From the Dutch East India Company to the Corporate Bill of Rights: corporations and international law

Grietje (River) Baars

Chapter 30 in Research Handbook on Law and Political Economy, 2025, pp 515-533 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: This chapter explores the complex yet underexamined relationship between multinational corporations and international law. This lack of clarity hinders effective responses to the harmful impacts of corporate activity. The chapter traces the historical evolution of corporations—from medieval joint stock companies to modern multinationals—showing their centrality to the expansion of global capitalism. Corporations established trade networks, waged wars, and governed colonies, facilitating both primitive accumulation and the creation of the modern state system. Law, capitalism, and the corporation have historically operated through a shared logic of “commercial sociability,” though this connection is now obscured. This invisibility is reinforced by a 20th-century ideological divide in international law that separates the public/political from the private/economic. With today's collapse of the public into the private, a return to the perspective where the ‘political’ and the ‘economic’ are one will change scope and range of potentially effective responses to today's multinationals.

Keywords: Corporation; Colonialism; Capitalism; International law; History; Marxist theory (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781803921181
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