Trading colonialism for imperialism: How Hope & Co. shaped the advent of European imperial exploitation in Asia and the Atlantic, ca 1750-1830

The transition from "early modern" colonialism to "modern" imperialism remains poorly understood and understudied. Its timeline and causes have mostly been studied from the perspective of the state. This project will challenge this state-centric approach through the case of Hope & Co., a Scots-Dutch family firm that embodied the nineteenth-century archetypical imperial firm almost a century ahead of its time. Archival research on Hope & Co.’s exploitation of colonial resources between ca 1750 and 1830 will demonstrate that imperialism’s origins can be retraced to the eighteenth century, and that firms, not states, were the driving force in the emergence of new, more direct forms of colonial rule. Thereby this study can reassess the current understanding of the relationships between firms, states, empires, and colonial societies, and the significant role family firms played in reconfiguring this constellation of relationships to its advantage already in the eighteenth century.