The Expedient and the Emergent

This essay examines modes of English governance in the trading outposts of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century mercantile capitalism in order to argue for the constitutive role of commercial practices in the shift to the modern forms of governmentality associated with the political liberal state. Reading the different kinds of writing that debated the transformative power of global trade during this time, including fictional travel narratives, economic pamphlets and East India Company factory records, it is possible to discern how values like religious tolerance, cultural relativism and contractual equality were crucial not only for the peaceful carrying out of European trade before colonialism but that such ‘European’ values were first implemented as principles of governance in some of the trading outposts outside Europe. We can see these practices manifest in the vast theatre of trade involving the Indian subcontinent before the East India Company was in a position to colonise trade routes, resources, land and people through military might

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