Search Results

This chapter examines early modern corporate sovereignty as it materialized from medieval religious thought. It analyzes Thomas Hobbes’ political theory and William Blackstone’s writings on the common law in describing a configuration of corporate power that emerged during the eighteenth century. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the corporate charter that granted corporations legal standing, established corporate immunities and privileges, and provided a framework for governing towns, hospitals, poorhouses, learning societies, and churches. According to Hobbes, the chartered grants are gifts from the sovereign that provided exemptions from the law.

This chapter explains the reworking of corporate sovereignty in the context of modern U.S. corporate law by describing corporate personhood and analyzing 19th- and early-20th-century literature of lawyers, political economists, and public figures to understand how corporations changed from fundamental institutions of government into private, capitalist firms. It discusses corporate personhood as a retroactive attempt to rationalize an institution connected with early modern models of sovereignty and police within the juridical framework of a liberal capitalist political economy that centers on concepts of personhood, rights, and citizenship. The chapter also reviews Matt Wuerker’s drawing “Corpenstein”, which echo earlier presentations of corporations as monsters.

This chapter analyzes how the articulation of corporate sovereignty to capitalist value enabled corporations to transact business and enter into legal proceedings in multiple jurisdictions. It describes the coalescence of the pockmarked international regulatory structure for transnational corporations that emerged during the mid-20th century, and considers the ways legal frameworks of personhood were applied to corporations extraterritorially. The chapter also investigates the regulation of foreign corporations that emerged within the complex of territorial sovereignty, and examines the conflict of laws that concern trade disputes, nationalization of foreign corporate assets, and liabilities of corporations under public international law.

This chapter examines the jurisdictional autonomy of corporations and their insistence upon a pluralistic legal order in the early modern British Empire. It argues that overseas corporations were not just intermediary bodies or outsourced, privatized extensions of the state; they were also forms of “commonwealth” responsible for governing over the economic, political, religious, and cultural life of those under their authority. It considers various forms of corporation, such as joint-stock companies and corporate colonies, and how they competed with one another for jurisdiction and authority. The chapter first provides an overview of corporate sovereignty, corporate colonies, and corporate government before discussing how legal pluralism became a source of jurisdictional tension and fissure, not only between corporations and the state but also within and among corporations themselves.

This chapter reveals the invisible, unrecognized, and repressed logics that govern the understanding of corporate power in the present. It begins by discussing the position of law in the history of corporate sovereignty, followed by an analysis of the connection between the corporation’s powers and capitalist accumulation. As legal creations, law has been the primary mechanism for codifying corporate power in various iterations and for comprising a set of politico-legal arguments and concepts that transformed the religious image of the corporate body into the sacralized secular sovereign. The chapter concludes with suggestions on maintaining the corporation’s power to collectively improve life.

Recent reinterpretations of Hugo Grotius focusing on his treatise De jure praedae see him as intellectually compromised by his efforts to provide legal support for the colonial ambitions of the Dutch Republic. This chapter attempts to ‘provincialize’ Grotius by viewing him in a contemporary non-European mirror, through a contextualized and comparative reading of the Malay treatise Taj al-Salatin [‘The Crown of All Kings’], composed in 1603 by Bukhari al-Jauhari in north Sumatra. It is argued that crucial aspects of Grotius’ theory were also dominant features of political thought in the Malay region, with mutually cherished notions of trust and contractual obligations. Conversely, the Southeast Asian perspective shows that Grotius’ proposition of the Dutch East India Company as a ‘corporate sovereign’ with international legal personality, and his distinction between the legal, religious, and political realms, must have been alien to his imagined Islamic readers in Southeast Asia.