Conclusion

Draw together the book’s key themes, the conclusion highlights how, by the end of the seventeenth century, England’s overseas companies had adapted various models of religious governance to stamp their authority over peoples and faiths across the globe, thereby securing their governmental autonomy. However, as a new century approached, domestic religious and political authorities in England took steps to centralise the role of religion, evangelism and the overseas governance. Consequently, this changed the character of English imperial expansion and the relationship between English corporate governance and religion forever.

The Massachusetts Bay Company and New England Company (1640–1684): Exportation, Revaluation and the Demise of Corporate Theocratic Governance

Returning to Massachusetts, this chapter focuses on communal responsibility and identity in decline of the MBC’s theocratic governance between 1640 and 1684. Firstly, this chapter investigates the transportation of political knowledge and ideas through corporate membership, assessing the role of individual MBC members such as Hugh Peters, Stephen Winthrop and Henry Vane Jr., in the formation of religious governance in England in the years surrounding the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. The chapter also assesses the evolution of corporate evangelism in England and America, with the formation of the New England Company (NEC). It analyses several evangelical works including Roger Williams’s A Yet More Bloody and John Cotton’s The Bloudy Tenent, in order to understand the conflicted development of evangelism within the company, and how it became used to justify territorial expansion and further encroach on English and Native American religious and governmental identity and rights. The chapter concludes by offering an analysis of the downfall of the MBC, emphasising how models of governance strengthened and established out of corporate flexibility could, at the same time, be made brittle and weakened.

The East India Company (1661–1698): Territorial Acquisition and the ‘Amsterdam of Liberty’

The final chapter highlights the differences in global corporate governance, providing a case study of how differing governing models could ensure corporate success rather than failure. It continues the story of the EIC’s evolving religious governance in the second half of the century. It investigates how, following the acquisition of Bombay in the 1660s, company leaders such as Strenysham Master, Gerald Aungier and Josiah Child, developed the company’s religious governance to deal with administrating over a variety of peoples and faiths. Following 1662, in the post-Braganza era of the EIC, the flexibility of the corporate form was accentuated because of its adoption of an ecumenically broad form of governance, which allowed it to establish government over not only English Protestants but also Catholics, Armenians, Hindus, Muslims and Jews. The chapter also investigates the role of passive evangelism in the EIC’s religious governance as a way to encourage conversion. In doing so, the company hoped to bring local Indians not only into the Protestant faith, but under the English government.

The Plymouth Company and Massachusetts Bay Company (1622–1639): Establishing Theocratic Corporate Governance

This chapter examines the development of a different form of corporate religious governance in the Atlantic in the years after the Jamestown massacre. It focuses on the denominational identity of its members and how this influenced the direction and formation of a theocratic model of governance that the company would adopt. This chapter illustrates how the leaders of the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay companies, such as William Bradford, John Endicott and John Winthrop, established authoritarian governments by manipulating charter privileges, forming a theocratic model of governance in New England. It examines how the leaders and members of the Plymouth Company and Massachusetts Bay Company, as corporate bodies, established and nurtured a distinct form of governmental identity. By tracing the development of the Massachusetts Bay Company’s congregational theocratic governance through works such as Bradford’s Of Plimoth Plantation, the Winthrop Papers, as well as the Records of the Town of Plymouth and the Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay New England, it shows how the joint stock corporation offered its members the legal and structural framework that would dogmatically police the religious behaviour of its members to secure and establish a godly republic.

The Virginia Company and the Foundations of Religious Governance in English Commercial Expansion

This chapter traces the use of religious governance in England’s early attempts to colonise Virginia between 1606 and 1624. It assesses how, in the initial steps to establish English authority abroad, religious governance was influenced by the political and governmental characters of successive company leaders such as Thomas Dale, Thomas Gates and John Smith. This explains why the Virginia Company embraced multiple forms of religious governance that would later be used as separate and distinct models of governance by successive companies. The Virginia Company experimented with religious governance to secure their control over English personnel abroad. Moreover, it became an instrumental tool in the companies’ attempts to expand their jurisdictional authority over Native American leaders, such as Powhatan, Pocahontas and her uncle Uttamatomakkin. By doing this company leaders hoped to establish governmental control over Native American peoples, and traditions, such as those Smith writes about in Generall Histoirie of Virginia, traditionally considered beyond the bounds of English governance. Finally, it examines how the experiences and memories of religious governance in the Virginia Company provided the groundwork for future forms of corporate religious governance to evolve.

Apostasy and Debauchery (1601–1660): Behaviour, Passive Evangelism and the East India and Levant Company Chaplains

This Chapter investigates an extraordinary group of company agents who have often been overlooked, but were ubiquitous in overseas corporate life; the chaplain. It provides a detailed assessment of the daily lives and responsibilities of chaplains. Moreover, it traces how they became important figures of control who policed over the spiritual and earthly lives of personnel in religiously and governmentally diverse environments of India, the Levant and Japan. This chapter examines how corporate chaplains, such as Edward Terry, Edward Pococke and Patrick Copeland, became instrumental figures in establishing corporate authority, and thereby commercial success, in this period. Furthermore, it reveals, through their published works, such as Terry’s, A Voyage to East-India, Lord’s, A display of two forraigne sects and the letters and works of Pococke, the essential role chaplains played in the corporate exchange of ideas and religious knowledge overseas. Finally, this chapter highlights how, throughout much of its existence, the LC and, for a small period, the EIC’s government, helped to inform the flexible process of how companies established corporate governance abroad and how they interacted with peoples, faiths and cultures.

‘A Just Government’—Empire, Religion, Chaplains and the Corporation

The introduction details how religion and religious life were interwoven with the development of ideas of civic, commercial and religious government. Moving beyond the traditional narrative that sees these texts as purely evangelical justifications, it introduces the reader to the key themes and arguments of the book; that religion framed the expansion, behaviour and interaction of government abroad, and that this is one of the primary reasons for the different forms of government adopted by English people across the globe. At the same time, it also provides a mechanism to connect these varying governments.