Corporations as against governments

In many of these histories, Brown describes the tension many colonies felt, between the rights of the citizens to their liberties and the power of the corporation to enforce its monopolistic practices and profit-seeking policies. Many of the men Brown describes were confronted with this tension in the form of another person who would agitate for the rights of the people in the colony. Most notably, Petrus Stuyvesant was opposed by Adriaen van der Donck, who wrote the Remonstrance against Stuyvesant's policies, and practically had the Dutch West India Company's charter revoked, except that the Netherlands and England went to war, and the order never arrived revoking it.

In the case of Cecil Rhodes, the policies he instituted - particularly through compromises with the Boers - kept the native population of blacks subordinate and oppressed, and it was not until the twentieth that they would...