At the core of Pettigrew’s article “Corporate Constitutionalism and the Dialogue between the Global and Local in Seventeenth Century English History’ is not simply an affirmation of the new “constitutional turn” in the growing historical scholarship on corporations but also a more urgent and pointed call to examine the global activities of seventeenth century English trading corporations with particular attention to the protean, contested, dialogic, and creative dimensions of their constitutional activity. Early modern English trading corporations should be seen, in Pettigrew’s view, as discrete constitutional entities which operated in multiple settings around the world and at various local, national, and transnational registers. In that sense, corporate constitutionalism did not exhibit the unbroken extension of power from center to periphery. Dependent on state authority and yet also often virtually autonomous in their operations abroad, corporations, as Pettigrew emphasises, were both “reflective and refractive of state constitutional mechanisms because their constitutional provisions were so often-re-negotiated at home and abroad.” Further complicating their legal standing, corporations were also part of the polyglot, contentious, and pluralist legal and political culture of the period, in which—as the now massive literature on early modern constitutionalism has made clear—multiple forms of written and unwritten constitutional authority, power, and invention operated.
Pettigrew’s article is ambitious both in carving out new lines of investigation and also in raising some essential questions about the relationship of corporate constitutionalism to power, difference, and ambition. In particular, one of the great strengths of the project is its challenge to the familiar Whig narratives of triumphal expansion. By illustrating the ways in which constitutional experiments reverberated around a transoceanic framework in which overseas expansion impelled new perspectives on government not just abroad but also at home, corporate constitutionalism offers the possibility of contesting narratives about the insular development of the English constitution, while also duly recognizing that constitution’s pluralist and hybrid constitutional terms and techniques. In short, according to Pettigrew’s proposed directive, a “comparative and constitutional approach to international activities of trading corporations helps to place non-European contexts, peoples, and cultures into domestic constitutional narrative and therefore places national constitutional histories within a global constitutional denominator.” As Pettigew notes, this approach contests James Tully’s influential view that early modern and modern constitutional change sought, among other interests, to subject indigenous peoples and to? regulate and order cultural diversity.
Yet I suspect that there is still additional room for Pettigrew to more precisely and directly detail how corporate constitutionalism distinguishes itself from Tully’s account, particularly with regard to power and culture. In Tully’s formulation, “modern constitutionalism” possesses several features. It is “defined in contrast to ancient or historically earlier constitution” and “rests on the “stages” or “progressive” view of human history, which the classic theorists produced in order to map, rank and thereby comprehend the great cultural diversity encountered by Europeans in the imperial age.”Footnote 88 Further, modern constitutionalism holds “concepts of popular sovereignty which eliminate cultural diversity as a constitutive aspect of politics” as it also characterises itself in terms of “a society of equal individuals who exist at a “modern” level of historical development.” And, indeed, one of the essential components of Tully’s argument is that he finds that modern constitutionalism’s “empire of uniformity” has elbowed out less hierarchical forms of cultural adjudication—the traditions of indigenous peoples, treaty conventions, and the multiform, irregular ancient constitutionalist forms of common law and civic humanist adjudication.Footnote 89 These are more situated, mediated, and dialogic modes of understanding and recognizing culture, Tully suggests, and they offer an important and overlooked resource for adjudicating the diverse claims.Footnote 90
Particularly since Tully’s formulation is global in scope and examines the impact of modern constitutionalism on colonial practice and theory from the sixteenth century to the twentieth, it would greatly strengthen the impact of Pettigrew’s proposal to clarify how his constitutional case studies challenge, provoke, and re-conceptualise modern constitutionalism’s core features. In particular, a clearer conceptual account of corporate constitutionalism’s alternative treatment and understanding of diversity, culture, and uniformity would be beneficial. While Pettigrew touches on some of the relevant differences between the at times widely different kinds of non-European and indigenous nations and peoples, the constitutional aspects of these differences are not yet fully spelled out. How precisely are difference and diversity addressed and mapped by corporate constitutionalism? Is corporate constitutionalism “aspectival” in some of the ways that Tully suggests?Footnote 91 Is it relational, open to change, and shaped by context? In what way do the different constitutional features of corporate constitutionalism (among them, mixed combinations of the ancient constitution, treaties, statutes, and the common law) deal with non-European engagement and in what way are power and privilege (on the part of multiple actors, agencies, and institutions) being exercised in the creation and exercise of corporate constitutional techniques? How does corporate constitutionalism then differentiate itself from ancient constitutionalism, common constitutionalism, and treaty constitutionalism?
In that vein, Pettigrew’s article could also more persuasively illustrate how power functions in corporate constitutionalism. Tully’s work, in that sense, profoundly illustrates the political possibilities and appeal of “redescription with critical intent.”Footnote 92 Casting even greater attention to the roles that power plays in the contestations and creations of corporate constitutionalism would usefully deepen understandings of corporate influence. In part, increased attention to power could deepen the meaning of constitutional “determinants,” a term that, in Pettigrew’s article, at times flattens the particular interests, intentions, and ambitions of corporations along with their various agents and representatives. In addition, greater attention to power also would help to clarify the dynamics at work in constitutional and cultural “dialogue” and “mutual engagement.” Are these “transcultural interactions and exchanges” even-handed and equitable? Or can they veer into domination, exploitation, and subjugation? Under what conditions and situations? As evident in Pettigrew’s case study of the Royal African Company, constitutional operations on the ground often involve fluidity, exchanges, and interaction and these require the work of translators, go-betweens, and traders. What emerges are forms of practice and understanding which were certainly dependent on intercultural and cross-cultural knowledge but also very much bound up in—as well as facilitators of—differential power relations. While Pettigrew’s conception rightly emphasises the fluidity, porousness, and modular functions of corporate constitutionalism, it is not fully clear precisely how difference and diversity is defined and adjudicated, particularly in the more integrative aspects of Pettigrew’s proposal, which looks not only to link the local and the global, but also the corporate, state, and transnational.
To give power and culture a more accentuated role would not simply add further depth and nuance to Pettigrew’s conception of corporate constitutionalism but it would also more explicitly interrogate received wisdom about the history of the corporation. As Jo Guldi and David Armitage have observed, one of the notable features of trendy “critical turns” is that they mask “old patterns of thought that have become entrenched.”Footnote 93 What is at stake in Pettigrew’s article is not merely a more refined historical assessment, but also a more profound assessment of the power and pitfalls of transnational institutions. As reflected in Pettigrew’s references to Tully, Noam Chomsky, and Alfred Chandler and Bruce Mazlish, the political and social utility of a reconceived corporate constitutionalism is significant. More than mere critique or revision, a manifesto of the kind attempted by Pettigrew in his article proclaims its ambitions publicly and performatively not only to offer a new agenda but also to rally forces, as much as possible, for enacting change. A more conceptually precise and power-laden conception of corporate constitutionalism would yield powerful and compelling insights not simply for historians but for many others invested in the “jurisdictional evasions” of corporations past and present.
