ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the central role company sovereigns–the most important practitioners of non-state violence during the colonial era– played in driving Western colonial expansion. It reviews that problematizes the dichotomy between public and private violence, introduces company sovereigns, and distinguishes them from other forms of state and non-state colonial violence. The chapter defines company sovereigns more comprehensively, and traces their evolution from seventeenth through the twentieth centuries. It argues that international relations scholars should acknowledge company sovereigns as much as sovereign states as the true vanguards of the spread of a European-dominated global colonial order. The chapter claims that company sovereigns from the 1600s to the 1900s served as one of the principal vanguards of European conquest in the Americas, Africa and Asia. It stresses how private force has tended to be ignored in accounts of the international system. The chapter suggests that private force, as a boundary-crossing or boundary-challenging phenomenon, must necessarily be studied in a systemic perspective.
