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In September 1708, England's two East India Companies united under the terms of an award made by the lord treasurer, Sidney Godolphin. Coming as it did after over a decade of concentrated political and commercial rivalry in London and in Asia between them, Godolphin's conspicuous part in the unification (as well as the company's loans to the government) confirmed the company's willing subordination to the interest of the British state. The state and Godolphin would show less interest in its other large-scale overseas trading corporation, the Royal African Company. Just a few weeks after Godolphin's award, he offered the following indictment: 'The African Company has been managed from a great many years by a pack of knaves ... who have cheated all their adventurers.' Godolphin objected to the company's 'present foundation which is in my opinion a very rotten one'.1Since the Glorious Revolution, the Royal African Company, like its East Indian counterpart, had been subject to prolonged legal, constitutional, and public-parliamentary assaults on its charter right to monopolize access to specific arenas of overseas trade. For the East India Company, the Godolphin award that brought this political interrogation to an end heralded a new period of stability and financial and commercial consolidation. For the Royal African Company, the interrogation led to financial collapse and commercial impotence, while the resulting greatly expanded transatlantic slave trade proceeded with little state oversight.
Why then did the Glorious Revolution deal such different outcomes to the two companies? To answer that question, this article offers the first comparison of their late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century legal and political histories. Both had enjoyed close relationships with Kings Charles II and James II as they energetically used their prerogative to help the companies enforce their monopolies. Neither company's enforcement powers proved entirely reliable during the second half of the seventeenth century, but both companies proved themselves largely able to satisfy the interests of their shareholders.2Both companies' monopolies proved controversial in similar ways: as inhibitors of economic opportunity, as price fixers, and as despotic intruders into politics. Contemporaries believed, correctly in our view, that their successes in the seventeenth century owed much to the shared legal and broader constitutional supports provided for...