Company-state at home: The East India Company and the fiscal system in eighteenth-century Britain

Yuchtman, Noam ORCID: 0009-0003-6501-9618, Hutkova, Karolina ORCID: 0000-0002-1103-1991, Dal Bó, Ernesto and Leucht, Lukas (2025) Company-state at home: The East India Company and the fiscal system in eighteenth-century Britain. Past and Present. ISSN 0031-2746 (In Press)

Text (Revised manuscript 14 Feb 2025) - Accepted Version Pending embargo until 1 January 2100. Available under License Creative Commons Attribution. Download (559kB)

Abstract

The significance of the state’s fiscal system for military capacity, colonisation, trade, and economic development is a long-studied topic. Much scholarship has focused on Britain and the emergence of its fiscal-military state. This article shows that fiscal capacity was not created only by government bureaucracies: the ‘company-state at home’ model presented here complements the narrative of the ‘fiscal-military state’ by showing that much fiscal revenue from trade was realised through the action of the English East India Company (EIC). Lacking the capacity to enact exhaustive laws, carry out complex calculations, or effectively manage a large bureaucracy, the English state relied on the administrative capacity of the EIC to collect customs on the East Indies trade. The institutional solution of allowing the EIC to collect revenues overcame the administrative challenge of customs revenue collection. This solution was made possible by the EIC’s administrative capacities and sustained by alignment between Company and state interests. The role of the EIC in British state development suggests a symbiotic lens through which to study the relationship between the state and corporations, which can be applied across time, space, and state objectives.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2025 The Author(s)
Divisions:	Management Economic History
Date Deposited:	26 Feb 2025 10:12
Last Modified:	26 Feb 2025 10:15
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/127419

Actions (login required)

View Item