Quinn Slobodian and Philip J. Stern on Political Economy
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Welcome to the new Books Network.

Hello, listeners. I am Erika Monaghan, your host of today's History Exile episode, a New Books Network podcast series supported by Critica, Explorations in Russian and Eurasian Studies.

History Ex Silo is a podcast series intended to create scholarly dialogue across subfields. That is, to be a place where historians can discuss their work, share their underlying assumptions, explore similarities and differences, and most importantly, step a bit outside their areas of expertise.

So much of the work of the professional historian fosters a narrow specialization. We become kings and queens of our own historical hills and sometimes only rarely leave those hills.

We contend to live in scholarly communities holding much of value, but so narrow it invokes the image of an enclosed farm silo. History Ex Silo intends to get us out of our narrow specializations and talking to historians across subfields. If you are interested in the mission of History Ex Silo, or if you think you have an idea for an Ex Silo conversation, please reach out to us.

You can subscribe to the podcast series and find our contact information on the History X ILO page at NewBooks Network. Now to today's conversation. Adam Smith wrote that political economy belongs to no nation. It is of no country. It is the science of the rules for the production, the accumulation, the distribution, and the consumption of wealth.

However Adam Smith regarded the science of political economy, in practical terms, one is quite hard-pressed in history to find a case where governments, be it an empire or a nation, were completely left out of the picture. Or is it? Questions about how people and other types of entities organize and generate capital, and the role that governments play in all of this, fills libraries.

The ramification of the dynamics and rules surrounding money have proved so consequential and gaining momentum in the centuries since the Industrial Revolution, if I could add, that it is no surprise that historians have devoted so much energy to the study of political economy. And this, in the broadest terms, is the subject of our conversation today.

Today, we put two recent books that bring important perspectives to these questions in conversation with each other. I am pleased to introduce our books. We discuss Empire Incorporated: The Corporations That Built British Colonialism by Philip Stern, published by Belknap Press of Harvard University Press in 2023.

And we also discuss Crack Up Capitalism, Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy, published by Penguin Books also in 2023. The periods of time being studied are centuries apart, during the course of which there's been much innovation.

But we hope to come away from today's conversation with a better sense of what overlap our authors see, etc., etc. And indeed, I get ahead of myself. Let me introduce our authors. Philip Stern is an associate professor of history at Duke University. His work focuses on various aspects of the legal, political, intellectual, and business histories that shaped the British Empire.

He is the author of The Company State, Corporate Sovereignty, and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India, and of Mercantilism Reimagined, Political Economy in Early Modern Britain and Its Empire, published in 2012 and 2013, along with many other articles and edited volumes.

Our second author of our second book, Quinn Slobodian, is a professor of history at Wellesley College and the author of the award-winning Globalists, the End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, which has been translated into six languages. Languages.

He has written much else. I encourage you to look up both of our authors. And Quince Bobodium is also a frequent contributor to The Guardian, The New Statesman, The New York Times, Foreign Policy, Dissent, and The Nation. And without further ado, now I'd like to invite our authors in the chronological order of their books to introduce to them, to us,

So, Phil, please tell us about Empire Incorporated. Yeah. Thanks, Erica. Thanks for having us on. And thanks for this idea. I'm looking forward to the conversation. I think there is an amazing amount of overlap and points of intersection among our work. So you mentioned and thanks for the lovely introduction. You know, I wrote this book called The Company State.

about a decade ago, which was an exploration of the way, sort of an investigation to the ways in which the East India Company had laid the foundations for its later transformation into a territorial empire in the first century and a half of its existence. A lot of historians had sort of generally gone with this idea that the East India Company had sort of suddenly or accidentally transformed India.

into an empire in the middle of the 18th century, an idea that didn't sit well with me. And one of the arguments that I made in that book, the Sutter Central argument, was that the company didn't transform from a merchant to a sovereign in the middle of the 18th century because it had been a kind of sovereign or a form of political entity all along. And there were many reasons for that, but one of the core reasons that I traced this to was its existence as a corporation.

which was a political and legal form that we tend to today to associate with economic activity and business activity, but which actually goes back to the medieval period as a form of organizing political communities, particularly in the church or in empires, particularly cities and other forms of governance. And so

From there, I started to think and look a lot into the ways in which the corporation had sort of structured the British Empire. And I've said this before, I had that experience after writing that book of kind of like that experience you have when you learn a new word and then you start to see it everywhere. Corporations just started popping out at me everywhere.

And I started to realize the phenomenon was much bigger, but also more complex than the story I told about the company state of a more diverse and complicated ecology of companies over time. So

The result of all that 10 years later was Empire Incorporated, which is a survey in a sense of the history of the British Empire through the vantage of the corporation and the role the corporations, joint stock companies, and other forms of private enterprise played in structuring and making of the British Empire. And the title, the best way of describing the book in the short time I've got here is to say that the title has kind of two meanings to me.

One, the most obvious one, Empire Incorporated, is that it's a study of the evolution of the role of corporations and joint stock companies, like I said, in shaping the British Empire with a particular attention to the way to companies that actually take on roles of governance in the empire and in a sense do the work of governing Anglophone settlement and expansion all around the globe.

The other meaning of the word, of the title, is that it's also a study of how the British Empire, the one we tend to associate with...

the British Empire, which is to say the state's empire, you might think of the British Empire proper, was built in a much larger sense than you imagine or a much greater sense than you imagine through the incorporation or co-optation, regulation, absorption, often purchasing of colonial spaces and colonial jurisdictional rights that had been established or the groundwork laid by these corporations or these other forms of

of private enterprise, a kind of cobbled together form of empire, if you will, or a kind of a conglomerate form of empire. At one point in the book, I think I call it an empire through merger and acquisition, right?

So it's those two kind of simultaneous narratives, which gets, I think, to the point you were making. One, I think a common point of conversation today, which is that our stories about states and empires, a story about a history that is only political history, only driven by states and empires. I think both of our works kind of get at the fact that that's a very oversimplified and misleading story about how to think about history from the 16th century to today.

Um, and in this book, what I essentially do is trace the story, kind of thinking of it as a, um, retelling of the story of the British empire from a character who's been very important, but marginalized as a sort of supporting character, the corporation. And as a result, uh, you know, could think of it like a, you know, like a minor character now, like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of Imperial history or something like that. Um,

And when you do that, the point is that you are able to upset a lot of the narratives and the ways in which we think about the patterns and periodizations of empire, which maybe we'll get to later. Maybe we won't. It's also a kind of intellectual biography of a legal institutional form spread out over about 400 years. And through the book, I essentially trace the arguments as to how the corporation evolved.

evolved over time to support and transform empire, how it both competed with, but was also at times in alliance with other forms of power, including the state. And also last thing I'll say is try to take on a kind of assume narrative and other histories about this, that the corporation's power lay in its inexorable ability to become a kind of behemoth or juggernaut and instead focus on the power of the corporation as being one of paradox.

and its capacity to essentially be public and private at the same time and to navigate among various jurisdictional forms, sometimes making the corporation extremely vulnerable, but sometimes making it extremely powerful. And so I look a lot at the ways in which the corporation can mobilize these capacities over the course of 400 years.

in an effort to also make an argument for thinking about the contemporary kinds of issues. I think the sorts of things that Quinn looks at through genealogy and through the long histories, the ways in which these develop. So the final point I would say that I think is important about the book, or at least important to me, is that the book is also very much about the role history plays in shaping ideology. All of these companies in many respects at every point look back to the past and

to make an argument for legitimacy. So in a way, looking at the corporate form and empire, not in the way a lot of people sort of look back at it as a kind of

modern innovation, but actually in many ways showing how at every stage of the game, people arguing for this kind of way of doing colonialism, which was always contested, did so by saying they did this because it was the way it always had been done, not that it was actually a new form in a various way. So it's just a different way of thinking about the connections between past and present in that respect. Thank you so much. Okay, now we will go to Quinn. And Quinn, if you would please introduce to us

crack up capitalism. Sure. Yeah. First of all, big thank you to Erica for making this happen and putting us into conversation. It was a great pleasure to read Phil's book, and I'm sure it will be to talk about it. So the book crack up capitalism, sort of like Phil's is a bit of a sequel to the one that I did before. And in a way, it's helpful to contextualize it that way, I think. So I've published this book called globalists.

The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. And that book was about the 20th century's shift from a world of empires to a world of nations, and the way that that political shift produced new challenges for kind of stabilizing global capitalism. The challenge of making sure that these new nation states didn't mistake sovereignty for ownership.

or dominium for imperium in the categories used by people in my book, was something that was really a fixation for a group of people who we can think of as neoliberal intellectuals. So Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises,

Milton Friedman and others. So the book was really about this sort of century long search for a kind of a guardian of what they call the World Economic Constitution, what new institutions could police the boundaries between the nation state and a global economy. And they kind of had a series of candidates who were mostly disappointing. They were interested in the League of Nations as something that was able to kind of

supervise and police this, you know, the claims that might cross between ownership and sovereignty. The United Nations was even less satisfactory in

Eventually, things like international investment law became a little bit more promising and the European Court of Justice. And the book kind of ends with the World Trade Organization as an example of what international lawyers call the kind of juridicization or the legalization of international economic relations. So now you don't have to just appeal to a government. You can appeal to this legal code that stands above governments that theoretically can enforce claims about

ownership, property across borders in a consistent and reliable way. So that book was really about the sort of scaling up of schemes for organizing and stabilizing global capitalism, and in many cases, accelerating the reach of global capitalism into all of our lives.

It was written just before and then sort of was released at the time of the break with that kind of 1990s consensus of globalization. So the election of Trump, the departure of Britain from the European Union meant that this idea that there was a

a multi-level governance structure that was kind of keeping capitalism safe was no longer something people felt like they could rely on anymore. So witness the headlines of the last few years, right? Everyone is talking about a time of fracture, fragmentation, crack up, breakup. And the book that I wrote after that, the crack up capitalism book was an attempt to kind of respond to these ambient discussions, but also to kind of

a lot of the assumptions that I think were inside of them. So first of all, I don't think it's fair or helpful to say that we only hit a moment of fragmentation or crack up in 2016.

The book focuses in on, and sort of empirically, the through line is the emergence and the proliferation of these so-called special economic zones from the 1960s onward, which were the kind of ways that capitalism worked through creating small, you know, ring fence spaces for

manufacturing in the far-flung sort of supply chains to quasi-sovereign tax havens to sort of urban corporations inside of big cities like London or New York.

So the world was already operating through fragmentation or through what the historian Vanessa Ogle, who Phil also cites in his conclusion, calls archipelago capitalism. So fragmentation didn't just appear overnight after 2016. There already was kind of a functional fragmentation that I think is often overlooked in our search for ever kind of smoother stories of capitalist relations at higher and higher levels. So

So first of all, the book was intended to kind of just shine a spotlight on that and say, like, look, it's not enough just to look at nations and assume that that's the space within which capitalism works. You have to look beneath the envelope of the nation and find all of the legal geographies and economic geographies inside of nations to see where their concentrations of trade, concentrations of exchange and so on. Furthermore, the point of the book was to kind of say,

That's not just a kind of pragmatic way to organize capitalist relations. But for some people anyway, who are watching that it was an inspiration for maybe a kind of politics that could go beyond the nation and could maybe, you know, be prefigure a future where formal states governed by representative legislatures could

are no more and we return to a completely privately ordered medieval style legal geography. So the so-called anarcho-capitalists who I describe in the book or the sort of hardcore libertarians in many ways are like welcoming the crack up and embracing fragmentation. And what I describe as a kind of a dream of a world without democracy

The more I learn about early modern empire, the more I realize it's also a kind of a memory of a world without democracy that often explicitly, but very much implicitly, they're fantasizing about an era before the kind of principle of popular sovereignty became dominant, before the principle of national self-determination became dominant.

They're fantasizing about the era that Phil writes about from the 1500s right up into the 1800s. So for that reason, I think there's a kind of, there's a perfect symmetry between our books. And I think the theme of crack up is a curious temporality because it sort of at the same time projects something that could happen through a technologically enabled sort of future.

But it also has deep reference points in a kind of a pre-modern form of political organization that they glean in sort of bits and bytes in their writings from the history books that others have written.

So I guess I'll just leave it at that. And we can talk from there on. Oh, these are two terrific introductions. And as promised, I am going to mostly hang back and let you talk to each other. So where should we go? Who would like to begin?

I mean, I have definitely lots of questions, but I wonder if you wouldn't mind. There's sort of two things like meta questions I want to ask. And one is about kind of methodology, like sort of writing style, actually. And the other is about the kind of political stakes of the approach that you're taking in this book. So I'm going to start with the first one.

because it's always... This is also a chance for a modernist to talk to an early modernist, right? Actually, we don't necessarily talk to each other that much. I mean, Lauren Benton was one of my professors at NYU. I read some early modern history, not enough, but I'm always struck by the way that you all write, which is to say... And maybe you automatically know what I'm saying, but maybe you don't because you're like a fish in the water. But like...

It's a very elliptical style of writing, right? It's like it is it seems to be, oh, weary of wary of overly blunt sort of thesis statements and certainly like repetitious thesis statement seems to like prefer to show rather than tell.

by these often quite obscure sort of episodes, anecdotes, momentary encounters that one sort of has to weave their way through. And then eventually, once you've exited the forest, you can kind of look back and say like, okay, I think I now see what that forest is like. Whereas I feel like a lot of modern historians, and I'm very much a

guilty of this will just sort of like bang you over the head with their thesis. Like this book is about this. I'm about to say this, the world is like that. And here's some evidence. And just in case you forgot, I'm saying this, that, and the other thing. So do you know what I mean? Like, do you, would you agree that early modernists tend to work through accretion of anecdote and, and empirical kind of evidence rather than, you know, the blunter projectile?

You know, it's an interesting way to think about it. I'm not, I don't know if I, if I'd say, if I'd be willing to sort of diagnose all early modernists or all modernists in one. Sure. Yeah. But speaking for myself. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, but I mean, I recognize the distinction and I was actually reading your book rather admiring the direct, the directness of it in a variety of ways. I mean, there are many points in reading through your book where I was lamenting. I didn't have it in hand when I was finishing mine that,

we probably both should have delayed a little bit to pass them between one another. But I think part of the problem is, and I mean, we could do the whole podcast on this because it's very interesting. A, I want to say like really, really a point about having this conversation itself and its role. I mean, one of the reasons I set out to write the book the way I did, because I'm by training in early modernist, but you know, the book ran through the 19th and 20th centuries and

I have this epilogue, which was actually on the 20th century, which was originally supposed to be a whole chapter to itself, but actually ran up mostly against time and word constraints. I'd already forced a book a little over length on the press. They might not agree with the little part. And so that was maybe left for a future time. So one is to have that conversation. I think the part of the problem in the history of the British empire is the failure of this best conversation.

between early modernist and modernist as a result, like we cordoned off the empire that way. But to get to your point about writing styles, I think the part of the problem is that people are tired of hearing early modernists just tell you things were complicated or that they're hybrid. We, you know, one of the big, I think,

I think early modern writing in the past, if you go back a couple of generations, might have been a little more direct because there was the state and the state did these things. I remember even TAing as a graduate student courses on this, looking at textbooks and realizing that you saw these – part of the inspiration for my work were about narratives you saw in texts about –

Britain did this or France did this. And you're like, but everything else tells me there's no Britain in France. Right. And so so but I think that that one of the problems is that at least I get frustrated with myself when I let abstractions like we talk about hybridity, we talk about overlapping, we talk about complications stand in for the actual specificity of that.

So I guess in doing this book, the show-don't-tell model was sort of the approach, which is maybe there's a way through the aesthetic to communicate that. That is either deeply enlightening or deeply frustrating, depending on how you take to it as a reader. So I mean, I could see that point. Yeah. Can I also then, because I think that leads into the political question, and this is something I've been

writing about in the context of empire and finance as sort of two fields of inquiry, which I think sometimes talk past each other. People who work on imperial history or people who work on financial history, even though they shouldn't talk past each other. And one thing that has really struck me, and especially this has to do with also looking outside of the academy, is like the rise and rise of the frame of settler colonialism, right?

as a way to, as a kind of a master key for understanding, you know, empires past and then like politics present. Right. Maybe this is also because I'm Canadian and the, the land back movement and indigenous rights movements are just so powerful right now. And so overwhelming in their physical and their visibility in, I think mostly great ways.

And it seems like your narrative of venture colonialism, as you call it, and corporate colonialism as well,

And the work of, I think, good early modernists, it has different points of emphasis than the sort of parables of settler colonialism, right? I think that thinking about the Raoul Pac documentary, Exterminate All the Brutes, is I think a good stand-in for what's become a kind of a popular...

heavily moralized version of empire in which, you know, white settlers came as, you know, claimed the land to be empty and then like slaughtered anyone in their path and enclosed as they went to expand that footprint of white civilization and white empire. I mean, the work of people like you just shows how we can't rely at all on those

Like, it seems like you were constantly at, you know, strenuously sort of unsettling any assumption. I didn't know my own ignorance that there were like multiple British East India companies for like, or more than one. So it seemed, and you know, you're saying, no, here it was like this, here it was that, no, here they did make treaties with the local Sultan, here they did make arrangements with local indigenous people. So it seems like you're

You're sort of making it difficult to have a simplistic, moralistic, one, you know, perhaps as you're suggesting, overly abstract sort of bludgeon with which to proceed through the past, which I think is for the best. But then when you bring that lens back to the present, it points at different things, right? Instead of pointing at like the land back movement and land struggles or water struggles.

It points at more of the stuff that I work on too, like the transnational corporation, the forms of authority that kind of cross borders to govern capitalism. And I wonder what you think about that, like the sort of the prominence of enclosure as a master metaphor and sort of settlement and the way that a kind of focus on the corporation might both work for, with and against that.

Yeah, it's a really, it's a phenomenally insightful, it's a great question. I mean, it's something I struggle with trying to, it's something I struggle with answering concisely. So let me see if I can do it quickly, because it then raises a kind of interesting point of comparison, as you said, between our two books, or a point of connection, actually, more than comparison. I mean, so on the one hand, I think the book does try to complicate our definition of settler colonialism, not in its...

Not in the sense of its political or contemporary uses, which I think are valuable in the way that settler colonialism as a concept is employed, not necessarily as a historic concept, but as a concept of an ongoing form of expropriation. I think both of us actually in our different ways in our book point to ways in which that use of settler colonialism, whether it's the right term for it or not, but the concept is very useful and valuable because it shows that

that even in the places where you're not seeing...

you're not seeing white settlement colonialism repeat itself. You're seeing the processes. There's a point in your book, for example, where you talk about the relationship between urban spaces that rely on these remote spaces for extraction, right? For energy, for all of these sorts of things. And so I think it does show the dynamics of what people mean when they say settler colonialism.

colonialism about how even in these spaces, this is an ongoing dynamic. What I do take issue in the book, I guess, with the way the historiography and the history of

And it's precisely that, I guess I would say it's precisely that fusion or that spectrum of colonialism that I think is valuable. So in a way, I want to make, I guess I would like this book to be able to reinforce that colonialism comes in many different forms and guises and to reduce it to just the state versus people is to miss the mechanics of how it happens.

But at the same time, I do think one thing I'm taking to task in the book is a kind of heuristic or a schematic approach

to distinguish the way that historians of empire do between, say, settler colonialism, colonialism of rule, or colonialism, right? That a place like India gets coded and classified as not settler colonial because there was not a majority British population there and it gets coded as a kind of different place than Canada or what becomes the United States. Whereas if you look through the lens of the kind of agents that

then you're kind of looking at the Hudson's Bay Company or the East India Company or any of the number of land settlement companies in North America or the Australia projects that I talk about in the book, you're able to actually look at a kind of common dynamic and an imaginary where there were people still in the 1830s who imagined, 1840s who imagined that India could become a place of settlement, especially during, say, the Irish famines, places where what became New Zealand, Canada and North America and Australia became

uh, could have been this other kind of colony as people are sort of thinking about it, but also to think about that, the dynamics of expropriation, um, don't really resist that kind of simple distinction. So even more, it's even more important to me in this book is to distinguish, is to, is to explode the distinction historians had to make between formal and informal empires. So to get back to your point about finance, um,

Right. I wanted to think a lot about the way which we think about the history of colonialism or we not we probably not the people on this call, but that the history of colonialism tends to be thought of as having these two different forms. One where you color the matte pink and have formal territorial rule and others where it's it's the pressures of military finance that get inside of regimes, but actually don't formally colonize. And to me,

A, those distinctions don't hold up when you start to think about the role that finance plays in shaping colonialism. But they also, when you do, and this is a kind of interesting point of comparison I wanted to reflect on with you, when you stop thinking of empires having to, much like democracy or much like the polity in your book, as having to take a particular shape and form or size.

Right. Then you start to realize that you have what you might think what might be formally thought of as formal colonialism inside of all of these, quote unquote, informal spaces. I was struck, for example, I talk a lot. I don't I actually don't talk as much in the books. I my original first drafted, but I really liked that about about the British in 18th and 19th century Honduras.

And so when I saw it recur in your book as a, as a side of the set of same fantasy, a long genealogy of these kinds of uses of these places through like the establishment of plantations and the peopling of these plantations by pushing the people who are there out and bringing in settlers in that case for mahogany extraction, um,

Uh, is, you know, as I often say, if that, if that's informal empire, it didn't really feel informal to the people who were subject to it. And colonization is a form of, of polity building. So in that sense, I mean, I actually think it, I actually think it's exploding the category of settler colonialism. Yeah.

and thinking about its complexities actually reinforces our capacity to think through what the political value of thinking about the term as an ongoing form of expropriation and dispossession. The other thing I would add is that

My whole book is about thinking about the mechanics of how this happened. So the story, they just come in and do it, has always been very unsatisfying to me. Because how is it done? And one of the things that I focus on a lot in the book is are those either real or fictional, and often it's in some legal ambiguous place between those things, of how the Europeans, particularly the British, justified and legitimated the

forms of expropriation to themselves through the use of the concept of private property right and the idea of this this spectrum between private and public and public property which you know is again a kind of interesting uh point of comparison which i guess gets me to if i you know sort of turn around you know take the question and turn it around and give it to you which is like you know um

How do you, when you were, if you're thinking about, about our two work together, you know, as a kind of union of the kind of detente between our own modernists and modernists, you know, you know, I was so struck with the repeated examples in your book.

of these medieval fantasies, right? Is it Milton Friedman's son who's the LARPer? Is this right? David Friedman. Yeah, David Friedman. And the ways in which these are fantasies made real of a world that didn't quite exist that way in the way that they sort of imagined, but

So at the one time, it's a kind of deeply historically embedded story. But on the other hand, the concept of cracked up struck me that there was something to crack up.

Right. And so I was wondering how, you know, how in thinking about that long genealogy, say, settler colonialism or something like that, like how much did you imagine writing this book that these people wanted to break up something that existed or that in fact they were trying to come up with a way of capitalizing something that never quite existed in the first place, right? That coherence...

of the what what's the real fantasy i guess to me is it is it the fantasy of returning to the medieval or is the fantasy that a post 45 nation-state system actually ever managed to get itself quite settled if that makes sense if thinking about say vanessa ogle's work and thinking about all those ways in which those those those havens sort of came out of decolonization you know yeah yeah i mean it's it actually i can answer that by also saying something or sort of

that your last answer made me think about about your work, which is, and I'm also thinking here about Stephen Press's Rogue Empires, which I take that you like very much as well. And I thought it was a remarkable book. And so here's the thing, and I think this is a way of answering your question to me too, is when you look at just the basic facts, the facts you lay out in your book,

it's remarkably sort of obvious in a way that it was mostly private entities that carried out the kind of business of empire until relatively late in the game. And yet, as you say, and I think you're absolutely right that even as late as you being in grad school, you would read something like Britain did this or France did this, right? So, I mean, the question I had in the back of my head was, you know, at what point did we start to entertain that obviousness

obviously false belief that the private

out there pursuing their own endeavors, even if they're acting under royal charters or whatever, were somehow, you know, usefully described as the same thing as the metropolitan state back at home. Like, was that a product of that precisely sort of late empire consolidating historiography and kind of popular narrative that

wanted to make the map painted pink seem as if it had always been thus and not a sort of a patchwork series of sort of contingent um adventurers and sort of like uh fortune seekers of the kind that you and um and steven describe it so well like steven's example is

showing how the scramble for Africa was just like an unbelievably like uncoordinated effort led by just like the least scrupulous people that you could possibly imagine. But then we were very quickly sort of retroactively validated almost as like agents of, um, imperial expansion because it was useful for those in power to act as if they had always been part of the plan. So part of, so I, I,

would suggest or expect that the answer is something to do with sort of modern, the expansion of modern public education in the late 19th century into the 20th century and the need to kind of naturalize and firm up a kind of always already British presence all over the world and so on that obviously came under attack in the course of decolonization. But I think more to the point, the kind of things that

we're writing about are also more visible under conditions of the kind of globalization that we've been living under for the last 25 plus years, in which it just has become more and more obvious that, you know, much of the

the organization of social life is done by private entities, often with more or less levels of non-accountability from public authorities and a feeling that it doesn't make sense anymore to think about a world that is only organized into states because there are obviously these

state-spanning entities, these corporations, these pools of liquidity. There are all kinds of things that don't fit inside the neat contours of national boundaries. And most of us feel, I think, somewhat unsettled by that.

lot of people are in the business of making a lot of money based on figuring out the ways that the world of the economy and the nation-state don't align perfectly and sort of doing arbitrage between that's those two those two levels and

And then there are the people in my book who are, as I've said before, kind of like sniffing out the places where the kind of pools of private ordering go deepest and trying to figure out how to like dig, dig even deeper. So, um,

They find accurately that, you know, that you can use something like a gated community to produce a kind of bespoke set of customized laws that are opt in and you can kind of literalize the social contract and thus produce like an exclusionary political entity inside of a broader nation state.

or you can figure out how to put your money in places, into trusts or whatever that act as kind of dark geographies inside of a kind of imperfect fiscal surveillance apparatus that we have inside of states. So they find places that already exist as sites of kind of

opacity or the evasion of public authority and then just try to chip away more at them and to kind of expand them. And, you know, in drawing our attention to those places, I think they do what you're suggesting, which is they make obvious to us that, like, there never really was full, like, let's say, democratic oversight of the actions of the private economy. There never really was, you know, the even distribution of

the benefits of growth or even at the benefits of the post-war era. But they also act as agents of, I think, qualitative change. So I'll give you the example of homeschooling, right? And into the 1970s in the United States, there was like, you know, a few thousand people that were homeschooled. It was very, very unusual. It was illegal.

And you needed special exemptions to be able to do it through the policy entrepreneurship of the specific small group of libertarians who also sniff the kind of

The changing zeitgeist around the counterculture as well as religious fundamentalism and so on managed to get new laws put into the books in every state in the United States such that it's much, much easier now. And the number of homeschoolers have sort of grown by a hundredfold. Thus, I think, you know, punching holes or perforating in the in the metaphor I use in my book.

perforating some of that kind of shared civic institutional fabric upon which anyway, the, the ideal typical post war state was supposed to be constructed, right. Without shared and even enforced participation in those institutions of the state, whether they are education tax collection or, you know using utilities or, you know,

EMS services and so on, once you start to allow for the privatization of those, hiving them off one by one, then, you know, you show the lie of a kind of people living inside of a single society and you say, no, no.

So in that sense, yeah, I think it does, you know, it both harks back to an era before it exposes the fact that that uniformity was always a lie. But then it does also kind of open up the cracks even more. So even if things were always a bit cracked up, they can be more cracked up.

Or those cracks get sealed over and then recracked and yet anybody who owns a house knows that when you do that, the cracks are bigger and wider and weirder. Because no, I mean, that's absolutely – that makes a lot of sense because like I was – it's funny you bring up the homeschooling example. I was so striving – you should see the number of bookmarks and flags I put in the book of these moments where –

you know, like, so for example, my hope, one of the main interesting things in my book, or I shouldn't say interesting, interesting that I became interested in and I'll leave it to other people to decide if it's interesting was there's also a narrative in the history of companies and colonialism or couple, actually the history of companies and capitalism in general, that, um, you know, that, uh, getting back to our, our, um,

our early modern, modern rapprochement, which is that, that there was a world of chartered colonialism or chartered companies that gave way in the middle of the 19th century in the sort of, uh,

euro Western world to a kind of moment of administrative registration, right? Which is, you know, now we make companies by going and filing some paperwork. You only need a handful of people and you can even be a company to yourself. And that's a, it was a sea change in a fundamentally different world. So to me, what was really striking was the persistence of chartered colonialism and chartered capitalism to some extent, um,

beyond that moment. And then to see, for example, the sort of genealogical evolution in your book from the charter school to the chartered city and the ways in which this idea continues to persist. But what to me is really interesting, and I'm curious, back to a methodology question too, because I struggled with this as well when writing,

Which is one thing I really, and you correct me if I've misread you, but one thing I saw in common between our approaches is that we both see a kind of, and you know, similar to Stephen's book, as you mentioned before, we both see a...

The ways in which people are mobilizing their interests and mobilizing are essentially looking for ways to to make money or looking at ways to sort of capitalize on these situations, but at the same time, try to take their the fact that they take that may possibly take their ideas seriously, seriously.

Right. That this is also this is all these are also people who are whose interests and ideologies can align conveniently. But it's very hard to know when to decide to take it seriously, when not to take it seriously. What is it a front or a cover for a brute interest? And when, in fact, does do some of the actors in your book really believe they have a better way of organizing and understanding government? I I have found many instances, as did you, in different moments and different times where

of people saying the joint stock corporation is a much better model for organizing the polity than, than in my case, sometimes monarchy. And ironically, back then in the 17th century, the accusation was that it was, it was revolutionarily Republican. And one of the things that seems to evolve by the 20th and 21st century is that it actually was anti-democratic. Um,

But in the early 19th century, you see some people making similar arguments. You see, for example, about investment in the polity, meaning that reform should happen by voting by shares or how much you actually have rather than just being an individual or an atomized unit, things like that. But I've always gotten the sense that from immersing myself in these people that they either convince themselves of the truth or that, in fact,

of their ideas or that they in fact believe is one of my goals in writing these kind of work. It's same thing with my first book on the East India company was to, was to actually point at how powerful and dangerous it can be. In fact, when it's not just written off as mere interest, but is it ideology is one of my frustrations sometimes with the history of company colonialism that I sort of wanted to set back, which everybody sort of assumes, well, sure it was a company, but,

Profit was the bottom line. And, you know, in many ways it can be, it can be bold. So, you know, between that and the other thing I noticed in commonality between our two books, which is the balance in the book between stuff that happens and stuff that are actually fantasies that are just pitches.

you know it's in that sense it's an intellectual history about a world that didn't happen or or a world that couldn't happen and i'm not really sure my question is actually it was just it was a it was i was just constantly struck with i it was a very we both were doing the similar things in that way it's a bit of a struggle in both on both those fronts to tell a history right i don't know what you think about that if that's something that thought you one thing that that um

occurs to me that is very similar. A couple of things do. One is what you're saying, I think, is very true, which is that, you know, shareholder governance, for example, one stock, one vote, let's say, looks like a pretty retrograde form of organizing human affairs. But it depends what you're comparing it to, right? Like compared to absolutist monarchy, that might actually be, you know, an advance or like a new way of distributing decision making and power in a more

interesting way. If you compare it to one person, one vote popular sovereignty, then it doesn't look as good anymore. You get a very similar dynamic with these zones, these special economic zones. If you put them inside of a country that doesn't have a functioning democracy, that is an authoritarian one party state, and you allow for some level of

the re-commodification of land and some level of free enterprise, then relatively speaking, sometimes they can look like sites of freedom compared to the world around them. If you put a special economic zone that is immune from local government oversight into Liverpool or Teesside, then it looks much different. It looks less democratic. So the contextual nature of

And the historically specific nature of like whether a charter company is a progressive political form or a regressive political form, like very much depends on the place, the time, the people there, the exact form that they have decided to organize the entity under. And there's a

there's interesting things that we probably won't have time to talk about, about like the difference between like a seniorship and like the, there's different ways of a trust. Like there's, there's, I think extremely important subtle differences about the form of property tenure that you choose within these private, uh, formulations that, you know, range from kind of a Georgist quasi-socialism to like a more, um,

a more Lockean kind of privatized form of ownership that I think have consequences for governance that are really important and that like I think the smart libertarians spend all of their time talking about that like when once we get rid of states what form of land tenure will we choose and and what will the consequences for our future form of statecraft be based on how we organize our relationship to the land which another interesting

pitch for a recent book is Joe Goldie's long land war book, which I think is brilliant on occupancy rights. But the thing that the main thing that I was thinking about is how the dynamic that you describe is very similar to the dynamic I describe in that there's this kind of circling around one another of the public authorities and the private charter companies in which both think that they're taking advantage of each other, right? Both are both have a sense that they're getting more

from the other than the other is getting from them. So the states are pretty sure they can instrumentalize the use of the private capital and the private...

energies that these charter companies bring. In my case, it's states and these special economic zones where they think, okay, we're ceding a bit of sovereignty technically by saying that we're lifting certain regulations inside of this area. We're allowing more foreign ownership, foreign direct investment, whatever it is. But we think that we're actually controlling them. They're not controlling us.

And so most of the story is that, like, who's right? And in my book, it's sort of a twist ending in that it turns out that these zones that anarcho-libertarians thought were going to be sites of the unleashing of entrepreneurial energies and freedoms are actually completely in the harness of central authoritarian states. China and Saudi Arabia and Gulf states are the ones who are

fondest of special economic zones and they're not at all sort of innovating from inside or anything. They're just, they're, they're being used for the most part by the state rather than operating against the state. But this, the, the other, so that's one way of looking at it. Just like who's, who's in the, who's in the driver's seat, who's in the saddle and who's the horse.

But the other way is what you're saying, which is to sort of like enter the thought worlds of the private actors, whether the zone people or the charter company people, and say like, what is it that they actually want? Like, as you say, are they just hustlers and grifters, adventurers and merchants, just different forms across the centuries? Like, are we dealing with the same personality type here, basically? And if so, maybe you don't need to say that much more about them.

except for the ways they can be useful idiots for, or like, you know, um, aggrandizing themselves in different ways at different times. Or is there a kernel inside of their own, um, visions of a possible future in which their sort of dance partner, like the state or whatever has been actually, um, subsumed and, and destroyed, um,

I think that it's so hard for us to think of a world in which private ordering only prevails because we're so used to thinking of the public and private in this endless kind of tango that to just sort of sit with fully private government, not as a compliment to public government, but as the only game in town,

is I think it's strange that we haven't thought about that more, right? We've thought so much about like complete socialization of human relations, complete nationalization, the extinction of private property altogether. Not only has it been tried, but we've also spent a lot of time contemplating it, but rarely do we flip it and think about just like the, the, the rule and the reign of purely private relations and what that might look like. And I think it's worth,

asking what they imagine in such a world. Yeah, no, I mean, exactly. Because I think those imaginations, as you show in a number of different instances, and I think I hopefully show in my book too, even if you get some pretty wacky, unrealistic thought experiments,

They filter down either at the moment or generations later to things that actually end up happening, maybe in a more modified way for a variety of reasons. So that's I mean, that's one one reason to look at it. I mean, to me, it's a really number of interesting points there. I mean, to me, a couple of things that you made me think of one is, you know, you get back to your original question, you know.

show not tell or how do you talk about these things? It's because, you know, especially when, you know, I'm telling the story kind of over a much sort of, I guess, longer arc of time. It really resists because of all of these dynamics you're talking about. It resists any one simple dynamic, including the fact that that, you know, as you show in the book, your book to states are infected and infused by these libertarian actors or by these corporate actors and vice versa.

Right. There's a there, you know, there's a movement. They're not mutually exclusive in terms of personnel or in terms of power. Right. There's a dynamic that kind of moves back and forth over time or in different places and geographies. The other thing that you made me think about was that, you know, you said, but is it aggrandizement? Are they just adventurers, you know, or do they or, you know, or are they philosophers in a sense or in their own in their own minds or to other people? What's interesting is I had a number of characters. I think I make.

make the case about some of the characters in your book who are actually aggrandizing themselves by trying to be philosophers right that that that it's it's it's that somehow social stat that is it that that not only does it burnish their credentials as financial actors but at various points of social status or the emotional value of having twitter followers or or ex-followers you know or or a variety of different forms of capital social capital and cultural capital political capital come

with trying to create this space for yourself. I mean, you know, one of the most vociferous, you know, most persuasive and impactful 19th century writers

advocates for corporate colonialism was a guy, Edward Gibbon Wakefield, who Marx cited in Capital as the most significant political economist of his time because of his arguments about how to recreate capitalism on a colonial frontier. But the guy was one of the sketchiest characters you could possibly imagine, actually came up with this idea for the

uh, for South Australian corporate colony while in, in jail, uh, with a couple of other people in jail. And it's a longer story and gets worse and worse. If you tell it, start getting into the details of what this guy was like. So there's a couple of different, like, you know, for me as a bit of a tangent for me, one of the other sort of objects of telling the story about,

companies and colonialism is to also get away from a narrative about purely what the historians, and you'll know the work, the historians, Kane and Hopkins called gentlemanly capitalism. I mean, not all of these, some of these projects were deeply aligned with state interests and some of them were quite departed from it or were people who were doing these things precisely because they couldn't get access to that kind of power or that kind of

that kind of capital. So I think taking the ideas seriously because it's not just about

I guess what I'm getting at is it's not just about taking ideas seriously for their own sake, which I think is important, or their power later, but also about how the ideas themselves produce a form of power. Or rendering yourself as an important theorist has a power in the real world, if that makes sense. Yeah, I mean, I think that the effort of both of our work is to also not just have capitalism as an agent or a protagonist that requires no further explanation.

And because actually, I think in a way, like the cigar chomping, you know, plutocrat who just wants to make money like the Trump basically figure is.

is actually less dangerous than the person who starts to theorize, as you're saying. Because when that capitalist starts to theorize, one of two things is happening. Either they're actually planning for that moment we're talking about where, like, you extinguish existing forms of statecraft altogether and just state like a corporatocracy, or more likely, they're figuring out ways to enter conventional politics.

And even despite maybe their anarcho-capitalist leanings, and I'll give you a very concrete example, which is Javier Millet, the Argentine, until very recently leading candidate for president, who is a self-described anarcho-capitalist, and who...

fascinating for me. I mean, people like him are a dime a dozen, but he is important because he has managed to pull all this support. Where did he pull his support from? It turns out that the previous socialist or Peronist leader Kirchner had lowered the voting age to 16 with an idea that that would allow the youth to express their, you know, their, their more progressive tendencies. It was really criticized by the right. Conservatives thought this was going to be a disaster. And,

But in the event, the youth vote went overwhelmingly to Millet, the anarcho-capitalist. Why? Because under decades of austerity and structural adjustment, the Argentine economy has been destroyed and most young people work in the informal economy. And so for them, there's no reason to trust the state.

They completely identify with his sort of brutal rhetoric of like the social Darwinist virtues of competition because that's the world they live in. Right. So so if you have and there are parts of the world that continue to, you know, for various reasons, descend into situations in which the total private ordering of life is more of an everyday reality than a kind of anarcho capitalist fantasy. Right.

then that is fertile ground for people who, you know, preach that as a form of politics that may work still through kind of parliamentary channels, but in doing so is, you know, laying bombs on

In, you know, the remnants of what could be like an administrative or redistributive state. So I think like the theorizing capitalist, you know, is someone who we need to be constantly kind of on guard for. And, you know, unfortunately, we have to transcribe their ravings, no matter how hard it might be sometimes.

Oh, goodness. I hate to interject and break this off, but I think in the interest of time, I know you both have things to move to. I need to interrupt to stop us, but I want to thank you so much there, Dr.

for this conversation, so many, as I, so many kind of questions are thinking in my mind, including this theme that you've both brought into about, you know, the ideas that are, are, are ideas driving this? When are ideas a foil and when are they, when are they real motivators? And if at, if earlier in our conversation, I was thinking, listening to

as a, you know, Russian trained person, thinking about the power of the 20th century binaries of socialism and capitalism to just organize the way people thought they should, you know, act in the world and thinking, was there a comparable ideology? You know, we always say guns, God, glory, to what extent, to whom? And then as Phil is bringing up that there are these people that had

real visions for how to organize things. And Quinn, your comment about, well, depending on the context, one share, one vote might have been an improvement, you know, just gives us so much to think about. And also the, one of these main differences between the early modern world and the world we live in today being mass politics, that if, that if a project or in the early modern world had to appeal to the court versus what, how does,

How do mass politics and technology change the way that I'm... Well, I'll stop there. You see where I'm going and we could go on so much. But I want to thank you so much for your time. I want to thank our listeners for staying with us. I encourage you both to pick up the works of...

Philip Stern, his most recent book, Empire Incorporated, and Quinn's philobodian, Crack Up Capitalism. But as you've heard, they both have other really important monographs and articles to read as well. So thank you, listeners. Thank you, audience. And I will look forward to learning more from you in the future. Thank you very much, Erica. Yeah, thank you.