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CHAPTER SIX
France, England and the Enigmatic Eighteenth Century
The expansiveness of the Dutch Golden Age created a context in which rulers and
overseas merchant capitalists throughout Europe were lured by new opportunities and confronted
new dangers. On one side lay the tantalizing fruits of internationalizing trade, at a level never
before seen in Europe, heaped atop more traditional concerns with territorial gain. On the other
side was the correlate, war, inevitable in an age of uncertain and competitive interstate and
intercorporate relations. The wrenching Wars of the League of Augsburg (1689-97) and Spanish
Succession (1701-13/15) that inaugurated Europe's bellicose eighteenth century strained the
financial and political capacities of all states involved. The Dutch had developed novel ways of
marrying economic dominance in Europe with forced accumulation abroad. Now their
commercial and colonial innovations, and the state that sought to advance them, could be copied,
tinkered with, combatted and transcended: they were prey to the late developers' advantage
(Gerschenkron 1962).
Corporate bodies like the sovereign merchant companies could be crucial players in the
triangular dynamic of primitive accumulation, war and state formation. Recall that corporations
were also instrumentalized by rulers desperate for resources, sometimes to the extent that
companies were gutted, killing the state's own progeny (as in seventeenth-century France), and at
other times in ways that enabled them to survive and thrive, as in the Dutch Golden Age, when
the VOC amassed enormous resources and exercized sovereign control over extended trading
networks and territories. When they did well, patrimonial corporations became relatively
autonomous actors. They were potential sites of innovation in their home states as well as abroad,
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but also arenas of elite entrenchment and reaction. Their activities could create international
openings and by the same token threaten the integrity of metropolitan politico-economic systems.
In the Netherlands, as we have seen, such challenges proved too daunting, and ultimately
contributed to decline and the erosion of state power in the eighteenth century. Similar challenges
arose in England, which not only weathered them but became the next hegemonic power.
This chapter also explores the dimension of macro-social life foregrounded throughout
the book: the family monopolies of political privilege, especially those that shaped and were
shaped by overseas trade, in this era inevitably linked to military capacity. That family principles
were part and parcel of relations among the crowned heads of Europe is clear, and one theme is
the resilient role of royal dynasticism in overseas projects and the positions from which
opponents bitterly contested it. But family had a broader sociological role, or so I have
contended. Coalitions of elite patriarchs came to occupy and identify with sites of
intergenerational political privilege in the Netherlands, France and England, collectively and
consciously taking in hand parts of state apparatuses and their colonial projections. This family
grab rebounded on metropolitan development. In the Dutch case, it helped entrench a kind of
fractious localism, ultimately undercutting the capacity of Dutch elite to discipline the workings
of the colonial machine without rationalizing away their own prized position at the controls. This
chapter charts the upshot of the collective responses of state elites in France and England in the
face of similar institutional opportunities and conundrums.
In general, family mechanisms of rule with great staying power played a cardinal role in
forming states and commercial-colonial projects, which then in turn shaped elite patrimonial
monopolies. The changing practices and publicly-articulated dynastic principles of male elites
were implicated in their investments in male-defined lineages; in their links with specific class
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practices and especially forms of property in politics, and in relationships with monarchs and
crypto-monarchs like the Dutch stadholders. Observing Dutch dynamics suggests that the relative
rigidity of these mechanisms could make it harder for elites to hang onto desirable niches in the
changing global political economy. But was that always the case, and if not, why not? For E. P.
Thompson, England’s eighteenth century was “enigmatic”; John Kenyon called it "mysterious"
because of the conjunction of what he took to be social sclerosis at home and enhanced power
abroad. They are right -- there is an enigma to be unraveled. For comparative insights, this
chapter first looks to the organization of patrimonial rule and especially to the nodal relationship
among rulers, commercial companies and merchant capitalists in eighteenth-century England and
France, whose rulers were laying claim to the position that the Dutch had created but could no
longer sustain. The final section of the chapter examines how these competing projects of
empire-building became increasingly significant for elite patrimonial monopolies at home,
fundamentally challenging familist state structures. These interconnected crises of empire and
patriarchal authority roiled the early modern world.
System or Anti-System? Law's Company and the French State
Prospects looked bleak for France's overseas commercial and colonial ambitions at the
outset of the eighteenth century. In the wake of the ruinously expensive War of Spanish
Succession and the death of Louis XIV, the Compagnie des Indes Orientales was commercially
and militarily defunct. What a contrast with the active Dutch East Indies Company, a sovereign
trading body that was strong enough to refuse independent merchants the right to operate in Asia
until the 1740s! The embattled French Company fell into the hands of one of the crown's largest
financiers, the renowned Antoine Crozat, who assumed the rights of the organization in 1712 in
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exchange for a 10% cut of its net income (Dermigny 1970: 463). Crozat, Samuel Bernard, the
Paris Brothers and other major financiers held 85% of the value of farms on indirect taxes, the
source of the bulk of the crown's 204 million livres in annual revenue in the 1720s (Dessert 1984:
210-36). The Compagnie des Indes retained the right to grant independent merchants trading
permits, for a fee. It survived as a mechanism by which the crown's patrimonial dependents
squeezed out rent.
Commercial/colonial enterprise continued to be constrained by the crown and state elite,
with their history of treating merchants as competitors of company formation rather than as an
organic part of mercantilist projects as in the Netherlands and England. Nor did merchants have a
berth in the patrimonial state. But precisely because of its estrangement from vested interests,
commerce came to seem one of the crown's best hopes for escape from the constraints imposed
by its own patrimonial group. The crown had emerged from the war and into the regency of
Louis XV freighted with a huge debt of 600 million livres, mortgaged to its dependents, unable
to pay up and desperate for solutions. Tactic number one involved deeper patrimonialization. The
crown converted existing corporations like provincial Estates, city governments, and the Hotel de
Ville de Paris into revenue farms, as well as selling thousands of new offices in the guilds,
judiciary and state administration. These offices carried the usual fiscal exemptions, monopolies
over production or distribution, noble titles or other patrimonial prerogatives (Bossenga 1987:
117-18). They also continued to lure takers because they promised their families
intergenerational elevation of status, frequently tied to those future prerogatives, as Chapter Four
showed. Once committed, the elite tenants of these corporate bodies could then be compelled to
advance loans to the crown, though the bitter pill was sweetened because they were often
awarded commissions and interest (Lachmann and Adams 1988: 157-58; Matthews 1958: 81). In
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the early eighteenth century, as David Bien shows (1987: 93), the crown was still adding to the
numbers of corporate revenue farmers and lower-level venal officers.
Tactic number two was contradictory, and raised a forthright challenge to the ascendancy
of venal interests over the state. This involved the expansion of central state bureaucracies,
including the secretariat of foreign affairs and, even more radically, a direct attempt to bypass
venal finance.1 The crown secured a "hired gun," a Scottish financier named John Law, and Law
and the Regent tried to sever patrimonial officers' and revenue farmers' investments in their
privileges from their control over revenue sources, and to convert their holdings into public debt.
If this ploy had worked, it would have helped the crown dig itself out without amassing more
semi-private debt, and preserved it from creeping intergenerational colonization by venal and
quasi-venal office-holding families. The ambitious scheme failed, but is no less important for
that. Its failure was symptomatic, first of all: it reveals the familial state structure, and
corresponding limits to development. Law's System and the Anti-System rigged up in response
also had their own impact on patrimonial state formation in France.
The key to the scheme was the Compagnie des Indes, in yet another dizzying incarnation.
Law's remodeled Company, founded in 1719, united the inactive Compagnie des Indes Orientales
and the more recent Compagnie d'Occident, dating from 1717.2 Besides merging the colonial
monopolies, the vast new organization was to be responsible for the tax collection and coinage of
the realm, and for reimbursing the crippling state debt. At its peak the Company embraced
various eastern colonial initiatives, the rights to all trade in Louisiana and Canada, control over
Paris rentes, and the first effort in France at a public bank (Giraud 1961; Harsin 1970: 227-28).
"What I have been calling a Bank up to now should be seen as a company like those famous
companies that we see flourishing in England and Holland, but with this difference," Law
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remarked, stressing the gigantism of the enterprise: "that this bank or company will have no other
frontier for its commerce than that of the commerce of France, all of which will be in its hands"
(Girard 1908: 12 [my translation]). This wildly ambitious initiative infused France's militarized
colonial trade with new energy. The Company sent ships bearing over 6,700,000 livres to buy
Indian goods in 1720, and established a Bengal entrepot in Pondichery. It developed far-reaching
projects to expand trade in pepper and to colonize Mauritius (Furber 1976: 136-37). But Law
also opened colonial commerce to wider participation by independent traders, for example in the
tobacco and beaver trades, in collaboration with the Company. This was a clear break with the
state's previous mercantile projects, which had typically envisioned overseas merchants as
competitors to be eliminated by the crown. Also prospering under the new order were slave
merchants exploiting the West Indies, such as those based in the city of Nantes (Bertin 1962:
471; Martin 1924: 9-12; 1926-27: 435-46). When it came to combining commerce and coercion,
Law's System was no prettier than any of its patrimonial predecessors in France. It simply bid fair
to be more successful.
By the same token, it awakened the hostility of the elites whose organizational turf it
threatened. Crown financiers, such as the Paris Brothers, who had been strongly linked with the
regime in the waning days of Louis XIV, authored a so-called Anti-System, a canny attempt to
topple Law that offered the public shares in a tax farm and then tried to bankrupt Law's Company
bank by presenting the notes they had collected for conversion into gold.3 But the coup de grace
was administered by corporate revenue farmers and venal officers. Law's attempt to reimburse
and eliminate many offices blocking the expansion of trade damned the System in the eyes of
provincial aspirants to privilege, and Company revenues seemed inadequate to support the
remaining officials (Matthews 1958: 69; Weber 1904: 315-18). Shares plunged, the System
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crashed in 1720-21, and John Law fled the country. The Company was reorganized in 1723 and
1729-31 and confirmed as a traditional royal revenue farm, jointly administered by a series of
General Controllers and Ministers of the Marine. It received from the crown the revenues from
the rights to the western domain and the Louisiana tobacco farm, which were promptly
subleased, again at the behest of the crown, to sixty members of the resurgent and consolidated
state elite who styled themselves the Company of General Farmers. The Compagnie des Indes
had once again become a colonial corporation whose profits mainly derived from reinvesting its
capital in noncolonial outlets (Boulle 1981: 113). It was an intermediary corporate form by which
rentiers extracted resources from other ventures.4 This may not have been the optimal path to
commercial development or colonial exploitation, but this state of affairs was not necessarily an
insuperable obstacle. What mattered was whether metropolitan rulers and their patrimonial
dependents left independent merchants and, through them, producers the resources to reproduce
themselves and expand, and whether they backed them up militarily and accorded them
legitimacy on their home European ground. The first of these conditions was met, at least for a
time, we shall see, but the other two were not.
The Law interlude had important unintended consequences. First, it unshackled foreign
and especially colonial trade. The average annual value of foreign trade virtually quintupled from
215 million livres in 1716-20 to 1,062 million in 1784-88. This was a startling leap forward, even
after the 60% inflation from 1730-80 is taken into account. In 1716-10, the value of French
foreign trade was about one-half of England's; just before the Revolution it had reached virtually
the same level (Butel 1990: 162-63). France had become the largest supplier of manufactured
goods for Spain and its American empire, and dominated the Levant and Italian markets. Signs of
relative underdevelopment remained. Re-exports were largely controlled by foreign merchants
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resident in France and were almost entirely carried in foreign ships. In 1713-80, for example, an
average of ten French ships a year were registered eastbound on the Sound, whereas the Dutch
averaged eight hundred a year, and the British over five hundred during the same period
(Bamford 1954: 207). But overall, it was a miraculous result. The leading sector was colonial
trade, which grew twice as fast as other international trade in the eighteenth century. While
exports of French products tripled, colonial re-exports rose eight-fold (Butel 1990: 163). Most of
the increased traffic was due to the links between merchant communities of the Atlantic ports
and the major colonies of Saint Domingue (Haiti), Martinique, Guadeloup and Guiana.
Bordeaux, which dealt in slaves, sugar, indigo and coffee, registered imports of 163 million
livres in 1771, up from 9 million in 1724-35, accounting for some 25-30% of the external trade
of France as a whole (Charpentier 1937: 33-6). Nantes was the major base for the infamous slave
trade that surged after Law's System opened up the monopoly.5 Relative to the West Indies, the
East Indies trade was a less important component of the economy than it was in the Netherlands - a result of the competitive disadvantage bequeathed by prior French Pacific company projects.
After the post-Law era reconstruction, however, the Compagnie des Indes was commercially
active as a state enterprise, though on a smaller scale than the Dutch company.6
The Law disaster also gave the patrimonial state a new lease on life. The crash wiped out
most of the state debt, which was held in Company shares, but simultaneously discredited the
concept and institution of public banking, contributing to the serious shortfall of credit in later
years leading up to the Revolution. As a consequence, the state was unable to take the Dutch or
English route toward public finance. The fate of the System also stood as a warning to would-be
reformers: it underlined the ferocious opposition of the patrimonial elite, based in officers'
possession of, desire for, and belief in their entitlement to investments in state privilege and
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corporate prerogatives. In this manner the limits inscribed in the eighteenth-century French state
paralleled those of the Dutch. Only when existing intergenerational pockets of privilege were
respected and preserved, or somehow circumvented, would rulers or rebels make headway in
rationalizing the political economy or reconstructing the architecture of the state. This proved to
be as significant an obstacle in the path of political change as it was in the Netherlands.
The Syndication of French Family Property in Privilege
To other monarchs, the position of the Bourbon rulers in the eighteenth century might
have seemed an enviable one. The French crown had subordinated the national estates, which
had met in 1614 for the last time before the Revolution. The crown was the fount of material
control over vast reserves of hereditable resource-bearing political privilege and the source of
newly-minted (but ostensibly traditional) status markers of social mobility and institutionalized
privilege. Furthermore, those impressive powers were organized around an unparalleled political
theater, the court at Versailles, a brilliant site for the display of symbols of hierarchical royal
authority. Throughout the eighteenth century, the Bourbon kings continued to lay claim to a
superordinate, divinely-justified social fatherhood and, as feminist theorists and historians of
gender have shown, their claims were part and parcel of the prevailing language of political
legitimation (see for example Maza 1993). In fact, Sarah Hanley (1994: 122-24) argues,
monarchical political discourse became more patriarchal over time; even as new rhetorics of
fatherhood celebrated the benevolent paterfamilias as against the severe ruler of yore, kings and
their ideologists sought to highlight the authoritative relationship between father and child rather
than husband and wife as the template for the bond between ruler and subject.7 The Bourbons
were political patriarchs, strongly positioned as symbols and centralizing sources of family
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privilege and patronage. But though scholars and contemporaries often assumed that the
Bourbons were the absolutist rulers par excellence, holding the elite as well as the populace
hostage to their designs (while the eighteenth century English kings were held hostage by the
landed magnates as an implicit condition of dynastic support), both Louis XV and Louis XVI
also came up against the limits of patriarchal absolutism. The relations, increasingly conscious
and codified, that representatives of elite families developed among themselves constrained the
French kings as well. Dutch political developments, embodied in the Contracts of
Correspondance, are a good pointer toward what we might look for in the French situation.
By virtue of its very capacities, the French crown was able to pursue what Gail Bossenga
has nicely termed the "extended patrimonialization" of the state, whereby, as she puts it, "bundles
of privilege, status and governmental functions were, for all practical purposes, owned by the
elite" (Bossenga 1997: 31). This long-standing tendency dispersed as well as extended state
power; it enabled the elite to secure an intergenerational family foothold in corporate privilege by
buying into diverse sites and apparatuses.8 In the eighteenth century, the privileged codified
sturdier familial-organizational ties among themselves. The royal secretaries (who were not
actually secretaries, you will recall, but holders of sinecures purchased as part of family strategies
of ennoblement) banded together and established a corporation to cope with the crown's pressure
for funds in the 1720s and protect themselves from the monarch's unpredictable depredations
(Bien 1978). The Company of General Farmers syndicated itself in 1726. One-hundred fifty-six
families supplied the 223 revenue farmers that ran the CGF between then and the Revolution;
these families increasingly intermarried and collectively controlled the corporation by regulating
the rotating appointment of younger relatives to positions of apprenticeship (Durand 19xx: 46).
These practices meant that family cliques became simultaneously less differentiated from one
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another and more defended, so that any one ruler could not readily seize the advantage by
promoting men hailing from one family clique over those based in another, as Louis XIV had
done with the Colbert and Fouquet clans. The monarch had lost one of his prime tertius
opportunities – “being the third between players in two or more relations with conflicting
demands” (Burt 1992: 31). The combination of stably institutionalized mechanisms of group
defense with the old lure of low-risk family investment and advancement ensured that crownsponsored holdings remained attractive even at relatively low rates of return.9 Not all of the
privileged bunched into corps, but the Dutch case helps us see the signal importance of the fact
that among those that did were heavy hitters like the CGF that regulated the fiscal underpinnings
of the crown's commercial/colonial ambitions.
Hilton Root argues that these family pacts stymied development in France by disrupting
the relationship between "universalistic, achievement-oriented norms" and the developing state
(1994: 217-18). Root is right on target in emphasizing the importance of the pacts, for as the
office-holding family cliques codified lateral ties they also secured their hold on privileges as
articulated through traditional corporate forms. The pacts thus preserved the position of the
grander elite in central state apparatuses and were a vehicle through which its members
elaborated an intergenerational corporate identity based on their weighty office genealogies,
defined against both the independent bourgeoisie and smalltime provincial nobility. The
patrimonial elite had been perpetually nourished and replenished by a stream of bourgeois who
made their way into the state by abandoning trade for ennobling office, but as Lucas (1973) has
shown, commoners found the route to intergenerational family mobility and status honor via state
power increasingly closed to them in the eighteenth century.10 Provincial nobles for their part
mounted a feudal revival, the "seigneurial reaction" of the last decades of the Old Regime, and
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demanding renewed royal favor on the basis of honorable family antiquity and simple hereditary
exemption from taxation.11 Root's hypothesis is incomplete, however, as the basis for a more
general understanding. One lesson that emerges from comparing France to the Golden Age
Netherlands, where universalistic, achievement-oriented practices were no more widespread but
the familial state did encourage sustained politico-economic experimentation, is that
development depends on which institutional arrangements and elites family settlements implant,
and how they function in the global context. Dutch elite family commitments to a dispersed
pattern of corporate privilege first fostered the flow of resources, support and legitimacy from
key constituencies -- especially long-distance merchants -- to the state, although the institutional
arrangements that enabled the ruling elite to mobilize competitively through locally- and
provincially-based corporate forms eventually left them unable to deliver the goods in the face of
growing challenges from abroad.
Because the familial mechanisms are similar in the French case, the contrast highlights
the distinctive nature of the seigneurial nobility that was incorporated into the French state in the
seventeenth century -- to the detriment of mercantile prospects -- and then came to rely on statebased mechanisms and collective capacities to perpetuate itself over the generations. Corporate
officeholders were able to parlay this position to strengthen their intergenerational connections
and mobilize collectively in opposition to proposed reforms, radically limiting the capacity of the
crown to introduce new terms and conditions of governance. The rich recent historiography on
the French Revolution has emphasized the efforts of the Crown to breach these constraints, but
especially in the context of imperial crisis, it was too little, too late. In the last decades of the Old
Regime, the crown repeatedly tried to level fiscal distinctions by imposing taxes on the
privileged; rationalizing state apparatuses, and extending and multiplying mechanisms of
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political representation, but the privileged proved quite capable of effective resistance.12 As the
Parlement of Douai put it in the teeth of a reform effort in the 1770s: "the right to bequeath an
office to one's heir cannot be regarded as a simple privilege, but as a veritable right of property
founded on the most sacred titles, on a contract that Louis XIV resolved of his own accord to
make with his newly conquered subjects."13 But note the revealing melange of invocations of
hereditary family privilege and contractual rights to property. Especially when freighted with
promises of eventual family ennoblement, their commodification undercut the honor and
legitimacy of hereditary nobility – and thus the dynastic monarchy. Other potential solvents and
signs of what we would call modernity stemmed from within the patrimonial corps themselves.
The very men who held tight to corporate privilege routinely welcomed some forms of
institutional innovation with open arms. The Company of General Farmers, for example, adopted
some key features of bureaucracy in its later years (see Bosher 1970; Lachmann and Adams
1988). But the structure of patrimonial authority raised some fearsome obstacles to the
generalization or diffusion of innovation to areas of the state under other corporate bodies'
administrative control and, as we have seen, the Crown found itself with less and less room to
manoeuvre.
From Mercantile Body to Monied Company in the English State
World power and domestic dinosaur: this paradox seems to characterize the eighteenthcentury East India Company, at least at first glance. The EIC, according to an admiring entry
penned in 1751 for The Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce, was "the most flourishing
trading company in the kingdom, as likewise one of the greatest in Europe for wealth, power, and
immunities" (Postlethwayt 1971 [1774], quoted in Neal 1990: 119). Its fortunes were at the
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high-water mark then. After years of acrimonious division, it was relaunched as a patrimonial
corporation in 1709, issuing from the union of the Old (crown-chartered) and New (parliamentsanctioned) East India Companies in one integrated body. The Company's sovereign prerogatives
were resoundingly endorsed. And unlike its early seventeenth-century predecessor, the EIC now
had a permanent organizational existence as a single organizational body.14 But the
reconstruction of the East India Company also signalled an erosion of crown control over its
overseas mercantilist offshoots in favor of a nominally shared executive responsibility. The new
Company cohabited with the executive's evolving exercize of statutory control over
commercial/colonial policy. The EIC was a building-block in a colonial system that was
recognizably old-style, but that reoriented not only the mercantile structure of England but also
the map of long-distance trade in Europe. Mercantilism was actively strengthened in overseas
long-distance trade (Thomas 1968 [1926]: 118-65). The Navigation Acts, slightly remodelled,
regulated the nationality of shipowners and crews; proscribed certain destinations for their goods;
established what types of colonial manufacture were allowed, and regulated the fiscal
relationships of colonial to home industries (Thomas and McCloskey 1981: 93-99). The viability
of these arrangements abroad depended on military force, delivered by the chartered companies
and the state's armed forces, especially the navy, the largest in Europe by the eighteenth century.
The growing capacity of the navy to support England's overseas traders would prove one of the
decisive differences between England on the one hand, and the Netherlands and France on the
other.
The Dutch were the big losers. Colonial markets became a crucial source of imports and
exports, and the goods were marketed to Europe directly, bypassing the Dutch entrepot. English
imports from 1752-54 still included about 30% of the trusty commodities that had dominated
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medieval northern European trade (such as wine, timber, woollen and linen textiles, hemp and
flax), but Asian and American products now accounted for fully 46% of imports (Davis 1969:
119). Rising European demand powered the Atlantic import and reexport trades in sugar,
tobacco, indigo, and dyewoods, and the surging Asian tea trade. By the 1790s, Europe was
absorbing 80-90% of reexports (Farnie 1962; Wilson 1965: 264).15 The Netherlands had been
England's main source of imports, the finisher of its manufactures, its major market outlet and a
key source of shipping services before the English Revolution. By 1700, the Netherlands'
position had slipped in relative terms, coming in second in imports behind English colonial
plantations, although it was still the primary destination for exports. The Netherlands was only
tenth in supplying imports by 1760, and as a market for British exports its share was one-third of
what it had been (Wilson 1965: 271-2). Throughout this period, multilateral trade built on
colonial contacts and possessions was replacing the dependency on the Netherlands. The Dutch
had created this style of conducting large-scale overseas trade, and the English borrowed and
perfected it, displacing the Dutch entrepot in the process.
The East Indies trade was just one sector of the foreign trade -- and lest we forget,
enforced extraction -- that was crucial to the growth and structure of the English and in fact
British economy during this period, as historians like Davis (1954) and Deane and Cole (1967)
have long maintained. But it was a particularly important one as a corporate source of expanded
resources and even more as a site of institutional innovation. Its metropolitan directorate related
uneasily to the development of capitalism and the broader rationalization of the metropolitan
state -- both processes that they were unwittingly encouraging. The English company had been
feebler than its Dutch cousin throughout the seventeenth century. Ironically, this very weakness
gave rise to the distinctive feature of the eighteenth century English company: the development
15
of a thriving symbiotic private sector. For decades, independent English merchants based in the
Atlantic had pressured the EIC to open up its monopoly (see Chapter Four above). When the EIC
finally bowed to this pressure in the late seventeenth century, it compromised by recognizing the
rights of what were called "private" traders in the East Indies -- including interlopers based in
Europe, Asian merchants, and company servants trading on the side.16 Private traders carried
goods for the Company in intra-Asian trade, paid customs at Company ports, and investigated
prospective routes, in return for military protection (P. J. Marshall 1987: 281). By the first decade
of the century, private traders were transacting one-half of the Company's intra-Asian "country"
trade. The EIC eventually surrendered the whole of this commerce, resulting, unexpectedly from
the point of view of the Company directorate, in a huge expansion of EIC and private trade.17
This development stood in sharp contrast to the domain of the VOC, which maintained its
internal monopoly until the 1740s, until it scrambled to imitate the EIC's more profitable
arrangement.
It was precisely this combination of patrimonial umbrella and energetic independent
capital that transformed the East India Company into a late-blooming success story as a
transitional colonial enterprise. The EIC and the English and Dutch private traders with whom it
contracted concentrated on the burgeoning tea market, centered in Canton and fed with Indian
cloth and American bullion. Imports of tea into England topped 100,000 English pounds in 1706
(Furber 1976: 127). As the price of tea fell, annual consumption per head catapulted upward:
some six- or seven-fold between 1725 and 1760 (Wilson 1965: 308).18 Tea was one of the first
two mass commodities purveyed in Europe -- the other was coffee, controlled by the VOC by
virtue of its grip on Javanese growing areas. The East Indies was most important as a source of a
rich import trade in the early years of the century, in contrast to the markets of the Atlantic settler
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colonies, but that was changing as well.19 The EIC was able to respond to opportunities like the
weakening grip of the Dutch and the disintegration of the Mughal empire in the 1720s and to
muscle in on the Indian subcontinent (Chandra 1971; Habib 1973). As the EIC in the Indies was
increasingly exacting protection from locally-operating merchants, it was maintaining its hold -at times with difficulty -- on the sovereign rights that it held at the behest of its home state.
The Company was indispensable not only because of its long mercantile and imperial
arm, which sheltered independent merchant capitalists, but also because of its transitional role in
domestic politics and finance. Take politics first. Company men, at the heart of the patrimonial
elite -- lodged in a position analogous to the Amsterdam bourgeoisie in that city's government -controlled London's Aldermanic Court, and as aldermen worked to discipline the direction of
City policy.20 This was no easy task, for the City opposition envied the elite their corporate
privileges and consistently pressed for a more open, more aggressive maritime and colonial
policy than either the patrimonial elite or the crown wanted (Rogers 1977). In this way,
patrimonial-style politics continued to organize significant features of the structure and
regulation of large-scale commercial and colonial enterprise. It was an ongoing source of social
tension that the independent merchant capitalists who pressed to open the colonial field were
limited and policed by the patrimonial elite, hand in hand with the crown and its ministers. The
East Indies men supported the crown and ministers in its turn, partly by the tried and true
expedient of shelling out money -- for example, the 200,000 pounds that the Company paid to
secure its charter renewal in 1766 (Kramnick 1968: 54). East Indies men also constituted one of
the biggest blocs in the House of Commons, along with the more dispersed West Indies interest,
and the bloc favored the crown.21
The enormous profitability of the Company also prompted major stockholders and
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directors to diversify into state finance, into what is still known today as the City of London
(Carruthers 1996: 53-91; Earle 1989: 146-52).22 As a pillar of the rising monied interest in the
metropole, along with the South Sea Company and the Bank of England (founded in 1694,
imported by William and Mary from Amsterdam on their Dutch home ground, but now given
truly national extension), the EIC played a transitional corporate role. Its loans continued to fund
state debt in traditional ways. The big monied companies held about L. 19,000,000 out of the
total national debt of L. 50,000,000 in 1720, even after funded debt borrowed from private
citizens had begun to displace loans from the patrimonial corps. Approximately one quarter of
state debt still derived from loans from these corps in 1749 (Sutherland 1984: 153-64). Yet the
EIC was also part of the financial revolution we've come to call the emergence of public credit.
Its short-term bonds became as important as government bills in the developing money market
(Sutherland 1984: 157). It underpinned new modes of state finance that departed from corporate
revenue farming, even as its own sphere was qualified by these innovative practices.23 One
upshot was that a higher proportion of resources was channeled to the state exchequer than in the
Netherlands. Another was that both the EIC and the state's funded debt was able to draw in Dutch
investors, estimated in 1776 to account for L. 59,000,000 of the national debt of L. 143,000,000.
"With the borrowed profits from Holland's Golden Age," as Wilson says, "Britain gambled on an
imperial future, and gambled successfully" (1949: 161). The shape of that imperial future had yet
to be determined. Meanwhile, at home, the Company exemplified the fixed patrimonial form that
allowed for ongoing, even explosive innovation in a context of intercorporate and international
competition. It was cause and component of a creeping financial and bureaucratic revolution: the
emergence of a centralized structure of public credit by which commercial and colonial wealth -including that of the dominant Dutch contender -- could be reliably and legitimately appropriated
18
by the state. But on what grounds, by what sort of state, and to what ends?
Ruling Families and Familial Rule in Hanoverian England
The parliamentary elites had divided over just these vexing questions in the lead-up to the
Glorious Revolution of 1688. They had agreed on restoring the monarch (Charles II) in 1660,
after the trauma of political patricide, but disagreed about the nature of monarchy itself. Their
arguments, made in the teeth of Charles II's and his brother and heir James II's absolutist
ambitions, highlighted varying views of the monarch's ideal role. At this precarious juncture, Sir
Robert Filmer's Patriarcha (1991), an enunciation of familial principles of political organization,
was published posthumously and found a wide audience. Filmer advocated for -- or rather,
reminded his readers of -- the great politico-familial chain of being, through which sons were
subject to male family heads, who were in turn to serve as dutiful subjects of the father-king.
Was the king a paternal proprietor, as in Filmer's conservative tory view, or a trustee, as the
whigs saw him?24 If the latter, did the monarch hold the crown and its capacities in trust for a
divinely-sanctioned royal lineage, as absolutist rulers were wont to claim, or for a wider
association: a group of aristocratic family heads and pedigreed natural rulers represented in
Parliament? Was Parliament to be a consultative corporation or a decision-making body, and if
the latter, what kind of sovereignty would it have? Or could dynastic legitimacy itself be
reinvented?
It is often assumed that the Glorious Revolution settled these crucial questions in favor of
a sovereign and effectively "modern" Parliament. Dynasticism, if it figures in the picture at all, is
supposed to have disappeared as a meaningful political principle then or shortly thereafter.25 It is
true that the Revolution issued in James II's flight to the continent and the deposition of James
19
and his heirs in favor of another branch of the Stuart family tree: James' elder daughter Mary, in
conjunction with her husband, the stadholder of Holland, William, Prince of Orange, himself
half-Stuart. The associated Bill of Rights abrogated future monarchs' indefeasible hereditary
right. Post-revolutionary advocates of parliamentary sovereignty also benefitted from something
they did not foresee: the pressures of massive and continuing war, which restructured the
relationship between crown and parliament as William III's escalating need for funds qualified
the monarch's sway over foreign policy.26 But it did not put an end to that perceived right. Royal
dynasticism infused sovereign claims to territory and the products of those territories, and threats
to enforce such claims had real teeth in the eighteenth century. Furthermore, James' perceived
birthright and the political claims of his heirs -- aka Jacobitism -- retained a stubborn and longlived legitimacy in elite opinion as well as popular memory, an issue that became still more
troubling with the accession of the dynastically-distant Hanoverians in 1714. As one unhappy
tory put it: "The succession of the crown to the next of blood is a law eternal and wrote with the
immediate hand of God and nature" (quoted in Western 1972: 38-39). The Dutch regents had
traversed similar terrain during their seventeenth-century Exclusion Crisis and failed to
extinguish resurgent Orangist claims to sovereign princely status. Jacobitism lay at the core of
the opposition tory party, and fear of Jacobitism and all that it stood for energized the leading
forces of the pro-Hanoverian whigs for a substantial portion of the eighteenth century.27 This
became even more important as alternative dynastic "choices" came to symbolize distinct
executive orientations to foreign policy and overseas commerce.
Claims that dynasty simply decayed also fail to register the broader relationship between
family and politics in the wake of the crisis of 1688 and during the century that followed. For
starters, patriarchal political authority was reinforced by elite devices that regulated family
20
property relations. The practice of strict settlement, which kept the patrimony together, held in
trust by the father for his eldest son, then renewable for his son, and so on. Strict settlement, most
pervasive among the landed elite, "enabled a landowner to tie the hands of his heir and turn him
into a tenant for life" (Stone and Stone 1986: 48). It also promised that estates would be coupled
with titles, which almost always descended to male heirs (Spring 1984: 4). This practice was
invented in the seventeenth century, after the Restoration, but was most widely applied in the
eighteenth. Strict settlements symbolized and enforced the impulse of lineage heads to preserve
the knotty intergenerational complex of estates, family name and titles. These singular projects of
family lineage advancement, and the contractual devices collectively invented and administered
with them in mind, supported the economic position of landed elite families.28 They guarded
against improvident heirs and indulgent fathers, either of whom might destroy the heritage of the
patrilineage and damage the future integrity of the estate.
Yet such settlements were not merely a matter of family economy: they also involved
political authority. Strict settlement reinforced all three legs of this tripod -- though no longer in
terms of elites' direct feudal control of vast household retinues backed by force, at least on
English turf. Now the relationship was indirect, mediated via family heirloom seats in the Lords
and Commons, and state offices that effectively belonged to great magnate families, like the Lord
Lieutenancies, a regional position resembling the Dutch provincial stadholderships. The Lords
Lieutenant dispensed huge numbers of offices in patronage chains, including the local Justices of
the Peace. Thus the political authority of magnate families -- or their male representatives -strengthened in the eighteenth century, based on the entanglement of patrilineage, property and
authority. That patriarchal relations among the governing elite were renewed in a form regulated
by the group rather than exercised by individual fathers raises two points of comparison with
21
Netherlands. First, as in the Dutch case, I would expect this systemic affirmation of paternal
authority to have affected relationships within these families. Patriarchy could not be expected to
give way to greater equality, in spite of Lawrence Stone’s (1975) eloquent arguments to the
contrary. And in fact Eileen Spring and others have shown that provisions for daughters and
widows deteriorated under the strict settlement regime; married women lacked a legal persona
until the nineteenth century, and children were deemed the father's property until the 1830s, when
the first statutory act reducing the power of husbands was passed.29 Correlatively, Parliament
sanctioned remodeled dynasticism in royal lineage -- and this is the second point of comparison
with the Dutch case. In contrast to the Netherlands, where the assembled rulers of town,
corporate enclave or province called the shots, these provisions and settlements were in the last
instance enforced by the consolidating central state. Only the crown and assembled elites in
parliament could overturn a strict settlement. The symbolic and institutional sources of the
politico-economic strength of English magnate families were migrating upward.30
England had acquired the core of a well-ordered "fiscal-military" organization relatively
quickly compared to other European countries, perhaps by the early eighteenth century as John
Brewer (1988) has persuasively argued. The consolidation of newer and more rationalized central
administrative departments -- Customs and Excise, Navy Board and Board of Trade -- contrasted
with the underdeveloped central instance in the Netherlands, and was surely crucial to England's
growing success abroad in accumulation and warfare.31 At the same time, many a central state
office continued to be regarded as a family interest for much of the eighteenth century, as family
pressure groups bound together by patrilineage and ties to in-laws contended for perquisites, just
as their Dutch counterparts snatched up the offices and privileges that radiated outward from
local corporate centers (Aylmer 1961; Mounod 1988). Did the actions of family factions "clutter
22
the history of the eighteenth century with trivial detail," veiling more important issues, as J. H.
Plumb (1951: 41) confidently asserts? This seems very far off the mark. Nothing was more
important than family to suturing the ragged operation of public power. At the same time, as the
next section shows, nothing was more troublesome.
The scramble for favors was channeled by a remarkable elite arrangement, initially
orchestrated by the whig leader Sir Robert Walpole and dubbed the Robinocracy, in which the
ascendancy of whig ministerial managers and crown counsellors, dominated by the nobility, was
linked to the distribution of proprietary office-holding. The Robinocracy constituted a party-like
group that in its heyday "settled like a cloud of locusts on the royal household and all the
institutions of executive government" (Plumb 1967: 69). It was also the functional equivalent of
the more formal Dutch Contracts of Correspondence and the French family syndicates of officeholders in linking privileged elites to state power. A 1739 opposition pamphlet listed hundreds of
these so-called "placemen" pulullating in the army, navy, law, state departments, diplomacy,
royal household and administration, and colonial outposts.32 Walpole's success stemmed from his
capacity to use crown patronage to create submissive Parliaments, pleasing the king and
strengthening the central state, while at the same time distributing this patronage to reinforce the
power of elites at the local level. The system depended on a legitimate and secure Hanoverian
dynasty. For its part, the House of Hanover needed the support and management of the local
dynasts. Thus a strengthened central state, and dynasty, could coexist with England's notoriously
autonomous local elite. Once again, we should not overlook the role of dynasty as a principle of
legitimacy and authority encoded in practices of rule. The Parliamentary Act of Settlement had
invented a new royal dynasty and begun to render it legitimate. The nouveau dynasty was reviled
and ridiculed for decades, particularly as it publically broadcast its ugly internal squabbles, but
23
the onus was on the whigs to nurture it if they wanted to stay in power and pass on their positions
to succeeding generations.
So how did the big bourgeoisie, including the movers and shakers of trading company
enterprise, fare in this familial scenario, given that the most important levers of state power were
controlled by the heads of the great landowning families, the magnates who maneuvered for the
rights, partly at the behest of the crown, to dispense parliamentary seats and government
patronage and by the same token to manage the substance of politics from the 1710s to the 1770s
in the Augustan Age?33 Lured by the prospect of family distinction, social climbing bourgeois
continued to aspire to landed gentry status, hooked to the system by lineal ambition as well as
politico-economic prospects. A study of the London aldermen indicates that the corporate city
patriciate of the early eighteenth century was increasingly likely to marry its progeny into
families of landed gentry (Rogers 1979: 445).34 City dynasties did emerge in their own right as
the century wore on, as landed estates became scarcer and an urban rentier existence more
socially acceptable. Meanwhile, men hankered after the intergenerational family mobility that
state service and parliamentary seats could deliver. "The Government contracts were usually held
with a seat in the House of Commons," notes Namier, "whilst baronetcies, the crest over the
profits, had invariably to be gained by service in the House; and a generation or two later,
provided the money was preserved, the trade discontinued, and a seat in the House retained, a
coronet was within the reach of the children or grandchildren of the successful Government
contractors" (Namier 1929: 59-60). Returning East Indies nabobs and absentee West Indies
planters fervently pursued these familial aims. What isn't clear is how many were successful in
acquiring estates or "placing" their daughters in the gentry or aristocracy, and how many more
were disappointed as strict settlements tightened the land market and the price of brides rose.
24
Disappointed or not as individuals, the company merchants collectively depended on the
structure of relations forged between magnates and crown in the aftermath of the Glorious
Revolution. Overseas traders may have found the patriarchal landed fantasy seductive, but they
were perforce aligned with the sitting dynasty and its adherents against those who brandished the
Jacobite banner of an imaginary bucolic past.35 Hanoverianism was generally framed against a
tory "politics of nostalgia" (Kramnick 1968): a reactionary stance that exalted the retired life of
the country gentleman and excoriated the ruling house, monied companies, the City of London
and the expansionary state implicated in global reach, all of which were seen as of a piece.
Supporters of the House of Hanover celebrated commercial and colonial power as well as calling
for a defense of the realm against the older cluster of fears of Popish plots, French-style
absolutism and accompanying fantasies of the wholesale ruin of paternal prerogatives and
unchecked appropriation of elite property. By defending the sitting dynasty, however, neither the
whigs nor their merchant members and supporters were advocating personal monarchical power.
(That line of defense would have been difficult to pursue in any case, for the House of Hanover
was by its distant dynastic credentials questionably legitimate until the 1760s, even beyond the
point at which the perceived Jacobite-French threat to Britain that the Hanoverians were bent on
countering culminated in Charles Stuart's failed 1745 invasion.) Overseas merchants actually
wanted more restrictive interpretations of monarchical familial right: they smarted when the
crown betrayed them on the issue of the cotton trade, and complained when George I and George
II engaged the state in continental military actions on behalf of personal family dynasty, arguing
that the crown's autonomous adventures blocked further commercial and colonial expansion
(Holmes and Szechi 1993: 56-8; Rogers 1977). But if they were company men, they considered
themselves stuck with the Robinocracy and its subsequent manifestations, and consistently
25
resigned themselves to the House of Hanover as the better dynastic alternative; the autonomous
merchants, frustrated and champing at the bit, could find no other alternative than loyal
opposition. Clearly, English merchants, patrimonial or autonomous, didn't control the key levers
of state power as they had in the Golden Age Netherlands. They had to operate under the dynastic
umbrella reinvented by the great magnate families to consolidate their own familial preserves.
Crises of Patriarchal Authority and Empire in France and England
War and empire: these were two persistent themes of eighteenth century European
politics. Breaches in the Netherlands’ patrimonial empire sparked Dutch rulers’ crisis of
authority and patriarchy at home, in the metropole. As we turn to France and England, we see
similar patterns, I will argue: imperial crisis, and patrimonial dynamics at the heart of crisis, in
both cases entangled with patriarchal forms of rule. There, too, the colonial systems were
pressured from without and imploded. Company rule formally concluded in France with the
Revolution, and in England in 1828-32, but on both fronts the game was up, as it was in the
Netherlands, in the 1780s. The associated delegitimation of rulers’ authority in Europe was
implicated in the simultaneous crisis of monarchies and elites. The historical resolutions of this
quandary differed, entraining the destruction of elite political redoubts, state breakdown and
revolution in France, and elite renegotiation, state reconstruction and hegemony in England. My
brief is not to tell the story of the French Revolution, or of England’s own unfolding Golden Age
-- that would take me well beyond the bounds of this book’s argument -- but of the entwined role
of elite family pacts and monarchical fatherhood in the collapse of the patrimonial system.
System domestic and international: for the familial resolutions that underpinned the collapse of
the Dutch and French governments remade the global arrangements of power by which England
26
profited.
If this were an eighteenth-century novel, the chapter devoted to the Compagnie des Indes’
further exploits would be titled “in which the Company continues its career as Phoenix.”
Opportunity for expansion knocked, just as it had when Colbert was ascendant a century before,
but the state did not answer. The Company once again experienced a burst of brilliance,
launching what was to be its last serious bid for mercantile and territorial supremacy in India
under the aggressive leadership of Joseph-Francois Dupleix. Dupleix’s ambitious territorial and
military projects were mounted with an eye to bolstering company trade, especially at the
expense of the company’s English rival. His very success in extending the company’s sphere of
influence in the 1740s meant that he eventually had to appeal to the state for backup. But the
crown refused support for years, running true to form, eventually offering intermittent and halfhearted military aid. The contrast with England was stark, for when called upon in similar
circumstances, the English state directed naval squadrons and army regiments to help defend the
East India Company’s holdings from the French (Holmes and Szechi 1993: 254-55). The Seven
Years War spelled the end for the growth of French colonial power under the Old Regime and
marked the limit of the expansion of merchant capital. The war brought on the final debacle for
that particular version of the Compagnie des Indes, groaning under an enormous debt of
60,000,000 livres and a decimated infrastructure (Luthy 1960: 861-62). Dupleix’s consolation
prize was awarded posthumously: a metro stop in Paris now bears his name.
Independent traders welcomed the company’s collapse, and the domestic fruits sprouted
in indices of merchant self-organization, including protests of independents against the privileged
monopolies. Merchants organized themselves in Marseille (Bonnassieux 1892: 316-7; Cordier
1976 [1906]: 221-31), Bordeaux (Charpentier 1937: 121-33), Le Havre (Barrey 1910) and
27
elsewhere. The merchants and slave-traders of Nantes were among the most vocal in opposing
patrimonial companies, and the Nantais played a central role in the 1765 campaign against
reviving the Compagnie des Indes (Boulle 1972: 103; Martin 1926-27: 241-3; 1931: 338-44).
After the suspension of the Compagnie des Indes' monopoly in 1769, the criticisms of
independent merchants were borne out by the abrupt increase in trade, which in spite of taxes and
stringent limitations on where independent merchants could discharge their goods, immediately
leapt from 8,200,000 francs a year to 20,294,000 (Garnault 1899: 6). Nevertheless, the French
state wasn’t able to do any better by the independents than it had by the Compagnie des Indes.
The state failed to provide adequate naval protection for independent traders in the Austrian
Succession War and, most disastrously, the Seven Years War (Taillemite 1988: 139-49, 273).
Merchant and manufacturing capital then flowed away from commercial ventures, back into the
safer waters of local and provincial state offices and bonds. Boulle points out that even the slavetraders of Nantes, among the most aggressive merchants, reverted to traditional uses of capital in
the face of the state’s failure to support them (Boulle 1982: 93-108).
Overall, the French colonial and overseas commercial enterprise continued to lack the
state support that the Golden Age Dutch or even the English companies routinely commanded.
As Jones shows (1995: ch. 5), officeholders were able to put a stop to the crown's experiments
with broadening political representation. And the crown continued to heed them. No wonder: the
crown continued to rely on privileged corporations for funds -- the corps were putting up a third
of the king's loans in the 1780s (Bien 1987: 111) -- as part of its dependence on a mode of
finance that was increasingly inadequate to the state's position in the competitive intercorporate
and interstate system. Without a Dutch or English-style public bank or state treasury, the crown
was unable to raise taxes in wartime and maintain the level of armed (especially naval) readiness
28
needed to protect traders from foreign powers. The inter-elite pacts and the institutions they
secured prevented merchants from articulating a significant voice in policy-making whether as
merchants, as part of the patrimonial group, or as subjects. In fact the French state actually
reinstated the Compagnie des Indes monopoly in 1785, infuriating the independent merchants
and confirming the association of France's privileged overseas traders with the increasingly
beleaguered monarchy.36 The chorus of opposition made its way into the 1789 cahiers of the
States-General, which called for the abolition of the Compagnie des Indes as part of the abolition
of privileged monopoly companies in general (Bonnassieux 1892: 317-8, 499-501) -- and of
course, the overthrow of patrimonial privilege altogether. The Company was finally abolished in
1790, in the heat of the Revolution. Just as they had in the Netherlands, the state and company
collapsed in tandem.
Let me make one point in closing this section, bearing on the role of the monarch or his or
her functional substitute as symbolic patriarchal center in times of imperial crisis. The monarchs
of France (and as we have seen, England) incarnated the legitimating and organizational
principles that made possible the positions of their respective elites. In times of public failure in
war or colonial crisis, therefore, monarchs and elite readily became joint targets of perceptions
and accusations of patriarchal weakness. How far could they, the monarchs, be sidelined, blamed,
disciplined or reined in if the men of the elite were to keep their own pieces of the patriarchal
patrimonial pie? One reading is that both the Dutch and English elites had “gone too far” in this
regard, the English in the era of the seventeenth-century English Revolution, the Dutch in the
Second Stadholderless Period in the eighteenth century. Restoration and resignation followed:
restoration of Charles II in England and the Dutch elite’s having acceded to the elevation of the
Prince of Orange into stadholder of all provinces in the mid-eighteenth century. But of these
29
three patriarchal symbolic and organizational centers, the Bourbons were by far the most
vulnerable. The Prince of Orange was a quasi-monarchical figure who – had he been a different
sort of man! -- could have filled the absent center of Periwig Period politics. But he was not that
sort of man, and there were plenty of elite partisans of English “constitutional monarchy” who
breathed audible sighs of relief that he wasn’t. As such a limited monarch, as Linda Colley
(1992: 226-250) notes, George III was able to duck the blame for defeat in America, and for
problems of eastern empire. “The former prime minister, Lord North, was made the scapegoat for
national humiliation; while the king himself, because of his undoubted domestic probity, his
obstinate patriotism and his adroit alliance with the boy wonder, William Pitt the Younger, came
to represent for many Britons reassuring stability and honest, uncomplicated worth in the midst
of disaster and disillusionment” (Colley 1992: 226).
But Louis XVI was not so fortunate. Widespread caricatures limned him as a weak
household head, unable to control his wife Marie Antoinette (vilified as a bad mother and sexual
predator) and therefore, by metaphoric extension, his kingdom (Hunt 1993: ch. 2). This line of
familial discourse was reflected in and contributed to the delegitimation of French monarchy.
Increasingly, as Sarah Hanley has shown, both monarchs and corporate elite faced public
arguments over the limits of the paternal prerogative in politics. These arguments explicitly
linked the patriarchal prerogatives of crown and elite family heads, for example in objections to
the despotic family practice of serving letters de cachet on willful sons and daughters, who could
then be imprisoned at the behest of parents and with the sanction of the crown.
The contrast with England was stark, and symptomatic, for the mid-eighteenth century
seemed to bring to spectacular fruition the promise of 1688 and empire. The Seven Years War
marked the moment at which England’s ruling group realized -- belatedly! -- that England had
30
moved to the fore in commercial and colonial centrality. Canada had been rent from France, and
mainland America from France and Spain; the Indian empire was under British control, as were
the slave, sugar, and carrying trades spanning West Africa, the West Indies and Britain. Yet the
triumphant imperial moment was swiftly followed by a crisis of the mercantile system and its
associated forms of sovereign rule. The role of the dynastic monarchy in making foreign policy,
the dynamics of patronage and the fate of the state's patrimonial colonial projections preoccupied
the political elite. At the time it was unclear whether inter-elite struggles would spark a
revolution or could be contained within the framework of the existing state. These issues echoed
the political tremors in the Netherlands and France. Here as there a key point of tension lay at the
interface between the metropolitan state and the old colonial system, and this site became the
jumping-off point for people’s renewed political questioning and efforts at restructuring. But the
upshot in England was quite different than elsewhere. In a dramatic turn of events, the
metropolitan state began to assert power over the East India Company, and in the heat of the
struggle the concept and practice of sovereign rule was reforged.
The assumption of territorial rule in India and the associated division of spoils posed
several quandaries for the English. Expanded territorial rule abruptly ended the long period of
profitability and relative political harmony in the Company, between the Company and private
traders, and between the premiere patrimonial corporation and the state. Discord arose from
patrimonial politics as usual: Robert Clive's unauthorized seizure of Bengal (1757), resulting in
the acquisition of the diwani (land revenue) in 1765; the conquering of Bihar and Orissa in 1764.
From then until the metropolitan state asserted authority over the Company, instability was the
name of the game, with potentates driving indigenous merchants in search of protection into the
arms of the East India Company on the one hand, and the lengthening reach of English private
31
trade destabilizing existing mercantile and political arrangements and inviting the Company to
extend its political umbrella on the other. Meanwhile, high-ranking, influential EIC employees
lobbied effectively for a politics of Company intervention, including war, to save their own
investments and projects.
In India, the Company's servants moved to unite the roles of Company mercantile
employee, tax collector and semi-private trader, a shift that strengthened their hands against
competitors, including the Dutch traders who had heretofore been allies (Nightingale 1970: 2325). Yet the burgeoning infrastructure costs that accompanied even modest territorial rule were too
high to sustain with existing commercial profits, and the collection of territorial revenues quickly
became a paramount goal. The EIC initially succeeded in this sphere as well. During 1770-71,
years of severe famine and high indigenous mortality in Bengal, the Company showed an
increase in territorial revenues over 1768 (Misra 1959: 174-75). One can obviously argue about
the causal -- as well as the moral -- relationships in play here! Soon enough, however, the
assumption of territorial rule caused even the Company fiscal and political woe. The Company
administration could not both oversee its own expanded activities and curb the depredations of
its own newly empowered servants. Disgruntled independent merchants stepped up their
demands on the metropolitan state to do away with Company privilege. Clive himself worried
about the emerging chaos and pleaded with the state to assert sovereignty over the EIC's Indian
possessions.37 (Unlike in the Netherlands or France, in fact, the state had the capacity to do it.)
The potential political clout of the Company's new role posed another sort of challenge. The
EIC's army shot up from 3000 in 1748 to 69,000 in 1763, and its servants reportedly entertained
plans for the conquest of China (Black 1990: 65). Who would rule, Company or state? And who
would control access to the Company's expanding patronage?38 These were the old patrimonial
32
problems, arising with fresh urgency, and they elicited a familiar initial response from most
Company directors: they weren’t letting go of their privileges. At stake, they cried, were their
fundamental charter and property rights (Bowen 1986: 13-14) -- and by this they meant the rights
of English men to continued family property in power.
The fundamental political question was canvassed by the larger political elite, in the face
of Company resistance: if the state were to take over and absorb its own patrimonial arm, what
sort of state should that be? As in the Glorious Revolution, the collective answer was hotly
contested, though the present weightier burdens of empire gave the old debates some new twists.
Converging at the same historical moment, in the 1760s, were the dramatic changes in Company
fortunes; the breakdown of the Robinocracy, and the accession of a partisan new king, George
III, in 1760. George’s opponents, the ousted Whigs, raised the specter of royal absolutism in
denouncing the king’s policies. The carefully ordered arrangement for the distribution of
patronage could now be disturbed by royal whim – and this was compounded by the new
imperial pressures and perquisites, which were compromising the state’s capacity to mobilize a
consistent political line and defend its overseas trade and colonial outposts. That the corporate
form became part of a thoroughgoing crisis in the colonial system and forms of sovereignty itself
testifies to the patrimonial practices and quandaries that continued to characterize the English
state. How to enhance state power, which would perforce include opportunities for expanding
patronage, without raising the specter of royal absolutism? This was a contest over the state, and
the outcome was not settled in advance.
Unlike the Netherlands or France, England survived the crisis of authority triggered by
the imperial crisis through reform rather than revolution. Beginning in the 1770s and culminating
in the 1832 Reform Act, the rulers themselves disassembled key structures of patrimonial power
33
and began to assert political stewardship on behalf of a wider public -- though it was a public
principally understood as previously unenfranchised corporate interests.39 They divested central
state niches of corporate rights to accumulate resources, deploy power and elevate family status.
The civil service emerged during this period (Parris 1969), and the monarchy was shorn of its last
significant role in the quotidian exercise of state power, the selection of ministers (Foord 1952
[1947]). William Pitt the Younger, Prime Minister from 1783-1801 and 1804-06, was an axial
figure in this unrolling transformation: he took steps to rationalize the state, restructuring the
conditions under which king and elite could exercise their political authority. And Pitt’s India
Act (1784) marked the beginning of the end of the Company as an autonomous patrimonial
enterprise: the metropolitan state began to reclaim sovereignty over the EIC’s home office.40 So
while some among the ruling elite balked at assuming wider sovereign control over overseas
commercial and colonial arrangements, the state machinery was increasingly equipped to do so.
Enhanced state powers enabled ruling elites in the European metropole to capitalize on imperial
opportunities presented by the disorganization that they had helped, wittingly and unwittingly,
provoke. Furthermore, in contrast to the Dutch elite, which had a collective familial stake in a
style of corporate privilege associated with dispersed federated sovereignty, it seems clear that
the bulk of the English ruling elite had come to see their stake in a functioning central state. This
is not to underplay the dramatic debate and sharp political struggle -- or the sheer elite and
popular political instability! -- that issued in the bureaucratic experiments and political solutions
of late eighteenth-century England. Those struggles were fraught, involving what J.C.D. Clark
(1985) calls the matrix of property, providence and patriarchy that the elite themselves, under
duress, were finally taking apart.
Thus I see the process of political modernization as more protracted and uneven than
34
either the marxist or bellicist versions of English political development, both of which would put
the end of the Old Regime in the seventeenth century, whether in the English Revolution or the
Glorious Revolution of 1688-89 (e.g. Brenner 1993; Brewer 1988). One could take the familial
state argument to extremes, for the curtain has still to be rung down on the Old Regime in
England or for that matter Britain, where under some constitutional circumstances dynastic
monarchy still has real power. Perhaps it will never be, since “we moderns” may always long for
a mythical paternal political center -- which is currently monarchical in England and the
Netherlands, and “presidential-patriarchal” in France and the contemporary United States.
Nonetheless, my arguments in this chapter stand against this extreme familist intellectual vision
as well as against more traditional marxist and bellicist renditions of English history. The
substantial transformation in the English state had taken place by 1828-32, culminating in the
series of changes registered in the Reform Bill. That terminal date also witnessed the end of the
Company’s remaining monopoly, as in the Netherlands and France, the monopoly on trade. A
new colonial system and empire was then at hand (Hobsbawm 1967: 55-57): in the nineteenth
century, England converted India into an enforced dumping ground for English cotton
manufactures.
In comparison to the Netherlands and France, the English elite was able to stave off crisis
and the great question of “reconstruction or revolution” for a longer time. The impact of the
French Revolution itself altered the timing of the Dutch and English crises, accelerating the
Dutch demise on the one hand, and slowing England’s reckoning with patrimonial practices on
the other -- in the absence of French events, their death knell in England might have come in the
1790s. Many reasons for "English exceptionalism" have been adduced -- whether with respect to
the timing or the sheer fact of ‘reconstruction rather than revolution’ – usually class-based and
35
generally with a comparative eye to France. These include the relatively high degree of social
mobility among social gradations; the lack of a truly distinct noble caste; the fact that magnates
were forwarding the rise of agrarian and manufacturing capitalism and promoting state
responsiveness to rising commercial and industrial pressure groups; the specificity of
Anglicanism, and the sobering spectacle of the French Revolution itself, which encouraged elites
to make concessions to popular pressure (Brenner 1993: 655-56; Christie 1984: 54-93; Colley
1992: 220-250). My argument doesn’t write off these or other causal streams -- in the sense that I
wouldn’t seek to erase them in favor of a whole new roster. But people grappled with them from
within the overall umbrella of the patrimonial state, and the patriarchalism of the ruling ideas and
practices that continued to underpin its horizons of political possibility.
36
Endnotes to Chapter Six
1. See Rule (1976) regarding the secretariat, first forwarded by a minister of Louis XIV,
composed of offices (bureaux) staffed by proto-civil servants rather than crown commissioners,
several dozen foreign embassies and some eight hierarchically organized categories of
functionary.
2. See Giraud (1961) for an account of the operations of the Compagnie d'Occident.
3. They were initially unsuccessful: the crown supported Law by debasing the gold content of
specie while maintaining the value of the notes. See Girard (1908: 18-19); Luthy (1960: 298303).
4. For this paragraph, see especially Charliat (1931: 69-71); Dermigny (1970: 465-66); Girard
(1908: 27-31, 177-97); Luthy (1960: 861-62); Price (1973, vol. 1: 288, 362-3).
5. Slave traders were delivering about 35,000 slaves annually by 1783-92 and merchants were
investing about thirty million livres a year in the slave trade after the American War of
Independence. See Stein (1979; 1983: 114). The slave trade did not encounter significant
opposition in France until 1788.
6. It sent thirty (or fewer) ships a year, and 26 (or fewer) returned. Trade averaged 8,200,000
francs a year from 1725 to 1769 (Garnault 1899: 6; Weber 1904: 513-47).
7. For the advent of new rhetorics of political fatherhood, see Hunt (1992: ch. 2). Parlementary
elites thus made novel pleas to Louis XV's affectionate "paternal solicitude" alongside their more
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threatening insistence that "filial respect" should be seen as compatible with their holding
independent political views. See Merrick (1990a: 68-84, 1990b).
8. Venal offices alone were estimated by David Bien (1989) to have reached 50,000 toward the
end of the Old Regime.
9. In general, the attraction of office-holding continued to be strong: Doyle (1984) shows that
5,000-7,000 made their (rather, their families') way into the nobility during the eighteenth century
via office-holding.
10. Meanwhile the percentage of nobles climbed in provincial estates, parlements, and other
important corporate bodies. In the CGF, for example, the proportion of nobles shot up from less
than one-half to more than two-thirds (Durand 19xx: 131).
11. The Segur Ordinance of 1781 ordered army commissions reserved to men who could show
four quarterings of nobility. See Bien (1974). Hampson (1963: 8-13) summarizes feudal
obligations and their revival at the end of the Old Regime.
12. There is a vast literature on this issue. See especially Bosher (1970). For a partial review, see
Lachmann and Adams (1988).
13 This remark is quoted in Bossenga (1991: 55). Bossenga's is a superb analysis of the struggles
over patrimonial privilege in Lille, in the waning days of the Old Regime.
14. The Company acquired a permanent organizational identity in 1660. Sovereign power was
now vested in the General Court (the body in which proprietors (stockholders) met at least four
38
times a year to formulate strategy), which annually elected the twenty-four members of the Court
of Directors (the metropolitan office that oversaw day-to-day operations). These bodies were in
turn linked to a decentralized organization of Four Presidencies in the Indies (Scott 1910-12, vol.
2: 150ff; Sutherland 1952: 32-44).
15. Between 1700 and 1800, in general, imports were up 523% and the exports and reexports
568% and 906% respectively (while the population of England rose 257%). See Deane and Cole
(1967: 46).
16. The inroads made by private "country" trade, which had leapt ahead during the lapse of EIC
monopoly during the Civil War and the Interregnum, were grudgingly recognized by the EIC
directorate, which relaxed its prohibitions in 1670-79. With the rebirth of the United Company in
1709, private trade surged ahead. See Chaudhuri (1978).
17. At Calcutta, for example, English private shipping tripled from 1700 to 1750 (Watson 1980:
36ff, 183). Elsewhere (Adams 1996) I've discussed the way in which this delicate balance
undermined the Dutch company. Here I care about it as an input to the metropole.
18. By the 1790s, after Pitt's Commutation Act (1784) had slashed duties on tea, the EIC was
shipping 15-20,000,000 pounds of tea annually for sale in London. These sales brought in about
2,700,000 pounds a year (Furber 1976: 244; Nightingale 1970).
19. Overall, East Indies imports rose in value from 551,000 to 1.9 million pounds a year between
1701-5 and 1766-70 (Bowen 1986: 4). Exports to the East Indies also dramatically increased in
value, about ten-fold each year between 1700 and 1770. beginning at 113,000 pounds in 1701-5,
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and totalling circa 1.1 million pounds a year by 1766-70. North American trade experienced a
similar increase, shooting up from 268,000 to 2.1 million pounds, while exports to the West
Indies "merely" tripled to 1.2 million pounds (Schumpeter 1960: 17-18). Inflation was negligible
until the latter part of the century. If 1700 is taken as the base year, with the price of consumers'
goods other than cereals set at 100, the price is still only 101 in 1775-79. In 1780-84 it totals 108,
and rises until 1795-99, when it hits 134. See Mathias (1969).
20. The City Council represented some 12,000-15,000 freemen and through them a dependent
population of 700,000 or so, and as a potential channel for the "strong corporate spirit" and tory
leanings animating smaller-fry merchants, tradesmen, and master craftsmen, it was always a
latent threat to the status quo. See Sutherland (1984: 41-66).
21. In 1709, 29 MPs, owning a meager 4.3% of EIC stock, were involved in the Company. By
1764, some 66 MPs owned stock. By the time of the 1768 Parliament, at least one-quarter of
MPs had a direct financial stake in the Company (Bowen 1986: 95; Dickson 1967: 266).
22 Carruthers (1996) analyzes the interface between politics and markets in the late-seventeenthcentury English financial revolution. See especially his Chapter 3, on finance and stateformation from 1672 to 1712.
23. The public Bank supplanted the array of semi-private gold merchant "banks" that resembled
the Paris financiers who dominated French state finance until the Revolution. Tax-farming was
definitively abolished under William and Mary (1689-1702). Farming of the customs was
eliminated in 1671, and of the excise and hearth tax in 1683 and 1684, respectively (Brewer
1989: 92-95; Carruthers 1996; Dickson 1967; Neal 1990; Root 1994: ch. 9).
40
24. The labels tory and whig were first applied in the 1680s, in precisely this context.
25. See for example Schochet (1975). In coronations and other canonical ruling group
celebrations of the eighteenth century, England was celebrated as a national association of elite
family heads, and the monarch as the patriarch who reconciled them. See Clark (1985: 83); and
more generally, O'Gorman 1989: 225-44).
26. For the locus classicus of this argument, see Foord (1952 [1947]). Note that the settlements
themselves sought to reinstate the status quo in England - not radical! The settlements had much
more radical consequences for Scotland, nurturing Scottish parliamentary independence and
restructuring church governance from the episcopal to the presbyterian style (Mitchison 1983).
27. For the role of Jacobitism in the tory party, and for the attitude of the whigs, see Clark (1985:
esp. ch. 3). Colley (1982: 25-50) disagrees with Clark's argument that the tories had a distinctive
Jacobite identity, and that the whigs (including George I and II) were unified "by their common
suspicion of a disaffected toryism and by their justified apprehension of a Jacobite invasion based
on the military and diplomatic supremacy of France" (ibid.: 26). Note, however, that Clark's
argument places more emphasis on the existence of those perceptions than on whether or not they
were factually borne out. See also Mounod (1988).
28. A long-running historical debate has addressed the role of the strict settlement in the financial
position of great estates, with Habakkuk arguing that settlements improved the position of the
peerage in the eighteenth century, and his critics claiming consolidation at most. For my
purposes, the difference between these positions is minimal. See Habakkuk (1950; 1979; 1980;
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1981) and Beckett (1977), and especially Spring’s superb book on aristocratic inheritance in
England (1993).
29. See especially Spring (1984). Younger sons did better because they were less likely to receive
land than formerly and more likely to find alternative paths into state service and the expanding
professions. They were not as likely to gravitate toward commerce. Thus younger sons of the
landed gentry did not flow into the overseas trading companies in great numbers, except during
1650-1710, when the gentry found itself particularly hard pressed after the Civil War (Stone and
Stone 1986: 131-33).
30. Careful marriages elaborated these connections, such that, as Cannon puts it, "To trace all the
relationships which made the opening of an eighteenth-century Parliament a family reunion for
many members would be impossibly time-consuming" (1984: 114).
31. Venality of office figured less in these areas than in, say, the royal household (Brewer 1969:
75-6; Hoon 1968 [1938]: 209-10; Speck 1977: 41-2). The newer departments were not free of
venality, but increasingly handed out venal positions as rewards for reliable service in more
genuine capacities. For the customs, see Hoon (1968 [1938]: 211-18). Furthermore, the royal
household shrank as its administrative functions were transferred elsewhere, and sales of
important court offices ended in George I's reign (Plumb 1967: 107-12).
32. See Speck (1977: 211) on the pamphlet in question. Dickinson (1973) is a general text on the
Robinocracy, or Walpole's System, at its heyday in the mid-eighteenth century. Another
nickname for this cosy arrangement was Old Corruption -- but Brewer (1988: 72) argues that Old
Corruption in its most virulent phase was actually a product of a later period, the Revolutionary
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and Napoleonic Wars and the unprecedented level of spending that accompanied them.
33. These movers and shakers sat in the House of Lords, but relied less on that corporate body
than on their capacity to manipulate the composition and politics of the Commons which, it's
worth recalling, was not democratically elected in this period. See Cannon (1984) and Pocock
(1980: 12). A substantial proportion of Commons members never faced an election in their
parliamentary careers. As late as 1780, less than one in eight Englishmen could vote; the
proportion was lower in Scotland. About half of Britain's MPs had simply been placed in their
seats by a patron in the 1780s. See in general Evans (1983: 15-18).
34. "For those successful businessmen who aimed to put their families upon the map, it was the
routes followed by their predecessors -- marriage to landed men for their daughters,
establishment on the land for their sons -- that remained the most travelled ones in the later
seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries" (Horwitz 1987; also see Namier 1929: 4-10, 16-19,
21-31). Scholars disagree, however, about how successful they were at achieving these aims.
Stone and Stone (1986: 131-33) claim that merchants achieved a negligible rate of social
infiltration into even the lower squirearchy in the early modern era. Earle (1989) finds greater
merchant-gentry interpenetration. According to Rogers (1979: 444), intermarriage rose between
representatives of landed society and London's commercial magnates in the eighteenth century, at
the same time as the influx of gentlemen into merchanting fell.
35. "Even if their prime interest was their own private advantage," remarks E. P. Thompson of
the Hanoverian whigs, "the very size of the immense private interests at risk made them zealous
opponents of a nostalgic and anachronistic Jacobite counterrevolution" (1975: 258; see also
43
Speck 1977: ch. 1). Their interests and desires were not "private" in the contemporary sense, to
be sure, but Thompson's larger point still stands.
36. The merchants of the town of Lorient decried the Company "with whom no maritime or
manufacturing towns were affiliated" in a typical 1785 petition to the crown (quoted in
Nussbaum 1933: 487).
37. The state responded to the perceived opportunities, threats and chaos that the EIC had
provoked. In avid expectation of increased revenues, a promise was exacted from the directorate
to augment its payments to the state exchequer by an additional L. 400,000 annually. The sum
was not forthcoming: Company representatives in India were using their new administrative roles
to enlarge the territorial dominion in pursuit of wider control over trade routes, while overly high
dividends and speculations on Company stock sparked a serious financial crisis in England in
1772 (Sutherland 1984: 205-13). Successive ministries went on record saying that the
relationship between the state and EIC was failing.
38. From 1758, the year after Clive's triumph at Plassey, the formerly placid Company elections
to the Court of Directors were bitterly contested. The directors divided over the merits of
territorial rule, while ministry and opposition tried to organize factions in virtually every election
(Philips 1961 [1940]: 23-4).
39. These included the commercial and manufacturing interests that the whigs wanted to
enfranchise as corporate communities in the 1830s. See Gash (1977 [1953]: 17-18, 26).
40. Parliament ended the Company's monopoly on Indian trade in 1813, and in 1834 the charter
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lapsed and, with it, the remaining monopoly on the Chinese tea trade (Philips 1961 [1940]:
152ff) .
45