By Andrew Phillips and J. C. Sharman
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2020.
Pp. viii, 253, $29.95 hardcover.
The distinction between the public and private domains is something we often take for granted today, particularly in the West. Andrew Phillips and J. C. Sharman’s book Outsourcing Empire: How Company-States Made the Modern World illuminates how the history of these two domains, in particular their past hybridization, laid the foundations for our modern world. The specific hybridization of the public and private spheres the authors consider is known as the “company-state,” an institution with the power of a king and the financial promise of a transoceanic merchant enterprise.
In the early seventeenth century, European powers faced both increased geopolitical and military competition. To financially facilitate these challenges, they sought to further expand their spheres of influence by obtaining control over non-European resources. Due in large part to principal-agent problems, European rulers did not have the institutional means by which they
