GOVERNANCE FORMS

Charter

First royal charter (1606) created a public–private partnership governed by a royal council. A double charter with the Plymouth Company covering 34°–45°N latitude, or the Atlantic coast of America to the western sea, with Virginia south of 41°N at Chesapeake Bay and Plymouth north in New England.

Second royal charter (1609) reorganized, reconstituted as a joint-stock company. Granted the seacoast of America 200 miles north and 200 miles south of Point Comfort, and all the islands lying within 100 miles. Hundreds of investors listed as part of the company.

Third royal charter (1612) council made to be responsible to shareholders, conveying to the company all islands within 300 leagues of the coast between 30° and 41°N latitude (to include Bermuda). Granted the Company's governing council the right to keep court and assembly for the order and government of the plantation (10–18 councillors, served indefinitely: powerful men holding executive, legislative, judicial roles).

Great Charter (1618) replaced corporate landownership with the headright system.

The mission was simple. Get the cavalcade of limousines and the associated bus-loads of officials, diplomats and assistants up the road to the traditional pub and have a pint and some fish and chips. But things were never going to be that straightforward. The first problem was the road – a narrow country lane, which could barely accommodate a large car, let alone a fleet of buses. The second was the pub – a pretty but modest venue, which meant only a few people would actually get to go inside when the delegation finally arrived. The third was the demand that a few realistic-looking local punters be sprinkled around the place to make it appear vaguely natural for the photographers and journalists when they snapped their pictures.

The lead participants in this mini-drama were the then British Prime Minister David Cameron, and the visiting dignitary he was entertaining – supreme leader of China, Xi Jinping. It was September 2015, and the event was the first State Visit by a leader of the People's Republic to the UK for a decade. The specific location was Cameron's Oxfordshire constituency, at the Plough Inn at Cadsden, a pub he liked near one of his homes. There were other reasons to make a fuss about this event. From July 2012 to late 2013, relations between the two countries had hit a particularly rocky patch. In May 2012, Cameron had met with the exiled Tibetan religious leader, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, despite vehement protestations from Beijing. He had done so, on the pretext that the Dalai Lama was a spiritual personage, during a ceremony to confer a prize on the Tibetan at St Paul's Cathedral in London. He may also have calculated that as London would later that year host the Olympics, after the Beijing games in 2008, the Chinese would refrain from any major response.

In the atrium of Justinian's Hagia Sophia, there stood a lead-covered canopy over a great stone vessel. ‘Wash your sins, not just your face’, the inscription admonished. The message was straightforward. This study, however, dwells on another, more oblique architectural inscription: the Qasida al-Burda (‘Poem of the Mantle’), composed by the eminent Sufi poet and mystic Imam Sharafaddin al-Būṣīrī (d. 1294), whose verses adorn the ablution fountain added to the atrium of Hagia Sophia in 1740.

Just like Byzantine holy wells, ablution fountains (şadırvan) allow congregants to perform the cleansing rituals required in the practice of worship – both were monuments erected in honour of the sanctity of water. The decorative sensibilities of the fountains placed in the courtyards of Ottoman mosques underlined this theme, proclaiming the virtues attributed to water in Islamic mysticism. The qasida decorating the entablature of Hagia Sophia's ablution fountain is not about water per se, however, but rather love for the Prophet Muhammad (Figure 2.1).

Eighteenth-century Istanbul was a hub for diplomats, dervishes and dealers – all drawn to the cosmopolitan Ottoman capital from across the Empire and beyond: Cairo, Damascus, Tabriz, Isfahan, Bukhara, and even India. Some of those were pilgrims who, striving to fulfil one of the five pillars of Islam, chose to travel to the Ottoman capital with the intention of visiting the Tomb of al-Ayyub and Hagia Sophia before continuing to the Hijaz, visiting other ‘Second Meccas’ and ‘Sufi Ka‘bas’ along the way.4 For both Istanbullus and those Muslims visiting the Ottoman capital, the public display of the Qasida al-Burda must have been understood as a deliberate choice. The motivations and stimuli that lay behind the choice of al-Būṣīrī's qasida for this prominent location have, however, not yet been adequately explained.

In 1908, the French architect Marcel Le Tourneau gave a lecture at the Académie des Inscriptions on the Byzantine architecture present in Thessaloniki. By that point, Le Tourneau had visited the Ottoman port city twice, on stipends given to him by the French Ministry of Public Instruction and the Fine Arts. The purpose of his trips was to catalogue and sketch the city's monuments in the wake of destruction caused by the fire of 1890 and the earthquake of 1902. After his return from Thessaloniki, Le Tourneau described to a rapt audience how he had entered the deserted church of Hagia Sophia, or the mosque of Ayasofya to the Ottomans, and discovered its amazing mosaic decorations now revealed thanks to the fire, having been covered with plaster since the building's conversion to a mosque in the sixteenth century (Figure 5.1). In his account, Le Tourneau described how he approached the Ottoman authorities with these findings, impressing upon them the importance of his discovery and inspiring them to finally repair the damaged monument. His lecture was received warmly, and Le Tourneau published two articles on Thessaloniki's extant Byzantine monuments together with prominent Byzantinist Charles Diehl before his untimely death on the eve of the First World War.

Le Tourneau's foray into Thessaloniki's damaged mosque was but a single incident in the building's long history. In this chapter, I will trace Ayasofya's restoration by the Ottoman authorities at the turn of the twentieth century, a transitory period that covers the final years of Ottoman rule over the city and the wider region. Ayasofya is representative of the Ottomans’ engagement with the Byzantine past, in terms both of its historical symbolism and the monumental remnants of that history within the empire's cityscapes.

The opening years of the seventeenth century saw several companies awarded royal charters to found the first colonies of English North America: the Virginia Company in 1606, the Plymouth Company in 1606, the Newfoundland Company in 1610, the Somers Isles Company in 1615, the Council for New England in 1620, the Massachusetts Bay Company in 1629, and the Providence Island Company in 1630. Except for the latter two chartered under King Charles I, this flurry began with King James I. The towering significance of the Hudson's Bay Company in what became western Canada would begin some generations later, after the English Civil War (1642–51), with its 1670 royal charter issued by King Charles II. Charters were more extensive than patents in that they conveyed both rights over land and governance.

The early seventeenth century was largely associated with indenture and serfdom for skilled and agrarian work. The gentry was a formidable political class. The monarchy was forced to navigate uneasy relations with Parliament and suffered difficulties in raising revenue and maintaining allegiance. The merchant class was embryonic, mainly tied to guilds and regulated trade, cloth being England's central export. Overseas voyages were typically ones of “exploration” (privateering), with mercantilism dictating a pessimistic view of international exchange given the associated depletion of gold bullion from national reserves. By the middle of the seventeenth century, England was in civil war and Charles I had been executed. At the end of the century, the monarchy was restored, the Glorious Revolution united bourgeois interests and created a new foundation of state power epitomized by the creation of the Bank of England (1694) and the London Stock Exchange (1698).

From cathedral to mosque to museum – and recently to mosque again – Hagia Sophia is as famous for its conversions as it is for its extraordinary architecture. But one key stage in the monument's alteration history has tended to escape notice, overshadowed – understandably enough – by the more dramatic changes that preceded and followed it. Between 1739 and 1743, more than a hundred years before the Fossati brothers came along, Sultan Mahmud I (r. 1730–54) ordered a thoroughgoing renovation of Hagia Sophia that provided it with a library, primary school, ablution fountain and public soup kitchen. These additions turned what was already the Ottoman Empire's principal mosque into a true külliye, or religious complex, thereby bringing the monument more fully into the Ottoman fold. Besides their importance to Hagia Sophia itself, the buildings that Mahmud commissioned document a remarkable shift in Ottoman visual culture, capturing the very moment when a new architectural style – the Ottoman Baroque – came into being and forever changed the look of Istanbul. This chapter, which expands on my earlier work on the Ottoman Baroque, explores the political timing and purpose of Mahmud's Hagia Sophia campaign and its relationship to broader artistic developments of the eighteenth century. In particular, I shall discuss why the erstwhile church provided such a meaningful context for the new Baroque manner, whose locational and aesthetic association with the site gave it a crucial foothold during its emergence as a favoured state style.

It was one of those large public debating festivals held usually during the warm months in Britain. A packed schedule of events over two days, addressing issues from the US election to the impact of artificial intelligence – a smorgasbord of argumentation and intellectual manoeuvring by speakers and their audiences. Panels with invited experts on specific themes spoke for a few minutes each and then there were moderated question and answer sessions with the audience. I was glad to have been invited just as an academic attendee. Academics were at least spared the full onslaught of public indignation and rage because we were regarded as experts present to give balance. Polemicists, controversialists, politicians, and self-publicizers were not so lucky. But then, in an odd way, brutal treatment by their audiences seemed to be what they were there for. They had the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche's famous dictum engraved on their hearts: what didn't kill them was going to make them stronger; they seemed to be there to survive and then get more powerful.

Academics are supposedly custodians of neutrality. That is our claim about ourselves at least. And these days, the title “Professor” still (just about!) gives some pause for thought and restraint on whomever you are facing publicly and grants a little bit of mercy. My session was about the impact of the rise of China. The argument I used was one that I had deployed at similar events throughout Europe and the rest of the world over the previous months and years: like it or not, China was going to be part of our global economic future and probably our geopolitical and social one. Even if we were not going to it, it was coming to us – through investment, finance, students and tourists.

Once colonies were created to support exploration, trade, and settlement, history took a turn and the legacy of joint-stock royal charter companies in English North America began to extend far beyond commerce at the shore given their role in extended forms of settler colonial governance (Craven 1964). Extra-economic motivations expanded colony-making to meeting domestic interests like ridding England of its “offals” by exporting orphans, vagabonds, and other undesirables from the realm (Walsh 2010; Mancall 1995). Later in the seventeenth century, joint-stock royal charter companies were formed to monopolize the African slave trade (French 2021). Creators of states and markets, colonizing companies not only received land rights enabling the dispossession of Indigenous territory, within-colony the companies themselves created legal, governmental, and economic structures to dole out substantial acreages to investors and settler laborers through patents and subdivisions as unique forms of proprietary settler colonialism. Orchestrated by companies as law-makers and political units, their corporate activities laid the groundwork for the royal colonies and sovereign states that would follow. In short, colonizing companies had a very big impact on transatlantic political economy and settler colonialism far beyond the timeframe between being chartered and being dissolved.

The activities of joint-stock royal charter companies like the Hudson's Bay Company and Virginia Company were nothing short of foundational for North American political economy, implicated as they were in dynamics of land, labor, and capital. These companies formulated their own laws and governance structures, created a workforce, and organized relations of private property as risk-taking and market-monopolizing financiers, merchants, and export–import traders.

Evidenced through the company colony cases in this book, proprietary settler colonialism is expressed as political, economic, labor, and legal forms, with racialized aspects throughout. Manifest distinctions worthy of a modified moniker (“proprietary”) include: the simultaneously fractured (Crown-company) and fused (political-economic) nature of formal governance, the unfree condition of settler labor, the highly commercialized orientation of the colony, and the adaptation of feudal law to simplify economic development. John Locke's famous late-seventeenth-century theory of property and private land appropriation described the Christian God as “[giving] the World to Men in Common,” but surmised “it cannot be supposed he meant it should always remain common and uncultivated” (Locke 1690, Chapter V, Of Property, section 34). A justificatory logic common to proprietary settler colonialism, Locke's interpretation of divine will transcended the ages, influencing discourse across centuries and coercive treatment of an uncultivated “wild Indian, who knows no enclosure” (Locke 1690, Chapter V, Of Property, section 26) and a bonded English underclass composing the workforce of company colonies.

The activities and powers of company colonies offer another angle on the more typical focus in the critical literature on settler colonialism characterized by a militarized sovereign domestic or imperial state imposing western law, values, and forms of landownership and production on racialized populations through enslavement, extermination, and dispossession (Coulthard 2014; Englert 2020; Ford 2010; Hall 2014; Hixson 2013; King 2019; MacMillan 2012; Reid & Peace 2017; Tomiak 2017; Veracini 2010; Wolfe 2006).

It passed without mention, the cataclysm that was to forever transform life on the northern prairie and later coastal ways west of the Rockies. England's oldest newspaper, The London Gazette, was silent on the land grant of 2 May 1670 that made corporate monopoly investors “true and absolute lords and proprietors” of Rupert's Land in perpetuity; the journal of record opted instead to report on ships at Hull freighted with wine and prunes from Bordeaux, laden with thread and cloth for Amsterdam and Hamburg (London Gazette 1670a). Ricardian trade, ever newsworthy for its mutually advantages, illustrates perfectly, if not anachronistically, the narrow mercantile lens through which the Hudson's Bay Company has been often (mis)understood. As Fitzgerald (1849: 135–6) described some time ago, the Hudson's Bay Company was seen by many as “a despotism, whose severity no legislative control can mitigate, and no public opinion restrain. It knows but one limit, and obeys but one law – ‘Put money in thy purse’,” the latter in reference to a famous line from Shakespeare's tragedy Othello.

A royal charter empowering a joint-stock company to engage in overseas trade was nothing new, by the late seventeenth century England had seen dozens come and go – Virginia, Plymouth, Somers Isles, Massachusetts Bay, Newfoundland Companies and many more the same had all left their mark on the New World, although most were long since defunct (see Chapters 1 and 2; Whiteside 2022). A week after the Hudson's Bay charter was granted, The London Gazette reported on tobacco arriving from Virginia at Plymouth (London Gazette 1670b). The newspaper is mute here too on the corporate connection, although for our purposes it is noteworthy that tobacco was first planted by the Virginia Company at its privately-owned Jamestown colony, an English company colony directed by Plymouth's merchant investors.

This chapter distinguishes two images of Hagia Sophia as represented in folklore during the long nineteenth century. The first, by far the most familiar, renders Hagia Sophia into a symbol of Greek irredentism by means of a song. The second, far less familiar, appears in the works of Ottoman Greek scholars. These two folkloric Hagia Sophias form a natural pair. The first joins certainty regarding the building's meaning to a disregard for its matter. The second joins ideological ambiguity to a keen interest in the building's history, structure, décor and form.

The first printed anthology of Greek folk songs (‘chants populaires’) appeared in Paris in two volumes (1824–5) collected, translated and annotated by Claude Fauriel. A passionate republican and man of letters, Fauriel never went to Greece, but gathered songs from correspondents in Greece, Venice and Trieste. His second volume includes a song on the capture of Constantinople, at least according to the title that he furnished (‘La prise de Constantinople’). The Greek text is demotic and metrical, set in the fifteen-syllable politikós stíhos (‘political verse’ or ‘verse of the city’), the ‘predominant meter of Greek folk poetry’. It begins with a lament:

They’ve taken the city, they’ve taken it! They’ve taken Salonika! And they’ve taken Hagia Sophia, the great church, Where there are three hundred small bells and sixty-two large bells, For each bell a priest, for each priest a deacon.

The first line introduces the first of several ambiguities. It may describe the capture both of Constantinople, known in demotic Greek simply as ‘the city’, and of Salonika. Alternatively, ‘They’ve taken Salonika’ may specify the (single) city in question. The following lines do not clarify, since both Constantinople and Salonika boast a ‘great church’ of Hagia Sophia.