The Corporation as a Technique of International Administration

Abstract

T HHE MOST DYNAMIC AND SERVICEABLE CONCEPT in the portfolio of modern business, the idea of the corporation, traces its lineage directly back to a great thirteenth century canonist, Pope Innocent IV. During an incubation period of four centuries, the corporate concept was in large measure the handmaiden of institutionalized religion.1 It was the legal device whereby a small collective enterprise devoted to God, learning or charity, such as an abbey or university, could preserve its continued existence, its legal rights, and its properties, even though the original human members of the group enterprise had all died. In the seventeenth century, a new and more ambitious field was carved out for corporate action. The economic exploitation of the wealth to be found in the new hemisphere of the Americas and the old continent of Asia became the province of compact and aggressive groups of merchant adventurers collectively organized as an English (or Dutch, or Portuguese) East India (or a Hudson Bay, or a Muscovy) Company. These companies, in addition to their monopoly privileges and (shall we say sovereign?) immunities from import and export laws and customs duties, had the power to tax their own members, decide their own disputes, and defend themselves against pirates and other external enemies. The English East India Company, it may be noted, not only remained on to subsidize Charles Lamb, John Stuart Mill, and a number of great Orientalists, but ruled India with an iron grip until the middle of the nineteenth century.2 In fact, the maintenance of fortifications and consular agents and