MDDM Ch. 25 "the Company Perimeter"

[jbor]

It's not only those territories controlled by Clive's East India Company,
but also the new American colonies themselves which Mason describes as
"Charter'd Companies". He notes that in all of these places "Control of the
Company Perimeter is ever implicit" (252.28), and seems to be of the opinion
that that's a good thing (though Dixon remains rather unimpressed).

It strikes me that the various European Trade Companies are here diagnosed
by Pynchon as the politico-economic precursors of "the cartel" - or "They" -
in _GR_, and that that theme of complicity, the recognition that "They" are
in fact *us*, is again foregrounded. Dixon and Mason are effectively (even
if unwittingly) Nabobs, or "Naboblets" or "Chicken Nabobs" at the very
least, as much as they keep trying to fool themselves that they are purely
men of science. Further, whatever security which "the Company Perimeter"
affords is a double-edged sword, for it is also a species of imprisonment.

Interestingly also, despite Pynchon's focus on coffee in _M&D_, in the last
instalment of the current run of his excellent doco 'A History of Britain'
Simon Schama noted that it was in fact sugar cane which was "the cash crop
of the Empire", and that the institution of slavery in the Caribbean, and
particularly Barbados, was very much an invention of *British* commerce and
enterprise. He described how the sugar industry in the West Indies, and the
West African slave trade which it inaugurated, provided the capital upon
which the British Empire was subsequently built.

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