1 Noam Chomsky, “Domestic Constituencies,” in Z Magazine, (May, 1998) <http://chomsky.info/199805__/>; George Osborne, address to the Institute of Directors quoted in The Guardian, (3 October, 2014). <http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/oct/03/george-osborne-charities-business-chancellor>

2 On the political roots of the early modern corporate body see especially Halliday, Dismembering the Body Politic: Partisan Politics in England’s Towns; Withington, “Public Discourse, Corporate Citizenship, and State Formation in Early Modern England”; Stern, The Company State.

3 See Carr, Select Charters of Trading Companies, p. xii.

4 Another “critical phase” occurred between circa 1780 and 1840 when the functions and behavior of corporate vehicles were transformed as they became much more detached from the state.

5 Coke, The second part of the Institutes of the lawes of England containing the exposition of many ancient, and other statutes.

6 Withington, Society in Early Modern England, 206; Halliday, Dismembering the Body Politic. On the historiographical move from “state-building” to “state formation” see Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England; Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England.

7 Hobbes, Leviathan, or The Matter, Forme, and Power of a Common Wealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil , pt. 2, ch. 29, 174.

8 Davenant, “Reflections upon the Constitution and Management of the African Trade,” 332.

9 This tally of corporate constitutions includes all of the charters issued to the following corporations across the seventeenth century: African (7), East India (13), Hudson’s Bay (1), Levant (6), Massachusetts Bay (2), Russia (6), Virginia (4), New England (2), and other North American Trading Companies (2).

10 Davis, Corporations: A Study of the Origin and Development of Great Business Combinations and of their Relation to the Authority of the State, vol. 1, 194.

11 Stein, “Tangier in the Restoration Empire.”

12 Papillon, The East-India-Trade a most Profitable Trade to the Kingdom, 18.

13 See Sen, Empire of Free Trade: The East India Company and the Making of the Colonial Marketplace; Stern, ‘“A Politie of Civill & Military Power,’” 263–7.

14 Boogert, The Capitulations and the Ottoman Legal System: Qadis, Consuls and Beratlis in the 18th Century; Eldem, “Capitulations and Western Trade,” 283–335.

15 On this point, see Boogert, The Capitulations, 25–6.

16 “Sir Sackville Crowe, complainant v. The Governor and Merchants of England trading to the Levant Seas, defendants: brief,” c. 1661, TNA, SP 105/109, f. 214v.

17 “Narrative of some of the Levant Companies Proceedings with his Late Majesties & Your Crowne,” TNA, SP 97/19, f. 266r-v.

18 Benton and Ross, “Empires in Legal Pluralism: Jurisdiction, Sovereignty, and Political Imagination in the Early Modern World,” 9.

19 Stern, ‘“A Politie of Civill & Military Power,’” 253.

20 British Library, IOR E/3/90 1683 May 23^rd London to Capt Leon Brown [Capt of the ship transporting above letters to India] (p. 165–66).

21 Orr, “A Prospectus for a ‘New’ Constitutional History of Early Modern England,” 433.

22 Benton, “The Legal Regime of the South Atlantic World”; Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes and World History, 49–59.

23 I deploy “transnational” in much the same way as David Armitage in Foundations of Modern International Thought, 18.

24 See Stern, “‘A Politie of Civill & Military Power,’” 283.

25 For the very different concept of “business constitutionalism” applied to the consistent ways in which the metropolitan managers of the East India Company sought to manage the Asian trade see Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia, ch. 2.

26 Halliday, Dismembering the Body Politic, ch. 2.

27 The constitutional category I define here is therefore meant to accommodate the differing perceptions of the corporation that have included understanding corporations as “sovereign” (Philip J Stern), as “franchises” (Paul Halliday), and as “societies” Philip Withington.

28 In this sense my notion of corporate constitutionalism offers some reflections on the processes that led to the formation ultimately of what Regina Grafe and Alejandra Irigoin have termed a “stakeholder empire.” See Grafe and Irigoin, “A stakeholder empire: the political economy of Spanish imperial rule in America.”

29 Stern, Company-State.

30 John Cary, An Essay on the State of England, in Relation to Its Trade, 47.

31 Pettigrew and Cleve, “Parting Companies: The Glorious Revolution, Company Power, and Imperial Mercantilism,” 627.

32 Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire since 1405, ch. 3.

33 Mentz, The English Gentleman Merchant at Work: Madras and the City of London, 1660–1740, 264; Nierstrasz, In the Shadow of the Company: the Dutch East India Company and its servants in the period of its decline (1740–1796).

34 See especially Child, A Treatise Wherin is Demonstrated, 38.

35 Withington, “Public Discourse, Corporate Citizenship, and State Formation in Early Modern England,” 1024; Ogborn, Global lives: Britain and the world, 1550–1800, 87–93; Hasan, “Indigenous Cooperation and the Birth of a Colonial City: Calcutta, c. 1698–1750,” 73.

36 Foster, Letters Received by the East India Company from Its Servants in the East, 261 (Ralph Preston to the East India Company, Amadaver, 1 January, 1614).

37 IOR G/19/21, Yale to “his most Imperial Majesty Jeanepatwan [?] Emperor of the Island of Sumatra and Territories thereof” Madras, 12 Sept. 1687, (f. 33v) IOR G/19/21, Yale to the “Emperor of the Island of Sumatra and Territories thereof” [the ruler of Bengkulu], Madras, 12 Sept. 1687, (f. 33v).

38 Breen, Puritans and Adventurers : Change and Persistence in Early America; Greene, Creating the British Atlantic: Essays on Transplantation, Adaptation, and Continuity; Winship, Godly Republicanism: Puritans, Pilgrims, and a City on a Hill.

39 Pettigrew, Freedom’s Debt: The Royal African Company and the Politics of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 38.

40 Erikson, Between Monopoly and Free Trade: The English East India Company.

41 The Levant Company was a regulated company and therefore had a more decentralised corporate governance structure.

42 Chandler and Mazlish, “Introduction,” 2.

43 Tully, Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity, 58.

44 Colley, “Empire of Writing: Britain, America and Constitutions, 1776–1848,” 239.

45 For recent work on constitutional history that privileges the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries see Ginsburg, et al., The Endurance of National Constitutions,.

46 Much of what follows is drawn from Pettigrew, Freedom’s Debt; and Pettigrew and Cleve, “Parting Companies.”

47 Lincoln’s Inn Library, Maynard MSS, No. 42. I’m grateful to Dr George Van Cleve for bringing this material to my attention.

48 For an alternative reading of these debates see Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution.

49 Opinion of Thos. Turnor, Gray’s Inn, December 12, 1677; Opinion of Thos. Corbett, 1677 (?) including brief summary of oral opinion of Sir John Maynard, TNA SP, vol. 398, fos. 110–19.

50 Stern, Company-state, 59–60.

51 Shower’s argument is in Renton, The English Reports, vol. 89, 498 (1 Show. K.b. 137, 138).

52 On the African Company as tyrannical see Wilkinson, Systema Africanum, 3. On the East India Company see Reasons humbly offered against grafting or splicing and for dissolving this present East-India Company, 4.

53 Some Considerations Humbly Offered, against Granting the Sole Trade to Guiny from Cape Blanco to Cape Lopez, to a Company with a Joint Stock, exclusive of others. See also Pettigrew and Stein, “The Public Rivalry between Regulated and Joint Stock Corporations and the Development Seventeenth-Century Corporate Constitutions.”

54 Reasons humbly offered against establishing, by Act of Parliament, the East-India-trade, in a company, with a joint-stock, exclusive of others, the subjects of England , 3.

55 Egerton Family Papers, Mss EL 9610, 1, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif. This manuscript copy was printed as Amendments Humbly Proposed to the Bill, for Settling the Trade to Africa, with the Reasons Thereof (n.p., [1698]).

56 Pettigrew and Cleve, “Parting Companies,” 633–8.

57 Chandler and Mazlish, “Introduction,” 2. See also Ciepley, “Beyond Public and Private: Toward a Political Theory of the Corporation,” 140.