In the late sixteenth century, no single existing institution met all of the challenges involved in transcontinental commerce and conquest. But Europeans were familiar with a range of useful precedents. Consistent with European understandings of sovereignty as divisible and capable of delegation, royal charters provided rulers a means to stretch quintessentially sovereign powers—such as the prerogatives of law-making, diplomacy, and war—over long distances.70 The chartered company-states would thus come to form an early modern iteration of a long-established practice, whereby “[t]he exercise of sovereignty was extended by dividing it.” Rulers provisionally assigned privileges to non-state sovereigns in exchange for a portion of the tribute gained from expansion.