Research Interests for Philip J. Stern

My work focuses on the history of Britain and the British Empire, particularly in the early modern period (loosely defined). My first book, The Company-State, is a political and intellectual history of the English East India Company in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I am currently working on or planning projects related to the history of the corporation in the British Empire, eighteenth-century British overseas exploration and cartography, the historiography of British India, early modern economic thought, the history of companies and colonization, and digital and data visualization approaches to the problem of colonial sovereignty.

Representative Publications

1. P. Stern, The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and The Early Modern Origins of the British Empire in India (2011), Oxford University Press [available here]
2. Philip J Stern and Carl Wennerlind, eds., Mercantilism Reimagined: Political Economy in Early Modern Britain and Its Empire, edited by Stern, PJ; Wennerlind, C (2013), Oxford University Press, ISBN 9780199988532 [mercantilism-reimagined-9780199988532] [abs]
3. Stern, PJ, Corporate Virtue: The Languages of Empire in Early Modern British Asia, Renaissance Studies (August, 2012)
4. Stern, PJ, Soldier and Citizen in the Seventeenth-Century English East India Company, Journal of Early Modern History, vol. 15 no. 1-2 (2011), pp. 83-104, BRILL [doi] [abs]
5. Stern, PJ, The History and Historiography of the English East India Company: Past, Present...and Future!, History Compass, vol. 7 no. 4 (2009)
6. Stern, P, Introduction: Rethinking Institutional Transformations in the Making of Modern Empire in Company South India, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, vol. 9 no. 2 (Fall, 2008)
7. Stern, P, 'A Politie of Civill & Military Power’: Political Thought and the Late Seventeenth-Century Foundations of the East India Company-State, Journal of British Studies, vol. 47 no. 2 (April, 2008), pp. 253-283
8. Stern, P, Politics and Ideology in the Early East India Company-State: The Case of St. Helena, 1673-1696, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. 35 no. 1 (March, 2007), pp. 1-23
9. Stern, P, British Asia and British Atlantic: Comparisons and Connections, William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 63 no. 4 (October, 2006), pp. 693-712
10. Philip J Stern and Carl Wennerlind, Introduction, in Mercantilism Reimagined: Political Economy in Early Modern Britain and Its Empire, edited by Philip J Stern and Carl Wennerlind (2014), Oxford University Press, ISBN 9780199988532
11. Stern, PJ, "Bundles of hyphens": Corporations as legal communities in the early modern British empire, in Legal Pluralism and Empires, 1500-1850, edited by L Benton and R Ross (December, 2013), pp. 21-47, NYU Press, ISBN 0814771165
12. Stern, PJ, From the Fringes of History: The Early East India Company and the Birth of the British Empire in India, in Fringes of Empire, edited by Kolsky, E; Agah, S (2009), Oxford University Press
13. Stern, P, Auspico Regis et Senatus Angliae: The Political Foundations of the East India Company’s Incorporation into the British Military-Fiscal State, in War, State and Development: Fiscal-Military States in the Eighteenth Century, edited by Sánchez, RT (2007), Eunsa, Pamplona
14. Stern, PJ, Governance and Regulatory Frameworks in Early Modern British Asia, in British Atlantic and British Asia: Two Worlds or One?, edited by Bowen, HV; Mancke, E; Reid, J (2012) [author's comments]
15. Stern, P, ’Rescuing the Age from a Charge of Ignorance’: Gentility, Knowledge, and the British Exploration of Africa in the Later Eighteenth Century, in A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660-1840, edited by Wilson, K (2004), Cambridge University Press