"Worms in the Entrails": The Politics of Corporations in Restoration England and Its Empire, 1660-1685

Historians have long recognized that one of the major themes in the reign of Charles II of England (1660-1685) was his conflict with various bodies which fall under the common heading of chartered corporations. The reign appears bookended by two attempts at corporate regulation. At the Restoration, Charles and the Cavalier Parliament passed An Act for the Well-Governing and Regulating of Corporations designed to rein in England’s roughly 200 corporate municipalities. At the same time, the crown sought to regulate English overseas corporations like the Massachusetts Bay Company, and to develop a new imperial political economic model focused on joint stocks. Yet most scholarship on corporations during the reign of Charles II has focused on the final dramatic years of his reign, the “Tory Reaction” (1681-1685) during which he seized the charter of the City of London and issued new charters for dozens of English municipal corporations, seized the charters of overseas plantation corporations like the Massachusetts Bay and Somers Island Companies, and brought the crown into close alliance with major joint stock trading companies like the East India and Royal African Companies. This dissertation asks why Charles sought to regulate corporations during his reign; why the problem of corporate regulation proved so intractable and recurrent; why the two attempts at regulation produced such dissimilar results; why some corporations embraced corporate regulation while others opposed it; and how, if at all, efforts at corporate regulation across these three disparate contexts – municipalities, colonies, companies – were connected.

Existing accounts of corporate-state relations during the reign of Charles II fragment this historiography into discrete fields in which different forces explain corporate regulation. The dominant narratives on municipal corporations in the 17^th century have been shaped by revisionism, with its emphasis on examining the borough community in isolation from the national state. These narratives suggest that the controversies surrounding municipal corporations were largely driven by local actors for local reasons – corporate regulation did not have royal origins, and it was only “national” to the extent that it represented a composite of local efforts. In contrast, the dominant frameworks for understanding corporate-state relations overseas posit a tension between an expanding royal national-state and overseas private corporations. Here, corporate regulation was driven by Charles’s desire to extend the reach of royal sovereignty at the expense of so-called “company-states.” Such is the current state of the historiography on corporate-crown relations in the reign of Charles II that its division into different geographies has produced wholly incompatible views of Charles’s statecraft and of the causes of corporate regulation.

This dissertation breaks with the current paradigms in two primary ways. First, it marks the first attempt to study early modern English corporations in England and the empire simultaneously, rather than confining itself exclusively to either the metropolitan or overseas contexts. This decision is justified by commonalities emerging from their shared institutional foundation, such as a corporate political culture and the nature of their legal relationship to the monarch. Doing so helps us to understand the broad trends of Charles II’s evolving relationship with corporations writ large while highlighting the differences between the different types. It also allows us to gain a more comprehensive picture of Charles II’s statecraft by taking in a wider range of the king’s dominions than has heretofore been studied at once, in the process illuminating a broader pattern of royal government that spanned empire and metropole alike.

This dissertation also differs from today’s dominant narratives of corporate-state relations in the reign of Charles II by placing national politics and political ideology at the center of the story. Revisionist interpretations of municipal politics tend to view local politics independently of events in the capital, and so to downplay the salience of national political divisions in provincial boroughs. “Company-State” histories of empire tend to figure clashes between corporation and monarch as essentially conflicts over sovereignty in the abstract. This dissertation integrates corporations of all three types into the broader national political history of the reign, showing how debates over national issues like the legacy of the civil wars, the terms of the Restoration, the place of nonconformists within society, the royal succession, and royal financing influenced corporate officeholders’ behavior as well as government efforts to regulate them. This decision to bring politics back into the history of corporations is justified by the nature of early modern corporate authority and by the post-revisionist emphasis on the public sphere. Corporate officeholders derived their power from a royal charter which obligated them to promote “good government,” and the power they wielded was essentially state power. Yet their understandings of “good government” were not limited to their immediate environs and were informed by national (and indeed imperial) discourse within the public sphere.

I argue that corporate regulation was a major priority for the government of Charles II because corporations served as semi-autonomous vehicles for corporate officeholders to express their political ideologies, a feature that became a problem at moments of national political transformation or crisis. Disagreements over the nature of “good government” – of the local corporation and of the nation as a whole – served as a major engine for disputes over corporate power among corporators and between corporators and the king. These policy disagreements, when pushed to their extreme, could transform into more abstract debates over royal sovereignty vis-à-vis corporations, but their origins must be sought in the relatively more mundane realm of Restoration political disagreement. In short, this dissertation aims to provide a history of corporatestate relations during the reign of Charles II that is both politically integrated and geographically capacious. Methodologically, this study is primarily shaped by a mixture of political, legal, and intellectual history, although social history, imperial history, and the history of political culture also influence the argument. The evidence on which this research is based is diffuse. In addition to a healthy engagement with printed pamphlets, broadsheets, poems, music, and satires, this work draws upon a vast collection of manuscripts that shed light on both central policy making and local political conflict. The former includes collections like the State Papers at the National Archives of the United Kingdom or printed transcripts of state trials that are primarily useful for illustrating the formation of corporate policy in Whitehall and Westminster. The latter includes archives that shed light on decision-making and politics within corporations, such as the London Archives, Massachusetts State Archives, Massachusetts Historical Society, India Office Records, and various county archives throughout England. Taken together, these sources and methods enable me to describe the interaction between corporate law and politics in the reign of Charles II in a way that productively integrates central and local history. 

My work makes contributions to the historiography of later Stuart politics, imperial history, and the history of corporations. In the realm of later Stuart politics, this dissertation provides a more comprehensive picture of Charles II’s statecraft by attempting to make sense of it across a broader range of spaces. Attempting to reconcile Charles’s imperial policy with his domestic policy suggests that the “Merry Monarch” was a far more sophisticated political actor than revisionist histories of England have generally recognized. My focus on the salience of national politics in the provincial boroughs likewise informs our understanding of the later Stuart period by demonstrating the national political consciousness of provincial actors. In the realm of imperial history, this dissertation demonstrates the importance of integrating the history of empire and the history of England into a common framework. It shows that it is impossible to understand the evolution of the imperial constitution independent of metropolitan political events, and it emphasizes the extent to which colonists and overseas merchants reacted to and influenced those events. For the history of corporations, this work contributes to modern debates about corporate purpose by shedding light on a very different early modern ideal of corporations that understood them as vehicles for promoting “good government” and corporate officeholders as public officials. It also serves as a reminder that the modern public-private dichotomy that pits states and corporations against each other is a 19^th century invention, and that the origins of both institutions are intertwined.