1600 to 1780 · Pre-Revolutionaryspan
Parliament argues whether a company may own a conquest
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The English East India Company was chartered in 1600 and consolidated into a single body under Queen Anne. By 1767 it governed provinces in India, collected their revenues and kept an army, and Parliament was arguing about what that meant. The question put in London was whether the company's rights of conquest belonged to it in the way its rights of trade plainly did, or whether territory taken by British arms belonged to the crown. The company's privileges had been extended in 1730 and were extended again in 1767, carrying its monopoly through to 25 March 1780. All of this was printed in a newspaper at Cap Francais and read by planters in Saint-Domingue, which tells you what those planters considered their own business. A chartered monopoly holding land, revenue and soldiers was the arrangement they lived inside as well, and London had begun asking out loud who such a thing actually belonged to.
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