by Brandon Taylor
Not all empires began with conquest or Christian conversion. Before an empire can conquer, it has to count stock. As travel narratives from the early days of the English East India Company—1601 to 1611—show, the mature form of the British Empire took shape via a commercial gaze that increasingly rendered the world as inventory. By the end of this period, such narratives focused obsessively on the dry heights of markets, merchandise, and profit—even when the journeys themselves had been harrowing. This gaze interprets the world as a ledger of extractable resources, organizing foreign lands and peoples through the language of accounting and exchange. It renders foreign places and peoples in strictly material terms, translating cultural difference into terms legible to trade.
Some scholars, such as Margaret Hunt in “Racism, Imperialism, and the Traveler’s Gaze in Eighteenth‑Century England” and Natasha Glaisyer in The Culture of Commerce in England, 1660–1720, have used the term “commercial gaze” to describe later colonial and merchant narratives, but this essay traces its origins to descriptive habits embedded in early joint-stock narratives. This phenomenon therefore offers us an opportunity to consider not only how the English East India Company corporation was initially characterized, but also how it came to grow more sophisticated and mutate into a necessary appendage to the English, and later British, empire.
Trade Charters and the Corporate Imagination
The East India Company’s corporate charter, which was passed into law by Queen Elizabeth I on December 31st, 1600, set the terms for the Company’s operations. The earliest travel narratives, written during these initial years, offer a glimpse of how that corporate vision outlined in the charter began to materialize in practice.
The rupture set in motion by the founding of the East India Company comes into clear view by comparing its charter to that of one of its most significant English contemporaries, the Virginia Company. Though they shared a rudimentary legal structure proper to the dawning capitalist age, the latter invoked far more traditional justifications for imperialism. Chartered in 1606, the Virginia Company framed its mission in religious and moral terms. Its first charter emphasized the Christian character of the venture and declared the conversion of Indigenous peoples a high priority. The colony, it claimed, must “by the Providence of Almighty God, hereafter tend to the Glory of his Divine Majesty, in propagating of Christian Religion to such People, as yet live in Darkness and miserable Ignorance of the true Knowledge and Worship of God.” There is no such proviso in the East India Company’s charter, where the peoples of the East Indies are not seen as occupants of a terra nullius in need of refashioning; they are instead a population of traders and merchants to be engaged and exploited for profit.
The East India Company’s charter granted exclusive rights to license trade vessels to the East Indies and appointed a governor, Thomas Smith, to oversee operations. It gave members a fifteen-year monopoly, consolidating both the authority and privilege to operate across the entire region. Additionally, the Company was richly furnished with shipping, manpower, and military supplies: six ships, six pinnaces, ordnance, and 500 English mariners “to guide and sail . . . at all Times, during the said Term of Fifteen Years, shall quietly be permitted and suffered to depart, and go in the said Voyages, according to the purport of these presents, without any Stay or Contradiction, by us, our Heirs or Successors, or by the Lord High Admiral.” This suggests that the East India Company was entering a mature, competitive trade route, facing better-resourced rivals from the Dutch and Portuguese, who held a decisive lead in institutional knowledge and capability. Thus, from its inception, the corporate discourse of the English East India Company had a clearer sense of its global position than some of its contemporaries at the time, including the Virginia Company and the Muscovy Company. Their charter has no illusions about the corporation’s central purpose: profit.
Even so, the East India Company’s eventual, ruthless efficiency had to be developed in organizational practice. It began as a commercial body, but it could not see commercially in the absence of articulated organs for doing so and a means of making sense of that “visual” information. Joint-stock companies operated through overlapping commercial and political authority, embedding imperial control within trade networks and corporate infrastructure. The interdependence of governance and commerce is evident in company charters, policy documents, and the travel narratives that catalogued regions targeted for profit.
Early Narratives and the Commercial Gaze
The earliest East India Company travel narrative already began to frame the world in economic terms. The anonymously written A True and Large Discourse of the East India Voyage documents the Company’s first voyage, which set sail in February 1601 under the command of Sir James Lancaster. Published in 1603, this text accounts for many of the perils faced by the first journey, including repeated storms, fatal accidents, and illnesses that claimed several sailors. The text is organized chronologically and features extensive accounts of ship cargo alongside a persistent interest in the peoples and cultures encountered. Descriptions of the cultures and peoples the voyagers meet are inevitably shaped by a commercial gaze, which assesses interactions through material value.
In one section, the 1603 author describes the people of “Sombrai” in brief ethnographic terms before quickly turning to the island’s economic value, where they describe a source of timber fit “for a maine Maste.” When the voyagers meet the King of Sumatra, they record the feast’s lavish materials—gold vessels, bell metal more precious than gold, and porcelain from China. The publication continues to rigorously document the materials of the places they visit, to a point where even an extended meditation on cultural practices quickly returns to commercial valuation.
One sequence in the 1603 account begins with a detailed portrayal of the King of Pariaman’s wealth and governance. He is described admiringly as “very ritch in-treasure.” The narrative then expands to describe local laws, which punish offenders either by elephant attacks or by mutilation. It also sympathetically details elaborate burial practices that include carved stones and family plots. The narrative then quickly shifts to a transactional lens, portraying the people as “subtill and cunning in bargaining,” willing to sell the same item to multiple buyers and revoke a sale if someone offers more. Even the local coinage is inventoried: “gold called Masse and lead Cashe.”
While the 1603 text frames most encounters through the lens of utility and trade, its gaze is not yet consistent. One might read its recording of cultural details suspiciously or generously: as either a form of extraction beyond the manifestly economic or as a rupture in the rhetoric of the commercial gaze by way of genuine curiosity. Yet overall, that oscillation between commercial assessment and ethnographical satisfactions of curiosity suggests that early Company writers were still negotiating how to perceive the unfamiliar. By 1612, such uncertainties began to resolve themselves. Coverte’s narrative, published that year, reflects a more disciplined commercial logic, where material value governs what is seen, how it is recorded, and why it matters.
Commodification and Exchange in Coverte’s Report
Robert Coverte’s A True and Almost Incredible Report is the most significant early East India Company narrative, as it exposes the Company’s profound unfamiliarity with the peoples of the East Indies and the complexities of international trade, even as it offers detailed inventories of what he and his crew traded, bartered, or lost along the way. In one representative episode from his account, Coverte is visiting the “great City of the Bannians called Netherberry, where is a great Basar or Market, and all manner of brasen wares to be sold” and then lists the various items available there. Rather than postulate on the people who live in this city or their local customs, he merely adds that “surely cloth would be a very vendible commodity there . . . Also Gold and Siluer is there very plentifull, and these are very good people to deale withall.”
The commercial gaze classifies new environments and communities in terms recognizable to the logics of trade. It reorders perception according to value extraction, framing landscapes and cultural practices as potential inputs to commercial activity. This way of seeing does not necessarily take the time to linger on difference or context. It filters experience through a recordkeeping mindset, organizing detail by its utility to commerce and noting only what might be bought, sold, shipped, or exchanged. A verdant old-growth forest appears not as ecosystem or encounter, but as an undeveloped reserve of timber that could be transformed into ships.
These early travel narratives focus on material availability, trade stocks, and commercial opportunities. Rather than questioning whether profit is moral, as the Virginia Company struggled with in its early years, the accounts show how extensively these regions could be exploited through trade. This is not merely a description of the commercial gaze but an example of how it functioned on the ground: organizing attention around extraction and presenting trade as the primary mode of relation.
Even as the East India Company aimed to establish and formalize trading relationships, these early tracts evidence an attentiveness and acuity. The narrowing effect of the commercial gaze is that these become instrumental observations meant to expedite cultural interactions and benefit commodity exchange. This shift offers an early glimpse of the logics that would later characterize the Company’s explicitly imperial operations, suggesting how commercial perception could be adapted to broader projects of control. By the end of the period, the commercial gaze was already structuring how imperial agents perceived and recorded the world, laying the groundwork for the Company’s later expansion.
Conclusion: Profit, Perception, and the Structure of Empire
These early writings show how the rhetoric of trade shaped the foundations of English overseas enterprise. The commercial gaze, first captured in joint-stock narratives and later formalized in policy, organized perception and justified colonial expansion. It offered a framework in which foreign lands and peoples were made legible through commercial categories.
By tracing how corporate forms structured early encounters, we see imperial ambition emerging through the logic of profit-oriented governance. The travel narratives traced here reflect an emerging worldview in which value organizes perception, and trade becomes the framework through which difference is rendered intelligible. Philip Stern has shown that the Company developed into a “Company-State,” exercising delegated sovereignty and shaping the infrastructure of British imperial governance in South and Southeast Asia. The early travel narratives traced here mark the conceptual groundwork for that transformation.
Brandon Taylor is an Assistant Professor of English at Mount Marty University, where he specializes in early modern literature and political theology. His research examines how literary and rhetorical forms intersect with the development of institutional and economic structures in the seventeenth century. This essay draws from the second chapter of his first book project, Empire of the Unincorporated, which traces how corporate discourse organized political authority and colonial ambition in early English ventures. He is also developing a TEI-based digital edition of The Letters of John Chamberlain, building an open-access archive of early modern political correspondence at earlymodernletters.org. His work contributes to ongoing scholarly conversations in early modern studies, political theory, and the history of capitalism.
Edited by Zac Endter.
Featured image: The Castle of Batavia, Andries Beeckman, 1661. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
