South Asia Studies Council is pleased to Welcome Professor Emily Erikson as a Council Member

Emily Erikson is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Assistant Professor of School of Management (by courtesy). Her book Between Monopoly and Free Trade: The English East India Company is forthcoming with Princeton University Press in 2014.

Emily Erikson conducts research in the fields of social networks, comparative historical sociology, organizations, theory, and economic sociology. Her focus is on the role of social networks in historical and cultural change. Her forthcoming book, Between Monopoly and Free Trade: The English East India Company, (Princeton University Press, 2014) examines the impact of social networks on the fortunes of the English East India Company and by extension the relationship between Britain and Asia. Current research includes both extending existing work on the English East India Company by examining the role of the chartered companies as a site for the negotiation and coordination of the interests of capitalists and imperialists as well as new work on the difference between routine and ritual, agency and choice as expressed within social networks, and citation patterns in academic research. She is a consulting editor for the American Journal of Sociology and serves on the editorial board of Sociology Theory.

Between Monopoly and Free Trade argues that the English East India Company was one of the most powerful and enduring companies in history. This book locates the source of that success in the innovation and internal cohesion generated through what was initially a cost-saving measure, in which the court of directors granted employees the right to pursue their own commercial interests while in the employ of the firm.  Though the Company held a monopoly on English overseas trade to Asia, the Court of Directors extended the right to trade within Asia to their employees, creating an unusual situation in which employees both worked for themselves and for the Company as overseas merchants. Building on the organizational infrastructure of the English Company and the institutional base of the rich and sophisticated market of the East, the employees built a cohesive internal network of peer communications, i.e. a social network, that was used to direct English trading ships during their voyages. This network integrated Company operations, encouraged innovation, and increased the Company’s flexibility, adaptability, and responsiveness to local circumstance.  The argument is built upon an analysis of trade network dynamics, a statistical investigation of decision-making processes, and institutional analysis of ports and organizational context. This multi-method approach is designed to link macro and micro levels of analysis by offering an explanation of large-scale historical change in the world economy rooted in mechanisms operating at the level of the individuals that participated in that change.

Professor Erikson is also editing a special issue “Chartered Companies” for the journal Political Power and Social Theory. This issue will gather together an interdisciplinary group of sociologists, historians, and economists using the chartered companies as a platform to consider the interrelationship between the emergence of capitalism, economic development, and the trajectory of European imperialism. Although not limited to South Asia, several of the contributions focus on the relationship between England and South Asia as this is, according to Professor Erikson, “a particularly important site through which to understand the process whereby commercial and imperial projects were intertwined”. In the future, and with respect to teaching, Professor Erikson plans on focusing on economic and institutional development in South Asia in the early modern period and the effect of these institutions on the developing trajectory of global trade.