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Interview with Edward Cavanagh
Edward W. Cavanagh came from the University of Ottawa and as a Visiting Fellow to the Institute for European Global Studies. In this interview, he introduces his research project on Empire’s Companies: Settler Colonialism and Property Law in World History.
Welcome to the Institute for European Global Studies, Edward Cavanagh.
Thank you, I look forward to participating in the program with enthusiasm.
What kind of research project will you pursue during your stay in Basel?
I am currently preparing a large-scale comparative history of settler colonialism, focusing upon corporations. Identifying over a dozen companies, and analysing within a legal-historical framework their different roles in the dispossession of pre-existing populations in northern Ireland, north America, southern Africa and Australasia across a period of about 400 years, I prepare to present a radical and unconventional history of imperialism. A series of powerful companies, I argue – joint-stock, ad hoc, and everything in-between, primarily from England but also from the Netherlands, France, Scotland, Sweden and Russia – did the ‘dirty work’ which allowed new societies to emerge across the globe, societies wherein settlers eventually enjoyed dominance over indigenous people. Far from playing an active role in this four-century process – for the process did last that long, irrespective of the absence of monographs on the topic prepared to extend beyond concise windows of imperialism under analysis – European monarchs were happy, wherever possible, to sit back on their thrones as the companies they sanctioned (and some they didn’t) sailed out into the distant reaches of the globe to lay the foundations of empire on their behalf.
During my tenure as visiting fellow in Basel, I will focus primarily upon the Dutch Geoctroyeerde Westindische Compagnie and the Swedish Nova Svecia or Nya Sverige Compagniet, contemplating both their operations in Atlantic North America and the politics of their formation and operation in Europe. Published primary material will be accessible online and at the University’s library; documents in archives at The Hague will be consulted on top of this.
Why did you choose this specific topic?
I quibble with a number of historiographical assumptions in this project. Historians too often assume that the settlement of ‘new worlds’ was a Crown-instigated process, whose momentum came from the ambitions of colonising monarchs (and, depending on the time and place, the royal parliaments attached to them). Setting out to explain processes of ‘state formation’, other historians appear to miss out on the crucial function of non-state entities. When it comes to law and imperialism, outstanding appraisals too often prioritise metropolitan contexts over colonial settings. My project intends to challenge these, and other assumptions, found in the literature. In doing so, I will provide the first complete, comparative history of European corporations in settler colonial locales, which is a book I think that needs to be written.
But the objectives of this dissertation are more than historiographical. The regions in question still face pressure from indigenous groups over land, in the face of which national sovereign entities have struggled, and continue struggling to devise coherent policy approaches. In law, with the exception of the aboriginal title doctrine (which developed in the 1970s and retracted in the 2000s), inconsistency can also be detected in prevailing jurisprudences of indigenous land rights in the common law world. By narrating the process of dispossession, offering an alternative genealogy of property law that is meaningful to non-European societies, and proposing a new historical argument for corporate social responsibility, this thesis will sketch the outline of a transnational constitutional argument: since each of the settler nations under analysis inherited corporate practices and policies, they share similarities with respect to their obligations to indigenous people after incorporating these people into their polities as subjects, once the companies were replaced by settler states.
How does the topic relate to European Global Studies?
The companies under analysis were all incorporated in Europe, according to legal procedures that differed from place to place but essentially stemmed back to ancient practice. In fact, the corporation itself (as one body made up of several bodies, still how we recognise it today) was a distinctly European invention and its origins may properly be detected in Roman and Greek antiquity. Certainly, though, the corporation’s more confident emergence occurs in the middle ages, when we see the rise of bodies politic – boroughs, towns, and such like – in communities whose social complexity confounded traditional ruling authorities and were more efficiently delegated, by crowns, to local governments. In this fashion, many communities across western Europe transformed progressively after the eleventh century, marking a widespread royal outsourcing of political authority, which at first supported but ultimately undermined feudal social relations and transformed the state as we understand it today. Across the same period, craftsmen formed into guilds, benevolists formed into charities and hospitals, teachers formed into colleges, and religious groups, albeit careful in their refrain from dissent, formed into clerical associations, congregations, convents, and chapters. Most crucial of all, merchants created trading companies.
The global consequences of this trend cannot be overstated. By fluke or design, but certainly in relation to each other, the emergence of the modern trading company coincided with a newly confident oceanic mobility, which before long led to the movement of western Europe’s Atlantic frontier west to the Americas and south to the gateway onto Indian and Pacific oceanic domains. Doubly erroneous talk of ‘New Worlds’ aside, the really new things offered by their so-called ‘discovery’ were plainly economic: new markets and industries, untapped pools of labour and commodities, and the untold riches derivative therefrom. Naturally, Europe’s trading nations with the easiest access to ports on Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts were best poised to capitalise. And this they did, as is well known: first Spain and Portugal, then France, England, the Netherlands, and others here and there between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. About the history of trade and exploitation across the early modern world, and the bidirectional economic relationship between these European states and their markets across the seas, much has been written and argued already; what I prepare to do at the Institute for European Global Studies is explore both the metropolitan and peripheral contexts separate from each other, while honing in on one industry: that generated by transplanting people into the temperate regions earmarked as sites for European reproduction, in which access to one resource was fundamentally necessary to all settlers, and became, unsurprisingly, the one most quarrelled over between natives and newcomers. That resource is land, and it existed in greater abundance in the extra-European world than it did in the European world, and lay ready for the taking, provided indigenous owners could be dispossessed quickly and cheaply.
What are you most excited about regarding your stay in Basel?
The Institute for European Global Studies is the ideal place to air many of the academic questions to which I seek more confident answers. The expertises of permanent and visiting scholars at the Institute are diverse, and I look forward to a dynamic exchange of ideas during my fellowship. What’s more, Universitat Basel is commonly regarded as one of Europe’s finest universities, and its reputation across many disciplines is roundly revered. I am incredibly excited to be attached to this university.
I have also never before visited Switzerland, and I look forward to taking everything in, while striving, at the same time, to be prolific and as efficient in my work as possible.
Thank you for the interview, Mr. Cavanagh.
I look forward to visiting at the end of August.