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ABSTRACT
This paper examines early modern discussions of democracy in the context of a chartered company: namely, the Virginia Company. It examines descriptions of the Company’s constitution and politics as democratic. It focuses, in particular, upon a petition that William Cavendish (later the Second Earl of Devonshire) presented to the Virginia Company assembly defending the democratic constitution of the Company. Cavendish's secretary, Thomas Hobbes, may or may not have assisted with drafting that petition, but he was closely involved in the debates to which it contributed. The discussion, therefore, provides a broader context for debates about the role of democratic ideas in Hobbes’ works. More importantly, however, it shows that sub-state bodies politic in early modern England, such as chartered companies, provided an environment in which political thought, including democracy, could flourish removed from the dangers of national politics.
Acknowledgements
I am deeply indebted to Noel Malcolm, Miri Rubin, and Quentin Skinner for feedback on earlier versions of this article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Two notable and recent exceptions are: Phil Withington, ‘An “Aristotelian Moment”: Democracy in Early Modern England’, in Popular Culture and Political Agency in Early Modern England and Ireland: Essays in Honour of John Walter, ed. Michael J. Braddick and Phil Withington (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2017), 203–22; and the essays in Cesare Cuttica and Markku Peltonen, eds., Democracy and Anti-Democracy in Early Modern England 1603–1689 (Leiden: Brill, 2019). On the other hand, a familiar path for surveys of democracy is to jump from Ancient Greece and Rome to the modern revolutions. See, for example: Paul Cartledge’s, Democracy: A life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 283, charting the history of democracy from Ancient Greece and Rome directly, ‘after a long sleep’, to the Putney Debates in the 1640s; and Wilfried Nippel, Ancient and Modern Democracy: Two Concepts of Liberty? trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
2 See, for example: Quentin Skinner and Martin van Gelderen, eds., Republicanism: A Shared European Legacy 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and John F. McDiarmid, ed., The Monarchical Republic of Early Modern England: Essays in Response to Patrick Collinson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).
3 J.P. Sommerville, Royalists and Patriots: Politics and Ideology in England 1603–1640, 2nd ed. (Harlow: Pearson Education, 1996), 26 and 61.
4 George Mace, Locke, Hobbes, and the Federalist Papers: An Essay on the Genesis of the American Political Heritage (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1979), x; Frank M. Coleman, Hobbes and America: Exploring the Constitutional Foundations (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973), 3. This scholarship is examined by Kinch Hoekstra, ‘A Lion in the House: Hobbes and Democracy’, in Rethinking the Foundations of Modern Political Thought, ed. Annabel Brett and James Tully (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 191–2.
5 For a critique of mythologies of doctrines, see: Quentin Skinner, ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’, in Visions of Politics: Volume 1 Regarding Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 57–89.
6 Richard Tuck, ‘Hobbes and Democracy’, in Rethinking the Foundations, 171–90; Richard Tuck, The Sleeping Sovereign: The Invention of Modern Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 63–120.
7 On Hobbes and negative liberty, see: Quentin Skinner, ‘Hobbes and the Proper Signification of Liberty’, in Visions of Politics: Volume 3 Hobbes and Civil Science, 209–37.
8 Discussions of democracy in the early American colonies have focused upon New England, rather than Virginia, due to the religious republicanism of the Puritan settlers, see: Jason Maloy, The Colonial American Origins of Modern Democratic Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); James Kloppenberg, Toward Democracy: The Struggle for Self-Rule (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 61–93; Camilla Boisen, ‘Democracy and Anti-Democracy: The Roger Williams and John Cotton Debate Revisited’, in Cuttica and Peltonen, eds., Democracy and Anti-Democracy.
9 For chartered companies as bodies politic, see: Andrew Fitzmaurice, Humanism and America: An Intellectual History of English Colonisation, 1500–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Philip J. Stern, The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). For the understanding of various kinds non-state communities as bodies politic, including companies, church, and cities, see: Phil Withington, The Politics of Commonwealth: Citizens and Freemen in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). For studies building upon this insight, see: Henry S. Turner, The Corporate Commonwealth: Pluralism and Political Fictions in England, 1516–1651 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2016); William Pettigrew, ‘Corporate Constitutionalism and the Dialogue Between the Global and the Local in Seventeenth Century English History’, Itinerario 39, no. 3 (2015): 487–501. For a discussion of democracy, in particular, in the context of the church, see: Rachel Hammersley, ‘Presbyterians, Republicans, and Democracy in Church and State’, in Cuttica and Peltonen, eds., Democracy and Anti-Democracy.
10 On corporations as bodies politic and the state as a corporation, see: David Runciman, Pluralism and the Personality of the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Quentin Skinner, ‘A Genealogy of the Modern State’, Proceedings of the British Academy 162 (2009): 325–70.
11 Cesare Cuttica and Markku Peltonen rightly criticise recent histories of democracy as excessively forward-looking: ‘Such historians are mainly interested in the history of democratisation – which often concerns itself with how establishing how certain thinkers anticipated the values of modern liberal democracy, and much less with what early modern authors said about democracy’, Cesare Cuttica and Markku Peltonen, ‘“Gone Missing”: Democracy and Anti-Democracy in Seventeenth-Century England’, in Cuttica and Peltonen, eds., Democracy and Anti-Democracy, 4.
12 ‘His Maiesties Declaration, Touching his proceedings in the late Assemblie and Convention of Parliament’, in King James VI and I, Political Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 262–3.
13 Of course, another means of discussing democracy in relative safety in the seventeenth century was in poetry and theatre, see, for example: J.S. Maloy, Democratic Statecraft: Political Realism and Popular Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 111–6.
14 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), ch.13, 63.
15 The most notable exception to this perspective was Thomas Hobbes himself, who argued against the ‘vain-glory’ of states and derided ‘the insatiable Appetite, or bulimia, of enlarging Dominion’, On Hobbes and the bulimia of empires, see: Istvan Hont, Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); and Andrew Fitzmaurice, Sovereignty, Property, and Empire 1500–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 104. For Hobbes’s familiarity with the literature on greatness and reason of state and his sympathy with some of its themes, despite his disdain for ‘pretenders to Political Prudence’, see Noel Malcolm, Reason of State, Propaganda and the Thirty Years’ War: An Unknown Translation by Thomas Hobes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 109–23.
16 Michael J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, c.1550–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 21.
17 Hugo Grotius, Commentary on the Law of Prize and Booty, ed. Martine Julia van Ittersum (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2006), 15.
18 Walter Ralegh, The Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana, ed. Neil L. Whitehead (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), 127.
19 Gillian T. Cell, ed., Newfoundland Discovered: English Attempts at Colonisation, 1610–1630 (London: The Hakluyt Society, 1982).
20 Charter, 43, Eliz I, 31 December [1600], in Charters Granted to the East-India Company from 1601 (London, 1773), 5–6. See also: Stern, Company State, 7.
21 The Charter of New England, 1620, in The Federal and State Constitutions: Colonial Charters and Other Organic Laws of the States, Territories, and Colonies Now or Hereto Forming the United States of America vol. 3, ed. Frances Newton Thorpe (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1909), 1830.
22 The Charter of Massachusetts Bay, 1629, in Thorpe, ed., The Federal and State constitutions, 1852.
23 Fitzmaurice, Humanism and America, ch.3.
24 Edward Thomas Hayes, ‘Reasons to Move the High Court of Parlament to Raise a Stocke for the Maintaining of a Collonie in Virgenia’, in New American World: A Documentary History of North America to 1612, V, The Extension of Settlement in Florida, Virginia, and the Spanish Southwest, ed. David B. Quinn (New York: Arno Press, 1979), 168.
25 Ibid., 168–9.
26 Ibid., 168.
27 Edward Hayes had been tutor to the sons of Sir Thomas Hoby, the translator of Castiglione’s Courtier: Fitzmaurice, Humanism and America, 46.
28 Hayes, ‘Reasons to Move the High Court of Parlament’, 168.
29 Ibid., 169.
30 Ibid., 168.
31 Ibid., 170.
32 Ibid., 170.
33 ‘April 10, 1606. The Charter that Created the Virginia Companies’, in Quinn, ed., New American World, Vol.5, 193.
34 Ibid., 194.
35 ‘A Justification for Planting in Virginia’, in Kingsbury, ed., The Records of the Virginia Company of London, Vol. 3, p. 2, printed from Tanner Manuscripts, XCIII, folio 200, Bodleian Library, Oxford.
36 ‘The Second Charter to the Treasurer and Company for Virginia, May 23, 1609’ Alexander Brown, Genesis of the United States, 2 vols (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1890), Vol. 1, 233.
37 Paul Musselwhite has shown that the civic culture of the company proved to be a blueprint for the political culture of the colony, even well beyond the dissolution of the company itself: Paul Musselwhite, Urban Dreams, Rural Commonwealth: The Rise of Plantation Society in the Commonwealth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018).
38 Ibid., 232–3.
39 Ibid., 233.
40 Ibid., 208.
41 Wesley Frank Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company: The Failure of a Colonial Experiment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1932), 222–5.
42 For a detailed account of this language employed in the context of the Virginia Company, see: Fitzmaurice, Humanism and America; Andrew Fitzmaurice, ‘American Corruption’, in The Monarchical Republic of Early Modern England: Essays in Response to Patrick Collinson, ed. John F. McDiarmid (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); Andrew Fitzmaurice, ‘The Commercial Ideology of Colonization in Jacobean England: Robert Johnson, Giovanni Botero and the Pursuit of Greatness’, William and Mary Quarterly, October 2007; Alexander B. Haskell, For God, King and People: Forging Commonwealth Bonds in Renaissance Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017).
43 Robert Johnson, The New Life of Virginea (London, 1612), sig.A4r.
44 Smythe was also for two brief and uneventful moments a member of the English parliament prior to the publication of Johnson’s tract. For Smythe, see: Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company, 25–6; Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 96–100.
45 Instructions to George Yeardley, November 18, 1618, in Kingsbury, Records, vol.3, 98.
46 Ibid., 98–99.
47 Ibid., 104.
48 Ibid., 99.
49 Malcolm, Reason, 77; Theodore Rabb, Jacobean Gentleman: Sir Edwin Sandys, 1561–1629 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 254–5. On Sandys’ imprisonment, see: Rabb, Jacobean Gentleman, 261.
50 Malcolm, Reason, 78.
51 A Preparative Court held for Virginia, Kingsbury, Records, Vol. 1, 266–7.
52 Brown, Genesis, I, 207.
53 Craven, Dissolution, 308.
54 Ibid., 262–3.
55 Ibid., 120–1.
56 John Bargrave, Petition to the Privy Council, in Kingsbury, ed., Records, vol.3, 608.
57 John Bargrave, Charges Against the Former Government of Virginia, in Kingsbury, ed., Records, Vol. 3, 605.
58 Ibid., 606.
59 Ibid., 606.
60 Ibid., 605.
61 John Bargrave, Disclaimer of Opposition to the Present Management, in Kingsbury, ed., Records, Vol.3, 637.
62 Ibid., 637.
63 Ibid., 638.
64 A point also made in Noel Malcolm, ‘Hobbes, Sandys, and the Virginia Company’, in Aspects of Hobbes, ed. Noel Malcom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 55.
65 Bargrave, Disclaimer, 638.
66 Ibid., 638.
67 Craven, Dissolution, 282.
68 For the rise of Tacitism, see: Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government 1572–1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
69 For Hobbes’ translation of Altera secretissima instrcutio, see: Malcolm, Reason of State. For Johnson’s translation of Botero: Andrew Fitzmaurice, ‘The Commercial Ideology of Colonisation in Jacobean England: Robert Johnson, Giovanni Botero and the Pursuit of Greatness’, William and Mary Quarterly, October 2007.
70 For Botero on interest, see: Malcolm, Reason of State, 94; Tuck, Philosophy and Government, ch.3; Peter Burke, ‘Tacitism, Scepticism, and Reason of State’, in The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700, ed. J.H. Burns with Mark Goldie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 479–98.
71 Robert Johnson, Essaies, or Rather Imperfect Offers (London, 1601), sig.[D2v].
72 Ibid., sig.D3v.
73 [Sir Nathanial Rich], Note which I presently took of Captain John Bargrave’s discourse to me concerning Sir Edwin Sandys, in Kingsbury, ed., Records, vol.4, 194.
74 Ibid., 194.
75 On the True Law of Free Monarchies, see: Francis Oakley, ‘Religion, Civil Government, and the Debate on Constitutions’, in The Cambridge History of Political Thought 1450–1700, 247.
76 Rich, Note Which I Presently Took, 194.
77 Ibid., 195.
78 Ibid., 195.
79 Captain John Bargrave, Copy of a Letter to the Lord Treasurer Middlesex, in Kingsbury, ed., Records, Vol. 4, 438.
80 Alderman Johnson, His ‘Rough Draught to a Commission & the Peticion to His MatY’, in Kingsbury, ed., Records, Vol. 4, 85.
81 William Cavendish, A Relation of ye proceedings of ye Virginia and Sum̃er Ilands Companies in answere of some Imputations laid vpon them, together with the discouery of the groundes of such Vniust obiections, and a Remedy propounded for auoiding the like Inconveniencies hereafter, in Kingsbury, ed., Records, Vol. 2, 358.
82 Privy Council, Order for Confining Cavendish and Others, May 13, 1634, in Kingsbury, ed., Records, Vol. 4, 192. Craven, Dissolution, 308.
83 Craven, Dissolution, 309.
84 An Extraordinary Court Held for Virginia and the Summer Ilandes on Saturday in the fforenoone the 12th of April 1623, in Kingsbury, ed. Records, II, 346.
85 Thomas Hobbes, The Life of Mr T. Hobbes of Malmesbury (London, 1680), 4.
86 Malcolm, Reason of State, 5–9; Quentin Skinner, ‘Hobbes and the studia humanitatis’, in Skinner, Visions of Politics: Volume 3, Hobbes and Civil Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 45–6.
87 Kingsbury, Records, II, 345.
88 For the Virginia Company, Hobbes attended twenty eight assemblies (some of which doubled as meetings of the Somers Islands Company): a ‘preparative court’ on November 18, 1622 (Kingsbury, ed. Records, II, 124); an ‘extraordinary’ court on November 27, 1622 (II, 146); a ‘court’ January 29, 1622 [ie.1623] (II, 180); a ‘preparative’ court, February 3, 1622 [ie.1623] (II, 231); a Quarter Court (doubling also for the Somers Islands), February 5 1622 [ie.1623] (II, 245) in which he was also mentioned as a member of the Somers Islands Company (II, 246); a ‘Court’ February 19, 1622 [ie.1623] (II, 274); an ‘extraordinary court’ (doubling also for the Somers Islands),February 22, 1622 [ie.1623] (II, 294); a ‘Court’ (doubling also for the Somers Islands), March 5, 1622 [ie.1623] (II, 301); a ‘Court’, March 7, 1622 [ie. 1623] (II, 319); a ‘Court’, March 19, 1622 [ie. 1623] (II, 328); a ‘Court’, March 24, 1622 [ie. 1623] (II, 334); a ‘Court’, April 2, 1623 (II, 341); an ‘extraordinary’ court (doubling also for the Somers Islands), April 12, 1623 (II, 345); an ‘extraordinary’ court, April 17, 1623 (II, 364); a ‘court’ (doubling also for the Somers Islands), April 18, 1623 (II, 367); a ‘Court’, April 23, 1623 (II, 370); a ‘Court’, April 25, 1623 (II, 378); a ‘Court’, April 30, 1623 (II, 380); a ‘Court’, (doubling also for the Somers Islands), May 7, 1623 (II, 391); a ‘preparative’ court, May 12, 1623 (II, 414); [the court for May 24 did not record attendance beyond Cavendish and three other nobles (II, 434)]; a ‘Court’, June 9, 1623 (II, 436); a ‘Court’, July 4, 1623 (II, 460); a ‘Court’, July 9, 1623 (II, 462); a ‘Quarter Court’, November 19, 1623 (II, 485); a ‘Court’, January 14, 1623 [ie. 1624] (II, 497); a ‘preparative’ court, February 2, 1623 [ie.1624] (II, 506); a ‘Quarter Court’, April 28, 1624 (II, 534); a ‘preparative’ court, June 7, 1624 (II, 534) which was also the last court held by the company before its dissolution. He also attended a two further assemblies that were exclusively for the Somers Island Company: a Quarter Court, on 27 November 1622, in which Hobbes also voted in favor of a grant of land to ‘perticuler Adventurers’ proposed by Cavendish (II, 158); and a Quarter Court, February 12, 1622 [ie.1623]. This makes a total of 30 company assemblies, although Noel Malcolm counts Hobbes’ attendance at 37 assemblies he includes the dual, albeit simultaneous, attendances at joint Virginia Company and Somers Islands Company meetings which, by my count, come to six: Malcolm, Reason of State, 8; Malcolm, ‘Hobbes, Sandys, and the Virginia Company’, 54.n.8.
89 At a Virginia Court [held] the 19th of June 1622, in Kingsbury, ed. Records, II, 40.
90 At a Preparatory Court Held for Virginia on Monday the 18th of Novemb 1622, in Kingsbury, ed. Records, II, 123.
91 Extraordinary Court of the Somers Islands, March 17, 1622/23, in Kingsbury, ed. Records, IV, 48. See also Malcolm, ‘Hobbes, Sandys, and the Virginia Company’, 55.
92 29 April 1619, A Quarter Court Held for Virginia at Sr Thomas Smiths Howse, in Kingsbury, ed. Records, I, 211; and A Complete List in Alphabetical Order of the ‘Adventurers to Virginia’ with the Several Amounts of Their Holdings, in Kingsbury, ed. Records, III, 81.
93 Brown, Genesis, II, 847.
94 Edward D. Neill, History of the Virginia Company of London (Albany: Joel Munsell, 1869), 55.
95 An Extraordinary Court Held … the 12th of April 1623, in Kingsbury, ed. Records, II, 346.
96 Ibid., II, 346.
97 Ibid., II, 346.
98 Ibid., II, 347.
99 Ibid., II, 348.
100 Ibid., II, 351.
101 Ibid., II, 351.
102 Ibid., II, 352.
103 Malcolm, ‘Hobbes, Sandys, and the Virginia Company’, 55 also notes this phrasing.
104 Malcolm’s judgement is ‘one might suspect him [Hobbes] to have a hand’ in Cavendish’s petition: Malcolm, ‘Hobbes, Sandys, and the Virginia Company’, 55.
105 See footnote 88 for his attendance.
106 Hobbes, The Life of Mr T. Hobbes, 4. For Hobbes’ skepticism of democracy, see: Hoekstra, ‘A Lion in the House’.
107 A Relation of ye the proceedings of ye Virginia and Summer Ilands Companies, in Kingsbury, ed. Records, II, 352.
108 Ibid., II, 353.
109 Ibid., II, 353.
110 Ibid., II, 354.
111 Withington, Politics of Commonwealth.
112 Ibid., II, 355.
113 Ibid., II, 355.
114 Ibid., II, 357.
115 Ibid., II, 357.
116 Ibid., II, 358.
117 Ibid., II, 358.
118 Hobbes, Leviathan, 94.
119 A Relation of ye the proceedings, in Kingsbury, ed. Records, II, 358.
120 Thomas Hobbes, Elements of Law, ed. Ferdinand Tönnies and M.M. Goldsmith (London: Frank Cass, 1969), 2.2.5 and 2.5.3.
121 For Hobbes and Thucydides on this point, see: Hoekstra, ‘A Lion in the House’, 200–1.
122 A Relation of ye the Proceedings, in Kingsbury, ed. Records, II, 358.
123 Ibid., II, 358.
124 Ibid., II, 358.
125 Ibid., II, 358.
126 Hobbes, Leviathan, 134
127 A Relation of ye the proceedings, in Kingsbury, ed. Records, II, 359.
128 Hobbes, Leviathan, 138 and 121, ch.18 ‘Of the Rights of Soveraigns by Institution’. Hoekstra, ‘A Lion in the House’, 209.
129 Hobbes, Leviathan, 121.
130 Ibid., 129.
131 A Relation of ye the Proceedings, in Kingsbury, ed. Records, II, 359.
132 Ibid., II, 359.
133 Hobbes, Leviathan, 105.
134 See Tuck, Philosophy and Government. For Botero and the Virginia Company, see: Fitzmaurice, ‘Commercial Ideology’.
135 It is not anachronistic to describe citizens of the company as women given that a number of shareholders were women, including in a 1618 list: ‘the Ladie Carie’; ‘Sara Draper’; ‘Lady gray’; ‘Countesse of Shrewsbury’: A Complete List in Alphabetical Order of the ‘Adventurers to Virginia’, in Kingsbury, ed. Records, III, 81, 83, 83, 87, respectively. See also: Misha Ewen, ‘Women Investors and the Virginia Company in the Early Seventeenth Century’, Historical Journal 62, no. 4 (2019): 853–74. Early modern English people were capable of conceiving of women as citizens, see: Phil Withington, ‘Putting the City into Shakespeare’s City Comedy’, in Shakespeare and Early Modern Political Thought, ed. David Armitage, Conal Condren, and Andrew Fitzmaurice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 197–216.
136 A Relation of ye the Proceedings, in Kingsbury, ed. Records, II, 359.
137 Thomas Hobbes, On the Citizen, ed. Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 96–7.
138 A Relation of ye the Proceedings, in Kingsbury, ed. Records, II, 359.
139 Ibid., II, 359.
140 Ibid., II, 361.
141 Rabb, Jacobean Gentleman, 210–11; and 254–5.
142 On the continuity of the political thought of the company with the colony, see: Musselwhite, Urban Dreams, Rural Commonwealth.
143 Hoekstra, ‘A Lion in the House’, 210–11.
144 Hobbes, Leviathan, 230.
145 Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). For free speech in Jacobean England, see: David Colclough, Freedom of Speech in Early Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
146 See Malcolm, Reason, 77–88 on Hobbes’ shifting loyalties and intellectual development over this period.
147 Ibid., 87.
148 Hobbes, Leviathan, 230.
149 For the tobacco tax, see: Craven, Dissolution, 224–9.
150 See, for example: Mark Freeman, Robin Pearson and James Taylor, Shareholder Democracies: Corporate Governance in Britain and Ireland Before 1850 (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2011); Pierre Yves Gomez and Harry Korine, ‘Democracy and the Evolution of Corporate Governance’, Corporate Governance: An International Review 13, no. 6 (2005): 739–52.
151 This suggestion is also found in Phil Withington, ‘Public Discourse, Corporate Citizenship, and State Formation in Early Modern England’, American Historical Review 12, no. 4 (Oct 2007): 1037–8, with the caveat that the participatory nature of early modern civic culture contrasted with modern liberal democracies. In Britain, from the mid-nineteenth century, and in partial consequence of the Limited Liability Act of 1855 which distanced shareholders from company government, the democratic governance of companies was increasingly restricted. From this moment, therefore, companies (although not other corporations such as the church or cities) would have been diminished as a model for democratic political thought, albeit they could have provided inspiration for other political ideas.
152 David Ciepley has recently examined this question by showing that the constitution of the United States drew upon the example of Roman, medieval, and early modern corporations. In particular, Ciepley argues, the corporation provided a model of popular sovereignty. According to this Roman law tradition, a people conceiving of themselves as a body politic delegate their sovereign authority to a ruler, or government, but they do not alienate that sovereignty. Ciepley’s analysis can be further extended, beyond the constitution of corporations, if we appreciate that such corporate bodies were also forums within which popular sovereignty (and other political ideas) were relatively freely debated: David Ciepley, ‘Is the U.S. Government a Corporation? The Corporate Origins of Modern Constitutionalism’, American Political Science Review 111, no. 2 (2017): 418–35. Ciepley also argues that ‘The earliest American colonies, pioneers in the use of written constitutions, were pioneers because they were corporations – the Virginia Company and the Massachusetts Bay Company’. The government of the Massachusetts Bay Company and colony were certainly very closely tied, but the Virginia Company and colony were separate, although insofar as the Company created corporate ‘cities’ in the Chesapeake, Cieipley’s argument holds. For the civic culture of those cities, see: Musselwhite, Urban Dreams.
153 Hont, Jealousy of Trade, 23.