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>> 21 2 “Bundles of Hyphens” Corporations as Legal Communities in the Early Modern British Empire Philip J. Stern “Corporate” life has long been at the heart of our understanding of legal pluralism , whether in the sense of religious, ethnic, or commercial “corporate” groups with claims to semi-autonomous laws and legal institutions or formal corporate bodies that served as a “middle level” or “mediating institution” between state and society.1 Understandably, such pluralism was particularly pronounced in the context of empire, which by very definition required rule over a range of different groups, with divergent legal traditions, institutions, and cultures. Far from the confident and singular project it is often represented to be, such diversity meant that overseas expansion was a matter of constant uncertainty, opportunity, negotiation, and syncretism both for governments and subjects alike.2 This chapter argues that overseas corporations were far more than intermediary bodies or outsourced, privatized extensions of the state. In early modern parlance, they were themselves forms of “commonwealth,” bodies politic responsible for governing over the economic, political, religious, and cultural life of those under their charge, with their own claims to property, rights, and immunities at law that generated claims to jurisdiction, allegiance , and subjects and citizens. Whether in joint-stock companies, corporate colonies, incorporated municipalities, or various other institutional forms, the corporation ensured that empire was defined by layers of competing and overlapping jurisdictional authority from its very conception. Seen 22 > 23 conceptually was simply their status as “collegium or universitas”: that is, a collectivity vested with a legal personality, or a group of such bodies.6 From this basic concept of collegiality flowed the very notion of corporate behavior , particularly in the urban corporation, whose “whole point,” the twentieth -century political theorist Harold Laski observed, “lies in the organization of a group of men into something like an unity.”7 Yet while most any group could simply come together voluntarily, corporations uniquely possessed the right and responsibility to frame laws, bind their members to obedience, and obtain immunities and rights on behalf of the group as a whole.8 Put more simply, as a 1702 digest of corporation laws insisted, “The general Intent and End of all Civil Incorporation is for better Government; either general or special.”9 Ongoing modern controversies notwithstanding, for the vast majority of the corporation’s long lifespan the dilemmas surrounding it have been much less about its identity as a rights-bearing individual than as a form of society.10 As an artificial person, a corporation was subject to and protected by English laws, particularly with respect to property; yet, as a government, it was immune as a body from many of the very same strictures. It could sue and be sued but could not be guilty of a crime. It was immortal, and had no soul, and thus could administer but not take oaths, commit treason , be outlawed or excommunicated, perform homage, or even actually be summoned to appear.11 Their charters called into being not people but “bodies corporate and politick,” understood by contemporaries, especially in the context of urban government, as forms of “res publica,” or “commonwealth ,” a typically early modern fusion of private capacities of property ownership and legal personality mixed with the responsibilities and rights to govern over a particular form of public and its well-being.12 As Andrew Fitzmaurice has explained, “For the early modern English, [“commonwealth ”] meant simply a coherent political body defined by mutual obligations. A commonwealth could be a guild, a business, a parish, a town, a city, or . . . a colony.”13 Moreover, corporations were also forms of association, fellowship, and society.14 Even the joint-stock company, Otto von Gierke argued, “has in every respect the legal status of a fellowship personality. . . . [T]herefore, the association does not exercise merely private rights, but general corporate rights: autonomy, a specific area of jurisdiction.”15 In England, perpetual succession and the incorporated structure of the joint-stock company also descended from medieval guilds, which too were not only economic but organizations with distinct “bond[s] of union” and social functions that went far beyond their immediate commercial purposes.16 Corporations offered a 24 > 25 London, were so “ancient” they were said simply to exist by prescription, “time whereof the memory of many runneth not to the contrary; and therefore are looked upon in law to be well created.”29 Yet, even charters were not so clear-cut. While on the one hand they were issued by the...

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