One's company, three's a crowd: Metropolitan state-building and East Indies merchant companies in the Early Modern Netherlands, France and England, 1600-1800

This dissertation addresses the classical sociological problem of the causes of the differentiation of states from economic institutions. By means of a comparative analysis of the Dutch, French and English East Indies companies in the early modern period (1500-1800), I argue that developing states and mercantile/colonial initiatives shaped each other in ways that structured this process. The central puzzle arises from the "zigzag" pattern of development of the Netherlands, where precocious politico-economic differentiation was blocked and reversed. Data on the business and state ties of 228 Dutch company directors form the core of the analysis.;Chapters 1-3 argue that three conditions enabled companies to flourish: (1) the breakdown of Iberian and Mughal hegemony; (2) the coexistence of a nascent capitalist mode of production and a patrimonial state in the European countries; and (3) the presence of a configuration of patrimonialism in which crown arbitrariness was contained, and a unified mercantile elite exercised sustained influence over the corporations that were charged with key politico-economic functions. These factors were conjoined in the Netherlands throughout the period, and in England from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries. They were not present in France, where companies were never successfully institutionalized.;Chapters 4-5 examine the reciprocal impact of successful mercantile initiatives on metropolitan state formation. The articulation of two factors, company commercial strength and military power, and company structural compatibility with the growth of private trade, contributed to different outcomes. In the Netherlands, the unified, dominant, and internationally-oriented merchant class was reconstructed as a statebased rentier elite. I sketch several mechanisms by which such dedifferentiation promoted devolution. In France, the very inefficacy of company projects stabilized the enduring, undifferentiated bonds of state and agrarian dominant classes. In England, the merchant class was more fractured, a multiple, balanced dominant elite took shape, and the state and state elite were reconfigured along non-corporate lines. I discuss how these tendencies contributed to the capacity of the differentiated English state to absorb company functions and contest the boundaries of sovereignty with company elites.