Religious Governance in England's Overseas Companies c. 1601-1698

This dissertation explores how England's overseas companies between 1601 and 1698 through the use of religious governance regulated the behaviour of their personnel and peoples and developing three models to do so, pastoral, theocratic and ecumenical. It asks three central questions. First, how did corporate flexibility facilitate the establishment of overseas companies as distinguishable bodies that operated as extensions of English government abroad? Second, how did companies develop distinct ways of controlling the religious behaviour of the English settlers and the peoples who came under their jurisdiction, including Native Americans, Muslims, Hindus, Catholics, Armenians and Jews. Third, in what way did the models of governance interact, and how did they influence debate in England?

Chapter one examines the traces the foundational and influential use of religious

governance in England's early attempts to colonise Ireland and Virginia between 1606 and 1624.

Chapter two examines the development of corporate religious governance in the

Atlantic following the VC, focusing on the Massachusetts Bay Company's (MBC)

member's denominational allegiance in influencing the development of the theocratic model of governance that the company would adopt.

Chapter three moves away from an analysis of communities assessing the role of

individual agents, in particular chaplains in the East India Company (EIC) and Levant Company (LC) from 1601 to 1660, and how the two companies developed a form of pastoral governance to establish control of their corporate personnel in the religiously diverse environments.

Chapter four returns to the MBC focuses on the role of the individual in transporting

theocratic governance across the Atlantic alongside communal responsibility in decline of the MBC's theocratic governance between 1639 and 1684.

Chapter five continues to build upon the differences in global corporate governance

highlighting how the development of ecumenical governance in the EIC in the post-braganza era (1661-1698) and how through a policy of moderate religious inclusion can highlight how these models could ensure corporate success, rather than failure.

This dissertation provides a new way of understanding government formation and

corporate identity in the early modern era, and how religious governance shaped the behaviour of English expansion in the seventeenth century.