请将“Until well into the second half of the eighteenth century, the institutional history of the East India Company was marked by conflicts within the Com-pany being waged as struggles between factions in Parliament, whilst con-versely the renewal of Company privileges was hostage to the political battles of the day at Westminster. It is readily explicable, therefore, that in a period when, under Walpole's premiership, the Whigs and the 'management' of Par-liament remained largely unchallenged, the East India Company could also practise an unchallenged political influence. This was naturally facilitated by the immense profits that were made in this time from the Indian trade. Against this economic and political background, it was possible for the Company's directors to have their almost sovereign rule, over both the conquered parts of India and those still to be conquered, confirmed in 1757. It was established that all regions and other booty that the East India Company acquired with its own military forces should fall to it entirely and in case of need be supported against division by His Majesty's army and navy. What is particularly significant here is that in this political phase, the East India Company essentially determined its own policy and could call on the armed force of the British government in prosecuting it, without the government reserving any decision-making power of its own.
At this time, the political connections between government and Company still ran via personal and factional channels. Even the violent conflicts that broke out in the Company in 1757 over the election of its governing board did not abolish this structure. In the mid-eighteenth century, the East India Company was thus an organisation that could resort to public means of force in order to secure immense private profits. Both the shareholders and the employees of the Company benefited from this. Employees could make up for their low salaries by the permission they had to undertake trade on their own account. The directors, above all Robert Clive, extracted immense 'presents' from the Indian princes.
In the 1760s - simultaneously with the end of government stability in Britain - both official and private enrichment practices of the directors and employees of the East India Company became the object of political debate. It was finally laid down in 1759 that all the conquered territories lay under the crown. No change however followed from this. For the government let the Company purchase administrative authority over India on an annual basis. Even the participation of the government in the election of directors that was introduced in 1773 did not bring about a fundamental structural change. The Company continued to levy taxes and tributes, and its employees to extract 'presents'. In addition to the profits of trade, this private organisation held on to a large part of the money it extracted from the Indian population by its political and military rule.
In the context of the political crises of the turn of the century, political con-tention between rival factions grew sharper, and demands were increasingly raised to let in the 'new interests', so that the rich pickings of the East India trade and the internal structure of the East India Company became once again issues in a political struggle. But abolition of the private administration of India was now blocked not only by influential representatives of the 'vested interests', but also by the limited resources of the English state apparatus. The attempt was indeed made to lay down a basic division of competences, and achieve this by expanding the institutionalised powers of the governor-general. But, because the government of India was pursued for the direct profit of private parties, this did not change anything substantial.
The East India Company gradually ceased to be a trading organisation. It now drew its profits from the share of tax and tribute payments that was offi-cially permitted it, as well as an additional share that it retained. In 1823 it lost the monopoly of the East India trade, and in 1833 it was formally banned from trading activity. But only after the great Indian uprising of 1857-8 did a broad criticism of this practice of private government develop in England. In 1858 the East India Company was abolished. The administration of the gigantic colony, as well as the policy towards those areas that were not formally under the government of Great Britain but indirectly so by way of so-called supporting alliances, was nationalised. This did not reduce the exploitation of India, but it did abolish private profiting from taxes and tributes. The intended objective was to establish an administrative practice that would not provoke renewed uprising and massacre.
The end of the East India Company was not yet the end of the political priv-ileging of private trading companies. The British South Africa Company still obtained a charter at the end of the nineteenth century, like many other such companies before it. But the extent of private appropriation of the proceeds of state policy, and the entanglement of the interests of a company with factions in the home country that had made the East India Company such a bulwark of the ancien régime in the eighteenth century, were now reduced to a system of lobbying for opportunities of private profit in a context of party politics.
The abolition of the ancien régime of appropriation was demanded by man-ufacturers and industrialists, by non-privileged merchants, by organised workers and by many members of those strata that hoped for opportunities of advance in the state service for themselves or their sons. It was politically effected by Parliaments in which the landowning nobility and their relations still dominated numerically. Even if many critics were ready to lump the entire nobility together in the enemy camp, the political dividing line ultimately ran right through the gentry and the higher nobility.
In English historiography, the abolition of appropriation through power and privilege under the continuing domination of the nobility in government and Parliament is studied in terms of a self-reform of the English nobility. This may well be correct, as long as the material preconditions for this insight into political necessity are taken into account. The first of these preconditions was that aristocratic politicians succeeded in maintaining their political leadership of the so-called ‘landed interests', by way of their traditional influence in the counties, their successful political management and their financial resources.65
On occasion, this was significant for a representation of material interests that transcended estate limitations, but the material interests of farmers, small landowners, gentry and peerage were all too frequently overlaid by differences of interest for the representation of the landed interest in the nineteenth century to be reducible to a common opposition to the ‘moneyed and manufacturing interests'. Even the resistance to the repeal of the Corn Laws was fuelled by a variety of ‘interests'. Whilst it was especially small landowners and farmers who feared for a reduction in their income (the opposite of what the Anti-Corn Law League argued), what members of the aristocracy often combated first and foremost was the formal abolition of a special valuation of the landed interest, and hence of a normative basis for their estate supremacy. Finally, however, a Parliament dominated by landowners gave way on this point as on so many other traditional privileges.
In a different fashion to the lower gentry who tended politically to be oppo-nents of reform, members of the aristocracy, from their position of material security and scarcely threatened social respect, could afford the luxury of insight into political requirements. Not all peers and MPs made use of this opportunity, but a considerable number of them did. They thus purchased as it were for the leading strata of the nobility the continuation of a favourable access to the political power élite. This advantage persisted until the First World War, a point we shall return to below.
In recent years, this fact has often been seen (for instance by Perry Ander- son)66 as the reason for the dominance of finance and trading capital in English capitalism, and the loss of Britain's position as the leading industrial nation. This argument is supported by the close connections that leading politicians have had with the City of London. The cultural and political hegemony of ‘gentlemen' supposedly led to the formation of a ‘gentlemanly capitalism' and the rejection of technical innovation. But besides all the empirical objections to be made, such as the fact that there were always both personal and especially economic connections and overlaps between the different fractions of capital,67 it can be firmly established that the dominant patterns of investment practice were in economic terms rational in both the short and the middle term. No recourse to any form of aristocratic hegemony is needed to explain them. The position of English capital in connection with its Empire and the world market is evidence enough. As long as high profits could be made from trade and finance, there was no impetus to invest in the modernisation of British industry. There may have been individual aristocrats in the nineteenth century who let themselves be guided in their appropriation practices rather by perspectives of status than by capitalist rationality, and certain entrepreneurs may well have sought to act in a similarly ‘aristocratic' fashion, but, for the development of patterns of investment, the fact that leading representatives 
of agricultural capital were nobles and preferred to consort with bankers than with farmers has no decisive significance.
d.	From the ‘political nation’ to a national political public
In England, the dissolution of the ancien régime took place in the form of cam-paigns. These achieved a far-reaching formalisation of administration, formal rights of participation, the abolition of competitive advantages for the holders of privilege, and most of all, the expansion of the political sphere. The asser-tion of a national public as the legitimising instance of policy represents the bourgeoisification of the organisation of political power.
The process of this transformation does not need to be depicted here in detail, only in respect to its most important milestones. The first of these was the early beginnings of organised extra-Parliamentary opinion in the 1760s. Up till that time, influential political opposition was chiefly expressed in the notion of 'country' that has been explained above. This was represented by social groups that belonged at least locally to the ruling strata. They pressed for the abolition of corruption and overweening influence at court. They sought to reform the exercise of rule, but not to change it fundamentally. This shifted for the first time with the election of John Wilkes as the Member for Middlesex. The use of a 'general warrant' (the command to search and imprison unnamed individuals) and the decision of Parliament to declare the runner-up elected, since Wilkes was banned from taking his seat, led to protests across the country, in which members of the lower orders were especially prominent.
John Wilkes, whose heroism historians do not depict so generously as did many of his contemporaries, had a considerable propagandist talent. He suc-ceeded in presenting himself as a symbol for the victims of an oligarchical system of rule. But this was only possible because there were many people in England - especially in the towns - who were self-conscious enough at this time to demand the rights of 'all Englishmen'.”翻译为中文