Albert Schrauwers - Merchant Kings: Corporate Governmentality in the Dutch Colonial Empire, 1815-1870

MERCHANT KINGS

MERCHANT KINGS

CORPORATE GOVERNMENTALITY IN THE DUTCH COLONIAL EMPIRE, 18151870

ALBERT SCHRAUWERS

First published in 2021 by

Berghahn Books

www.berghahnbooks.com

2021 Albert Schrauwers

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A C.I.P. cataloging record is available from the Library of Congress

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Control Number: 2021930025

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-80073-050-2 hardback

ISBN 978-1-80073-051-9 ebook

Maps

Tables

Figures

This book is the product of some twenty years of research, and the list of debts I have acquired in the process are countless; some of them have been acknowledged in those articles produced piecemeal over the first decade, parts of which have been incorporated into this text: The Benevolent Colonies of Johannes van den Bosch: Continuities in the Administration of Poverty in the Netherlands and Indonesia (2001); Regenten (Gentlemanly) Capitalism: Saint-Simonian Technocracy and the emergence of the Industrial Great Club in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century Netherlands (2010); and Policing Production: Corporate Governmentality and the Cultivation System (2011). These articles coalesced into this project via a key article: A Genealogy of Corporate Governmentality in the Realm of the Merchant-King: The Netherlands Trading Company and the Management of Dutch Paupers (2011). The book in its current incarnation emerged from this article: from its major thesis about corporate governmentality, I then added the secondary theme (the sociology of rule) and the development of gentlemanly capitalism from the earlier articles.

One personal debt must be explicitly acknowledged: Tania Li has served as a generous and inspirational sounding board over this entire period, shaping my understanding of both Indonesia and governmentality. I give my thanks to her, and to those others without whom this book would not have come to completion.

CORPORATE GOVERNMENTALITY

In July 2018, the British government leveled its largest fine ever on social media giant Facebook for breaches of the Data Privacy Act; the 500,000 fine (equal to approximately five and a half minutes of the companys revenue), resulted from its role in selling the personal profile data of 50 million of its users to Cambridge Analytica, whereupon it was used to influence the Brexit referendum vote and the 2016 U.S. presidential election. A year later, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission applied a $5 billion fine for the same offense. Singling out Facebook, however, obfuscates the larger issue. Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft are the five largest corporations in the world by market capitalization, and all operate on a similar model: that of the surveillance of their active users, the silent shadowing of their activity as they traverse the wider web, and the use of this data in behavioral targeting to subtly influence their market choices andas the Facebook fine underscorestheir political views. It is this combination of individual surveillance with the subtle behavioral swaying of populations, of managing the conduct of conduct that French philosopher Michel Foucault argued was the core principle of governmentality, a Western form of instrumental rationality that buttresses modern forms of power. This strategy is not restricted to technology corporations, I will argue, but is inherent in the very genealogy of the corporate form itself in the nineteenth century.

One of the most transgressive aspects of the concept of governmentality, or governmental rationality, is the underlying assertion that the Western state is not the origin of government but that at a specific moment in time the state was governmentalized. The focus on governmentality was Foucaults way of drawing our attention away from the state and its structure to the plethora of independent agencies that shared its strategies of social control in order to regulate the health and prosperity of a population; agencies that I argue should include corporations. At a critical juncture in the early nineteenth century, the state began to connect itself to a series of groups that in different ways had long tried to shape and administer the lives of individuals rather than simply extend the absolutist states repressive machinery of social control (Rose, OMalley, and Valverde 2006: 87). Foucault focused attention on the manner in which both the state and these civil organizations came to share a set of programs that were applied to a population as a whole in order to secure the improvement of its condition, the increase of its wealth, longevity, health. Governmentality educates desires and instills habits by artificially arranging the disposition of things so people do as they ought (Foucault 1991: 100). As the Facebook example underscores, since people remain unaware of how their conduct is being shaped, or why, the question of consent never arises.

By focusing on a new area of concern, corporate governmentality, I shift attention from the state to the corporation, one such social technology for implementing these governmental programs of improvement; the practice of chartering corporations can be thought of historically as state-building at one removethe building of a franchise state (Ciepley 2013: 151). As delegations of state sovereignty, early corporations were frequently indistinguishable from states themselves; trading companies like the East Indies Company, for example, acted like a company-state or a state in the disguise of a merchant (Stern 2011). These companies exercised territorial rule and were able to wage war and sue for peace, raise taxes, and administer justice. As they developed in the early nineteenth century, corporations continued to serve as delegations of state sovereignty to favored subjects for public purposes, usually municipal, educational, or religious. They were, in other words, quasi-state enterprises accountable to all in the public sphere rather than private businesses as conceived today. Even Adam Smith concluded that corporations were incapable of efficient management and should only be created to handle highly capitalized, low-profit projects (Smith 1999: 700; Pearson 2002). In all cases, while private profit was served, what justified the delegation of state powers were the public benefits resulting from incorporation (Taylor 2006: 4).

Following Foucaults lead, the focus of this book shifts attention from the formal apparatus of the state to those corporations that contributed to the governmentalization of society. Despite a clear tie between capitalism and the development of liberal governmentality, little attention has been focused on the role of the corporate form in that development (Nadeson 2008: 55ff.). The co-emergence and codependence of the modern nation-state and the corporation needs to be underscored, especially at the moment of their ideological differentiation in the mid-nineteenth century. It was only later that corporations shifted from a quasi-public agencyin principle accountable to all, embedded within an institutional structure that served the public sectorinto a private agency, protected from government accountability by individual rights and legally accountable to no one but its owners (Roy 1997: 41). In that shift, corporations did not lose their governmental functions; they continued to manage the early nineteenth-century market transition by means of a concomitant corporate revolution. Corporations were a political strategy that delegated state (not specifically economic) tasks to ancillary jurisdictions.