Tag: Adam Nadeau

Private Interest and Civil Governance in Colonial and Revolutionary Era America

Published on by CIGH Exeter
The Destruction of Tea at Boston Harbor (1773) by Nathaniel Currier, 1846. Hand-coloured lithograph, 19.5 cm x 31.75 cm, Springfield, Massachusetts, D’Armour Museum of Fine Arts. Wikimedia Commons.

Adam Nadeau

Among the more poignant observations made during the early days of overhaul of the United States federal government by President Donald Trump, his former senior advisor Elon Musk, and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) were a series of essays from Mike Brock’s Substack, Notes from the Circus. A former executive at Block Inc. who was involved in, among other things, building Cash App, Brock combines his insight into the world of big tech with his longstanding interest in philosophy to provide commentary on the current state of American democracy.[1] In one particularly illuminating post, Brock traces DOGE’s intellectual origins in part to a school of thought in Silicon Valley which holds that recent innovations in technology have rendered liberal democracy obsolete and that it is inevitable that Western democratic systems of government are to be superseded by digitally mediated, algorithmically optimized, corporatist technocratic autocracies.[2]

One might certainly agree with Brock that the pairing of corporate-technocratic power with the emergence of more advanced artificial intelligence threatens qualitatively unprecedented levels of social control and the attendant erasure of deliberative democratic processes.[3] However, it’s important to note that the blending of corporate entities and American political institutions is hardly a novelty of the twenty-first century. The fusion of private interest and civil governmental structures, particularly executive office, has been an integral part of the American political experiment dating back to the colonial and revolutionary periods, when private ventures backed by civil officeholders were the primary mechanisms for expanding colonial settlement, often with devastating effects on North American Indigenous populations.

Brock is correct to identify colonial opposition to the concentration of corporate power and state authority in the British East India Company (EIC) as one of the causal factors in the American Revolution.[4] However, his analysis misses the critical element that American revolutionary leaders were so strongly opposed to EIC activities in the thirteen colonies specifically because the Company represented a concentration of corporate power and state authority that was external to the colonies: the Tea Act of 1773 enforced a Company monopoly on tea in America that was meant to undersell tea on the colonial black market.[5]

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Selling Empire: India in the Making of Britain and America

Published on by CIGH Exeter1 Comment

 

Adam Nadeau
University of New Brunswick

Review of Jonathan Eacott, Selling Empire: India in the Making of Britain and America, 1600–1830. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. $45.00 (Cloth).

JacketJonathan Eacott’s Selling Empire: India in the Making of Britain and America, 1600– 1830 (2016) reinforces two important historiographical points. One is that, contrary to David Armitage’s insistence that ‘the emergence of the concept of the “British Empire” . . . was long drawn out, and only achieved by the late seventeenth century at the earliest’,[1] the English polity that later incorporated the kingdoms of Scotland and Ireland was consciously imperial as early as the late sixteenth century. The second is that Britain’s imperial efforts were, from the start, transoceanic in nature. On the latter point, Selling Empire breaks with the older historiographical trend of distinguishing between a ‘first’ and ‘second’ British Empire delineated by a late eighteenth-century ‘swing to the east’.[2] Instead, Eacott asks readers to consider ‘America the India’ as well as ‘India the place’, for it was the idea of India that ‘fostered, propelled, and supported English and British imperial expansion and power in America’ (1–3). Rather than ‘separate “worlds” of empire’, Eacott sees ‘the British empire in the world’ (7), an important shift in perspective that, along with other recent studies of the peripheries of Britain’s American empire,[3] will continue to push scholars of early modern British imperialism nearer towards contemporary interdisciplinary debates surrounding notions of indigeneity and the legacies of settler colonialism.[4] Continue reading “Selling Empire: India in the Making of Britain and America” →