaning of English freedom and the futures of the trades they participated in overseas. The book offers a new perspective on the foreign actors who shaped English commercial and legal ideas and practices in the seventeenth century, as well as the Ottoman, Bantenese, Huedan, Siamese, and Mughal contributions to the ideological, institutional, and procedural underpinnings that would develop, slowly but surely, into the British Empire.