Practicing Exclusion and Managing Diversity in England’s Trade and Empire, 1550-1700

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, England’s trade and empire took place in global spaces that were home to a plethora of distinct cultures, peoples, and ways of doing business. To overcome this challenge, English merchants developed a range of institutional innovations designed to manage diversity and facilitate their participation in these complex international environments. Central to these practices were corporate forms of organisation that institutionalised exclusion as means of managing diversity, at home and abroad. This article examines how these exclusive practices developed and how they contributed to the emergence of systemic inequalities within the emerging British empire.