Brandon Taylor

This entry grows out of a longer essay I wrote for the JHI Blog, which traces how the East India Company’s early travel narratives began to see the world through what I call a “commercial gaze.” Those 1601–1611 accounts read like ledgers in motion: lists of goods, prices, and potential markets, punctuated by moments of shipwreck, sickness, or war. They reveal how quickly the English overseas project became a matter of inventory.

The JHI piece makes a historical argument. This post is something simpler: a note about why that history still matters when we read the language around us today.

When I spend weeks with seventeenth‑century charters, sermons, travel reports, and other errata, I’m struck by how their language frames the world. A charter grants “liberties” or “privileges,” but it also decides who counts as a “trader,” who counts as a “subject,” and who does not count at all. A sermon tells its listeners what to believe, but also how to think about profit and obligation. A travel narrative lists “brasen wares” in a bazaar, but the act of listing reduces the scene to inventory.

Once you notice that framing, you start to see it elsewhere. Corporate filings, mission statements, even certain forms of journalism still rely on language that translates places and people into categories of use. The vocabulary is cleaner now (“stakeholders,” “supply chains,” “assets”) though the effect can be the same: organizing what is seen by what can be sold.

This isn’t a call to treat every line of corporate or institutional writing as a blueprint for empire. It is, however, an argument for reading that type of writing with care. The charters and travel narratives I study remind me that language shapes more than style because it ultimately sets boundaries for our attention. It decides what is worth recording, what is left unsaid, and what becomes invisible to us.

That is, for me, the point of returning to these early texts. They help us see how the corporate gaze was built, sentence by sentence and clause by clause. They suggest that any language powerful enough to organize the world deserves close reading—especially the language that pretends that it’s only describing the world around us.