Company colonies and historical layering: understanding the Virginia, Somers Isles, and Hudson’s Bay Companies

Abstract This paper develops comparative case studies of the Virginia, Somers Isles, and Hudson’s Bay Companies’ colonies. The analysis uncovers significant historical layering through multifaceted and dynamic modes of production, class relations, corporate governance forms, land ownership schemes, and legal arrangements. Company colonies emerged as hybrid combinations of partially feudal company-owned plantations using white indentured servitude together with proto-capitalist stockholding and freehold land, nascent Black slavery, Indigenous dispossession, and illiberal legislative assemblies oriented to company prerogatives in a largely pre-Westphalian international order. Complex historical layering indicates that no single theoretical approach can fully capture all nuance; thus, the paper mobilizes its case studies to explore critical understandings of these companies through a company-state sovereignty focus, a Marxian view of privatized land and labour, and a Weberian perspective on early capitalist public-private institutional alliances. The paper concludes with connections to contemporary anti-colonial political struggles.