In complex ways, social inequalities create the conditions for people to feel that writing anonymously might be useful for them. On top of this, social crises create anxious contexts, when the receipt of a threatening, obscene, or libellous anonymous ...
In complex ways, social inequalities create the conditions for people to feel that writing anonymously might be useful for them. On top of this, social crises create anxious contexts, when the receipt of a threatening, obscene, or libellous anonymous letter might seem especially hazardous. Throughout history, ‘experts’ have put out careless suggestions about the types of people likely to write these letters, with poor people, busybodies, menopausal, repressed women being identified as likely ‘types’. I do not think that particular personality types are more or less likely to write anonymously, but that some people, for various reasons, respond to moments in their lives, or react to social or personal situations by writing such letters.
We must be careful, when discussing anonymous letters, to not assume we have a full or typical sample. The anonymous letters that were considered sensational by the press, or actionable at law, were probably atypical. Very many were disregarded, burned, ignored, or thrown away. In the twentieth century, for example, the media and the police became particularly focused on letter campaigns where there was a female suspect and where letters were sent within a tight neighbourhood, especially if these letters were deemed to be obscene or threatening. Similar letters with an obvious male suspect, or sent to workplaces and not homes, were, in contrast, not the focus of significant legal attention.
In only 39 of the 105 cases I examine in Penning Poison do we have a known writer. Despite the fact that men would have written the vast majority of anonymous letters throughout history (often because of disparities regarding available time, resources, abilities, and money), 17 of these ‘unmasked’ writers were women and 22 were men, implying a much greater focus on identifying female writers. One suspect, Annie Tugwell, was watched around the clock by three policemen for over three weeks in the summer of 1913. This seems to be a disproportionate response. It also appears that material evidence was planted by the police in that case to secure a conviction.
In the Victorian period, there were many assumptions that only the poor would write anonymous letters. In 1870 attention was drawn ‘to the nuisance that the new half-penny post was likely to become by mischievous persons sending obscene, slanderous, or grossly offensive remarks on the open cards’. This came with the assumption that a cheaper delivery system would encourage poor people to write anonymously. However, until the early twentieth century, most of the convicted writers of anonymous letters were affluent men who appeared to be respectable members of their communities. The people in control of the medium—the male, the respected and the rich—were those who appeared to abuse it. In the book, I include the case study of Rev Robert Bingham, the curate of Maresfield in East Sussex, who in 1810 wrote fake threatening letters, penned as though from the ‘Foresters’, local people connected to enclosures in nearby Ashdown forest. These letters threatened arson, and in January 1811 Bingham’s parsonage burned down. Eventually suspicion settled upon the curate himself; Bingham was seen moving stacks of wood the day before the fire, and had planted a flower over his books, buried in the garden. Despite very weighty evidence against him, Bingham was acquitted.
In later cases, the local police, juries, and judges refused to accept that respectable people accused of letter-writing episodes were actually the most likely culprits (unless the accused person was a menopausal woman). In many cases, the legal system first prosecuted a person who seemed to be rough or uneducated, before finally convicting the actual perpetrator, often a person with education and cultural capital who was pretending to be less respectable in their letters. This happened in Redhill, Surrey, in the 1910s, when greengrocer Mary Johnson was repeatedly accused (and twice convicted) of writing letters that were actually penned by her more respectable neighbour, Eliza Woodman. Johnson was hounded out of the town, and settled in Croydon, despite being proven to be innocent. In Littlehampton in the 1920s a similar situation occurred, with Rose Gooding imprisoned for letters written by her more outwardly respectable neighbour, Edith Swan.
Something like what social psychologists call ‘the fundamental attribution error’ pushes us to seek individual psychological explanations for letter-writing campaigns when social contextual explanations could be much better. The majority of speculation as to the mental dispositions of writers (their ‘personality types’), hinged on perceptions of respectability and preconceived ideas about the particularity of feminine malice. An unbalanced fascination with female letter-writers in the twentieth century was influenced by a wider cultural and social fascination with deviant women. It was not an epidemic of female mental illness, but British society was not interested in complex societal explanations and instead sought psychological factors—being uptight, sexually repressed, menopausal, having a ‘dual personality’, enviousness. No doubt some of the writers discussed in Penning Poison could have been diagnosed with psychological disorders if they were assessed today, but the fact of the matter is that, in most cases, their mental states were not assessed properly at all and cannot now be reconstructed.
Anonymity creates disinhibition—people feel freer to write because they are less likely to be challenged about their words. Many anonymous letters show the author to be play-acting a role—as a member of a gang or even as the moral voice of the community itself. Social psychologists call this deindividuation. In particular, it is noticeable that in quite a few of the cases discussed in Penning Poison, the writers lived marginalised and often powerless lives within their respective communities. Not signing their name permitted these writers to create an entirely new persona for themselves: they became powerful not powerless; popular not lonely; racy not mousy. They had (at least in their own imaginations) a crew, a gang, a village, a street, a housing estate, behind them. Seen this way, anonymous letters share many similarities with online anonymity, apart from the potential size and scope of the audience.
The concept of global science was not new in the nineteenth century. Nor was that of government-sponsored science. But during the 1830s and 1840s, both of these concepts underwent a profound transformation: one that still has ramifications over today’s relationship between specialist knowledge and the modern nation state.
We are used to governments invoking scientific advice and technical expertise when making policy, be it in the handling of a global pandemic, or the formation of strategies for mitigating anthropogenic climate change. In the nineteenth century, however, the mobilization of the natural sciences for governance was embryonic. True, past governments had looked to scientific practitioners for solutions to technical challenges, most famously in the development of reliable methods for calculating longitude at sea throughout the eighteenth century. Yet the nineteenth-century problem of terrestrial magnetism would see the extent of such activity escalate both in financial and geographic scale.
Amid growing anxieties over the threat magnetic-induced compass error presented to oceanic navigation, and philosophical concerns over how the Earth’s magnetic phenomena operated, the British state provided the military, naval, and financial resources to transform the study of terrestrial magnetism into a world-wide study. The impact of this was to change the concept of “global” science in five ways.
1. To truly know how a global phenomenon operated, you had to be able to coordinate and synchronise experimental measurements over vast geographical space, even without modern communications technology.
The great challenge of charting the world’s magnetic phenomena is that you have to know how it changes over time and physical space. Edward Sabine, the magnetic fanatic leading Britain’s magnetic enterprise, was well aware of this problem: a successful survey would depend on the coordination and synchronization of magnetic experiments around the world, in an age before modern communications technologies.
Sabine was especially concerned with recording magnetic epochs, that is to say, single moments in which the Earth’s magnetism was measured at the exact same time, producing a snapshot of its magnetic properties. However, ensuring naval ships and observatories around the world performed such experiments in synchronization demanded a strict regime or, rather, a system of magnetic data collection.
Sabine was not the first to appreciate the global nature of examining magnetic phenomena: Alexander von Humboldt had promoted such an approach to the study of a series of natural phenomena, including terrestrial magnetism, during the 1800s. An Empire of Magnetism really is the story of the development of a system for realising such global ambitions. It demonstrates the crucial role of the state in delivering such a system.
2. The state could play a transformative role in the collection of data from around the world.
In the nineteenth century, the Royal Navy was the most powerful military organization in the world. Britain’s empire was the most expansive of all of Europe’s colonial powers. And the British Treasury was unrivalled in its capacity for expenditure. Put together, these resources were beyond what any individual, private or corporate, or voluntary organisation, could mobilize in the investigation of terrestrial magnetism or, indeed, any natural phenomenon.
The allocation of money to sustain scientific activity was nothing new, but the extent and broadening range of material assets involved in the British magnetic enterprise was unprecedented, including ships, trained officers, overseas territories for observatories, building materials, the funding of instruments, and human calculators. Of particular value was the formation of a Magnetic Department at Woolwich Arsenal, which provided Sabine with a disciplined team to process incoming magnetic data and reduce it to the order of charts. This effectively made possible the rapid publication of the survey’s results, though this task would not be complete until 1877.
3. The military’s potential to deliver discipline for realizing a global scientific enterprise.
Naval and army officers were far from perfect experimentalists: they frequently made errors or damaged their magnetic instruments. However, they did provide a disciplined labour force with which to realise a global survey.
For a start, they were under orders, particularly those emanating from the immensely powerful Admiralty. When instructed to undertake experimental training, they obliged, and when told to be diligent in making measurements at fixed times, they performed these as directed. Sometimes, other duties or circumstances prevented officers from performing their magnetic work, but generally they followed their orders, be it from Sabine or the Admiralty.
They also had obedient crews or non-commissioned officers from the Royal Artillery or Royal Engineers to assist in the practicalities of magnetic experiments: dipping needles, the primary instruments for measuring magnetic phenomena, tended to be heavy, while constructing temporary magnetic observatories was physically demanding and required teamwork. Naval officers like Sir John Franklin and James Clark Ross needed little persuading to be industrious in their collection of magnetic data and it was not uncommon for magnetic practitioners to become committed to their study of magnetic phenomena, but military order and discipline was crucial to a systematic surveying of the globe.
Fox’s Falmouth-built dipping needle as portrayed in Annals of Electricity in 1839. (Author’s image, 2020)
4. The rising significance of standardization for producing consistent results, despite a diversity of contributors of varying experimental skill.
The key to transforming the Royal Nay into an organ of scientific investigation was standardisation. Sabine, along with Cornish natural philosopher Robert Were Fox, were constantly engaged in developing and refining a network of instruments training, instrument manuals, and experimental procedures that could allow naval and military officers to collect and return reliable magnetic data, be they performing experiments in Cape Town or Hobart, or on a ship in the middle of an ocean. The effort that this involved is well exhibited by the immense volume of surviving correspondence on the subject of dipping-needle design, especially between Fox and Sabine, but also with naval officers like John Franklin and James Clark Ross.
But it is also evident from the number of revised instrumental manuals produced during the 1830s that the promoters of the enterprise were eager to produce written instructions of greater clarity that could shape the actions of experimentalists, regardless of their location or distance from Sabine’s immediate direction. Likewise, Fox regularly invited naval officers to his home in Falmouth, where he could guide them on the use of his instruments. Achieving standardization was both crucial to the operation of Sabine’s system of magnetic data collection, as well as a source of constant labour for those at the centre of global survey work.
5. Public accountability would take on a growing urgency in global scientific enterprises that relied on state support.
Traditionally, if a nation state sponsored scientific activity, the question of public accountability was of low concern. Given that most pre-nineteenth-century forms of governance were essentially autocratic, usually being the business of unelected monarchs, this is hardly surprising. The eighteenth-century British state had invested into the resolution of the longitude problem, but Parliament was representative of a very narrow socio-political elite. With the passing of the 1832 Reform Act, which extended the vote to the middle classes for the first time and increased the franchise from around 400,000 to about 650,000, Parliament was faced with questions of accountability to a broader electorate.
It would be a mistake to exaggerate the impact of the Reform Act, given that voters still had to be small landowners, tenant farmers, shopkeepers, or in a household with an annual rent of £10, and also be male. Mid-nineteenth-century Britain was very far from a representative democracy as we would know it now. Yet, undoubtedly, the problem of public accountability escalated after 1832. Along with the repealing of a host of taxes, most famously the abolition of the Corn Laws in 1846, Parliament found itself under increasing scrutiny, especially over perceived financial extravagances.
The 1830s and 1840s saw a series of economizing measures, with both Whig and Tory administrations cutting government expenditure, particularly on the armed forces. During this period, we see the rolling back of what historian John Brewer has described as the “fiscal-military state”; that is to say, the disintegration of the system of high-taxation and high-military expenditure which had been crucial to Britain’s victory over the Revolutionary and Napoleonic French states during the 1790s and 1800s, but was largely redundant after Britain’s victory over Napoléon Bonaparte in 1815. In this context, promoters of the British magnetic enterprise were under constant pressure to justify themselves with increasingly broad public audiences.
Changing the face of scientific study
It is important to note that “global science,” in the sense that we use it today, was not an actor category in the mid-nineteenth century. Nevertheless, the magnetic enterprise’s promoters were keen to stress the project’s global ambitions and world-wide extent. Britain’s magnetic enterprise was central to a broader trend in nineteenth-century science. Increasingly, scientific practitioners were looking at the world as a complex network of interconnected natural phenomena. The global study of terrestrial magnetism concurred with the world-wide collection of data and observations, including astronomical, geological, botanical, anthropological, and tidal. Yet it was the performance of magnetic measurements that required the greatest organization in terms of coordination and synchronization. The examination of terrestrial magnetism’s protean nature, both in terms of time and physical space, required a system that could operate on a global scale.
Feature image: Owen Stanley – Voyage of H.M.S. Rattlesnake : Vol. I. f.6 The Pursuit of Science under adverse circumstances, Madeira. Image out of copyright, original held at Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales.
This curious drawing in the Royal Collection, attributed to William Hogarth but possibly by Phillipe Mercier, depicts a game of hazard, the ancestor of modern casino “craps.” An attribution to Mercier is supported by the figure of a young man wearing an order of chivalry (possibly the Garter, although the ribbon is worn over the wrong shoulder) who bears a strong resemblance to Mercier’s portraits of Frederick, Prince of Wales. Mercier was appointed painter to the Prince and Princess of Wales soon after the accession of George II allowed Frederick to set up his own household.
The staffage of the drawing is unusual, given the subject matter. Women as well as men sit at the hazard table, despite the strictures of Richard Steele that throwing dice was not ladylike. Even more remarkable is the clergyman who holds the dice box. Given the august company, he might be a bishop, and in fact, closely resembles Hogarth’s portrait of Benjamin Hoadly, bishop of Salisbury and later of Winchester. There are not many circumstances that would explain how, in the words of Frances Burney, these individuals became so strangely situated.
One such is Twelfth Night, 5 January, as it was observed at court, when the sovereign, Royal Family, and courtiers played hazard for the benefit of the Groom Porter, the court official charged with procuring and dispensing small furnishings. Since these could include cards and dice, the Groom Porter was inextricably associated with games of chance at court, as the final authority, for example, on the rules of games. The drawing may be an unfinished sketch for a painting, never undertaken, to commemorate the revels of a particular Twelfth Night, that of January 1731, whence our story.
The years after the Hanoverian Succession saw a concerted effort to suppress gambling operations, such as tables for hazard and faro, conducted in taverns, coffeehouses, and other public accommodations in London and Westminster. Apart from any moral hazard they posed (and there were admonitions aplenty in print culture), the “silver tables” at Vanderman’s coffeehouse in Covent Garden or at the Phoenix tavern in the Haymarket were competition for the Government’s own gaming operations, the lotteries it used to fund public works, freeing up other revenue to bankroll an expanding military and naval establishment.
Spurred by Charles, second Viscount Townshend, holder of the office that evolved into the Home Secretary, the magistrates of Westminster (where most of these gambling parlors were housed) authorized raids on premises determined to be “common” (i.e. public) “gaming houses” open to all comers in violation of statute. The magistrates were thwarted, however, at every turn by resourceful, well-connected, and above all well-lawyered gambling entrepreneurs, as adept at gaming the system as they were at reaping the benefits that mathematical probability afforded them.
It did not help that gambling went forward with impunity at court, as the royal household was explicitly exempted from all legislation aimed at proscribing or regulating games of chance. Townshend deployed all of the powers of his office to support the prosecution of gaming operations, authorizing the Crown’s attorneys to defend constables at public expense when gaming entrepreneurs sued them, and funding rewards for those who informed on gaming operators. A widely circulated pamphlet recounting the efforts of the Westminster magistrates and the obstacles they faced apparently originated in Townshend’s office.
George I and (briefly) George II were evidently pressed to set an example, and for the decade of the 1720s, hazard was banished from the Twelfth Night revels in favor of ombre, a polite card game played for relatively low stakes. By the end of that decade, however, Townshend had fallen out with the Prime Minster, Sir Robert Walpole, who happened to be his brother-in-law, and by the spring of 1730, Townshend had resigned, returning to Raynham in Norfolk to promote the cultivation of turnips. Raids on gaming venues slowed dramatically, ceasing entirely by 1735. And no sooner was Townshend out of office than hazard immediately resumed on Twelfth Night at court, with the King, Queen, Prince of Wales, and the three princesses winning nearly a thousand guineas among themselves. Hazard continued as the game of preference as Twelfth Night was observed at court for at least the next decade, even after subsequent legislation outlawed it, along with basset and faro, as an illegal lottery.
The sketch in the Royal Collection certainly looks like a study for the sort of conversation piece for which Hogarth was particularly known, and which Mercier was known to have undertaken as well. Assuming that Twelfth Night of 1731 was the intended subject, there may have been any number of reasons that the project was abandoned. Newspaper reports of the revival of hazard at court festivities that week in January appeared in the same issues as accounts of raids on gaming venues; not long afterward, Captain William Bradbury, the recently ousted deputy to the Groom Porter Thomas Archer, wrote letters to newspapers threatening to expose his former employer. It was not the time to draw attention to this sort of courtly practice. What might seem to courtiers to be a harmless seasonal amusement might look to the public like insupportable hypocrisy.
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Was the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, which was inaugurated in January 1801, unique? It has certainly been uniquely recognised as the “United Kingdom,” or (more simply) the “UK.” But how far does this recognition reflect the UK’s exceptional multinational structures?
In fact, there was a proliferation of the idea and practice of “united kingdoms” during, and at the conclusion of, the conflict with revolutionary and Napoleonic France (1793-1815). These were polities which had generally begun life as composite monarchies—“unions of the crown”—and which later developed into an array of different forms of multinational (and sometimes specifically named) “united kingdom.” They were also polities which, aside from these resemblances, were otherwise linked both by chronology, being created at roughly the same time, and often through the pressures of British foreign and imperial policy.
Pragmatic and contingent creations, these unions generally lacked a visionary ideal: they were forged (like many subsequent federal unions) in the context of economic and military need. The UK (1801), the Austrian empire (1804), the United Kingdoms of Sweden-Norway (1814), and the United Kingdom of the Netherlands (1815) were all formulated in the context of a world war, and against the backdrop of the struggle against revolutionary and Napoleonic France. An additional form of “union” polity, the Grand Duchy of Finland, came into being at this time (1809), and indeed a further “united kingdom,” that of Portugal, Brazil, and the Algarves, was created and also decisively shaped in the light of the contingencies of the global conflict (1815).
“Pragmatic and contingent creations, these united kingdoms generally lacked a visionary ideal.”
The UK, through its foreign secretary, Viscount Castlereagh (in office between 1812 and 1822) and his lieutenants, was central to both the origins and the preservation of much of this network; indeed, Britain may be said to have exported the supranational union just as the French republic exported revolution and the nation state. This of course is not to suggest that the British invented “union,” or even parliamentary union, or (still less) that these unions were all exactly the same. But it is to say that some of the key British and Irish architects of the United Kingdom emerged as staunch promoters and defenders of other union polities in the early nineteenth century—generally, as with the Irish union, with security and the French threat both firmly in mind. It is also to say that these constitutional architects were effectively using union to reinvent the institutions of the ancien régime for an age of revolution and reform.
But there was also, ultimately, a reciprocity of influences and connections. Contemporary Britons—politicians, scholars, travellers—naturally saw rich and dense interlinkages connecting the different unions of nineteenth-century Europe and beyond; and from these they eventually came to identify exemplars or paradigms for the constitutional reform of the United Kingdom. The best known case of such a set of influences rests with W. E. Gladstone; but Gladstone was merely the most prominent, and the most influential, of a much wider cohort who thought carefully about the reform of their own country (or indeed, more generally, about its merits and demerits) in comparative terms. The intercommunication of influences with these union polities across the long nineteenth century is truly striking. Scotland, for example, was at different times both influencing and being influenced by the Irish union, its supporters and opponents, while, looking to the British empire, Canada both received and bestowed influence from and on the unions of the United Kingdom.
In particular, Irish nationalists and Irish unionists, long engaged with the history of the multinational union states of continental Europe and beyond, sought both angels and demons and both models as well as warnings. Irish Catholics on the whole warmly embraced Habsburg Europe, and sometimes sought refuge within its boundaries; Irish Protestants (some of whose ancestors had originally fled from Moravia and other crownlands) were more suspicious. Indeed, there is an unremarked historical aptness in the notorious fisticuffs exchanged in 1988 in the European parliament by Ian Paisley and Otto von Habsburg, when evangelical Protestantism and Habsburg Catholicism once again came into violent conflict.
“It remains the case that the unions of the United Kingdom are intimately bound with European politics.”
In short, the story of the unions of the United Kingdom has been closely associated with external exemplars; and, more generally, the story of these unions has always been associated with European analogy and comparison. And it remains the case that the unions of the United Kingdom are intimately bound within European (and wider) politics. What has been identified recently (by, for example, The Economist) as the growing Europeanisation of the flagging unions of the United Kingdom has thus an historical aptness—since it was the UK who helped to provide union to parts of Europe in the first instance.
Unions and united kingdoms have been British and Irish—and also European; but they have been transnational and indeed transcontinental as well. In order to fully understand the unions of the UK, we need to look beyond these islands to the stories of the other contemporary European and global united kingdoms: how and why they survived—and how and why they sometimes failed.
“Paris is the place to make money, & England is the country to enjoy it.”
With what we think we know about capitalism in England and France circa 1790—a year into the tumult of the French Revolution and as the territorial expanse of the gargantuan British East India Company continued to wax in Asia—it is hard to fathom how exactly, a banker based in London (albeit one of French ancestry) could have come to this conclusion as he wrote to a friend, one of the directors of the much smaller French East India Company, or Compagnie des Indes.
Our twenty-first-century business history textbooks and op-eds tell a different story: that we should think of the British East India Company as the first modern multinational corporation, an ancestor of Amazon or Google. Like the corporate giants of the present, scholars often identify the British and Dutch East India Companies as architects of Western political and economic dominance, having built the modern world through their imperial exploits, conquests, market power, and exploitation of labor. Uncomfortably straddling the boundaries between the political and the financial, these “company-states” were both self-governing, profit-driven enterprises, but also political bodies that built and governed territorial empires of their own.
“These ‘company-states’ were self-governing, profit-driven enterprises, that built and governed territorial empires of their own.”
But neither journalists nor scholars pay much attention to one crucial element of the story: that the British and Dutch companies inspired a long suite of both imitators and competitors across a European continent thirsty for the exploitation of colonial trade. In the Atlantic world, settlement and slave trading companies populated the Americas with migrants both free and enslaved. In the Indian Ocean, European states competed against one another for access to lucrative markets for spices, Indian cotton goods, and Chinese silks and porcelain. Among the corporate entrants to this competition in the long eighteenth-century numbered Prussian, Austrian, Swedish, and Danish East India companies, among many more—companies that were often financially precarious, short-lived, and whose politics and operations remain largely unknown and unstudied.
This characterization curiously applies to the early modern trading companies of what was ultimately one of the most significant European global empires: France. In its three successive incarnations, the French East India Company earned a not entirely undeserved reputation for scandal, financial crisis, and institutional turmoil. Modern historians must reckon with the fruits of that turmoil: unlike its British and Dutch counterparts, whose archives are largely consolidated in major collections in London and the Hague, the papers of the three French companies are fragmented and scattered across different repositories throughout the country. The fact that royal ministers meddled so deliberately and repeatedly in the politics of the Compagnies des Indes hardly makes them desirable forebears for modern corporations beholden to the whims of their shareholders.
Yet the French East India Companies were major imperial and capitalist actors in their time. It was, after all, direct rivalry and competition between the British and French East India Companies that drove the establishment of British dominion in India in the decades after the global Seven Years’ War (1754–1763). This military consolidation came at a tremendous cost to the British company, whose repeated bouts of financial insolvency became a critical subject of parliamentary scrutiny in the decades to follow. At the same time, the defeated French had to invent new ways to secure access to coveted Indian goods and markets now controlled by the British, while still maintaining fragile diplomatic ties with independent South Asian powers who remained key geopolitical allies against a common enemy.
“Companies made poor sovereigns and states had to take responsibility for what their company-states had wrought.”
The final iteration of the French East India Company—lasting only from 1785 to 1793—emerged from this moment of mutual crisis between these rival imperial powers that drove a rethinking of the relationship between empire and business. By the late eighteenth-century, the “company-state” system was breaking down: exploitative and extractive as empire was, the costs of policing and governing territories were enormous, and private companies were proving ill-adapted to govern and trade simultaneously. In 1773, Voltaire called the defeated and bankrupt French company “a two-headed cadaver that conducted war & commerce equally badly”—a sentiment matched by the opprobrium towards its British counterpart articulated by Adam Smith in his 1776 The Wealth of Nations. Companies made poor sovereigns, and states had to take responsibility, one way or another, for what their company-states had wrought.
One solution was to put the company under an elaborate regulatory framework, and in the decades after the Seven Years’ War, this is exactly what happened with the British East India Company, which progressively became a centralized state bureaucracy of its own, to the chagrin of its capitalist investors.By contrast, the French government—both under the Bourbon monarchy and during the early years of the Revolution—pursued a deregulation of their new company. As the cost of empire in South Asia led French officials to scale back their military presence, they envisioned an informal empire for France instead, where a “purely commercial” company would maintain trading relationships with both Britain and key Indian states, like the kingdom of Mysore.
This vision of informal, commercial power progressively led French company shareholders to fight for their own rights as investors and to demand even greater independence from the state. Their corporate activism unfolded amid some of the greatest economic and political turmoil in French history, with the coming of the French Revolution—and yet, offered a decidedly alluring alternative to the rigid, parliamentary framework being imposed on the reluctant shareholders of their British counterpart. The reimagined French East India Company, though short-lived, offered a model of what a private company free from the regulations of royal or parliamentary charters might look like. Despite what we think we know about the British East India Company and the making of modern capitalism, there was money to be made in Paris, too.
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