This welcome call for a constitutional approach to the history of the seventeenth-century colonial and commercial company raises any number of important provocations for early modern political, legal, economic, imperial, and global history, as well, as the authors are quite aware, having great potential to explain the origins of the bewildering power of multinational corporations in our postmodern one as well. Yet, if Pettigrew’s article persuades that the history of all hitherto existing societies is to be a history of corporations, the spectre that continues to haunt it is of course that of Thomas Hobbes. His ubiquitously cited antipathy towards corporations—quoted here, as well as in an embarrassingly frequent number of places, including my own work—as “lesser Common-wealths in the bowels of a greater, like wormes in the entrayles of a naturall man” belies a far more complex and perhaps contradictory role for the corporation in early modern political and imperial thought. The parasitic corporation found in chapter 29—by which he quite specifically meant merely the large, numerous, and well-armed boroughs and cities that had been so recently troubling to the English monarch—comes at the end of a long list of even far more life-threatening intestinal diseases of the body politic, such as mixed government and incomplete sovereignty.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Elsewhere, whether understood as a “politicall system” or a persona civilis, the corporation appears to be integrally part of the very musculature of the body politic; even large overseas trading corporations, while suspect and perhaps noxious as “double monopolies” at home and abroad, were not inherently destined to devolve into the “Wens, Biles, and Apostemes” of the commonwealth.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

I raise Hobbes neither to praise nor bury him, and certainly not to extol any virtues of a history of the corporation that retreats from the capacious call found here into a more familiar canon of political thought. However, it seems not a bad place to start, given the charge to pursue an “anatomy of the corporate constitution,” packed as it is with metaphors about the composition and health of the body and implications for understanding early modern institutional power. To incorporate, to make into a body, was to impersonate, in both senses of the word: that is, to make into a person, but one that is in some sense only comes into being through mimicry, language, performance, and the law.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Yet, if diagnosing the corporate body politic requires some form of gross anatomy, it also calls for dissection of its biology on every level, from the biochemical and molecular to the morphological, ecological, ethological, and of course, evolutionary. As Hobbes recognised, there was an “unspeakable diversitie” of corporations, in number, kind, and circumstances; the question of a corporate biology would be, in a sense, to figure out how much one could generalise or systematise such a multiplicity, over time and place. Or, as the early twentieth-century legal theorist Frederic Maitland put it, “there seems to be a genus of which State and Corporation are species,” and we were “a little behind the age of Darwin if between the State and all other groups we fix an immeasurable gulf and ask ourselves no question about the origin of species.”Footnote ¹¹⁰

Certainly, at the core—and quite famously on the cover—of Hobbes’s Leviathan is the very image of a corporation: the “artificial man” of the state, many reduced into one under a single head, a legal person and common government. That corporations were themselves commonwealths only serves to reminds us that Hobbes’s “greater” commonwealth, the Sovereign himself, was a corporation.Footnote ¹¹¹ In England, this became articulated in the legal theory of the “corporation sole,” or what perhaps more famously has come to be known as the “King’s two bodies”: the one natural, mortal, and finite; the other, political, perpetual, and imperishable.Footnote ¹¹² Such a corporation was less a product of “jurisdictional evasiveness” than a function of the evolution of the notion of governance and jurisdiction itself, centuries of conceptualizing legally fictitious persons which gave birth to both the power of corporate associations as well as unleashing a conception of the sovereign state as transcendent, abstract, and impersonal—as well, as of course, a body formed immemorially by compact.Footnote ¹¹³

Like his many contemporaries, Hobbes was deeply familiar with the corporation, both through his own involvement with concerns like the Virginia and Somers Island CompaniesFootnote ¹¹⁴ as well as, far more influentially, the palpable legacy in both theory and practice of medieval jurists’ constant and extensive debates over the concept and nature of the persona ficta, in the rights of universities, bishoprics, cities, guilds, and ultimately commercial and colonial combines with relation both to monarchs, emperors, and the body the Church and the corpus christi itself.Footnote ¹¹⁵ This of course raises the question: if the only thing that truly distinguished the species civitas hobbesiana from other personae civiles is what Maitland dismissed as simply a “jurist’s theory,” then it remains to be resolved whether the corporation was a fundamentally distinct, rival, or generically similar concept to the state. The possibilities are not mutually exclusive. Perhaps it may be that the corporation did not develop a “long history of jurisdictional evasiveness” as a means to survive so much as the national state, with its similar biology but potentially different sociology, may represent simply some sort of unique corporate genetic mutation.

Thus, the history of the corporate constitution seems to be one of simultaneous convergence and divergence with the nation. Pettigrew’s article quite rightly also points to the global and transnational character of the commercial and colonial corporation specifically. We are pointed particularly to points of divergence, which are certainly persuasive—such as the greater capacities companies had to deal with the diversity of sovereignty and religion found in the extra-European world; it certainly offers a potentially deep structural answer to the puzzling question as to why Bombay became a cornerstone of the modern British Empire while Tangier burned. But, here one might turn from the divergence of state and company to consider their connections. Are their different paths to be found in the corporate constitution itself? To answer this, one might also need to consider how and why dissenters flourished in proprietorship Pennsylvania and Catholics in Maryland as much as Presbyterians did in Massachusetts, and the successes and failures all had in dealing with the several indigenous forms of sovereignty found within and without their borders. If we take Charles I at his word that the Crown believed corporations such as Virginia, Bermuda, and New England suited for trade but not “fit or safe to communicate the ordering of State affairs,”Footnote ¹¹⁶ then one must consider whether the proprietorial forms that followed were really any less categorically influential on the colonial constitution than the corporation.Footnote ¹¹⁷ And, of course, while corporations may seem jurisdictionally evasive, they would seem far less so when measured up against the host of pirates, mercenaries, merchants, and others that constantly challenged the authority of both state and company alike.Footnote ¹¹⁸

These are simply a few, hopefully open-ended questions, inspired by what is clearly an important and timely call for a wide-ranging research agenda on the impact of the early modern corporation on constitutional thought. Such work both picks up on a great inertia of current research and pushes it in new, exciting, and perhaps as-yet-unknown directions. It suggests a way to think about corporations—from the East India Company to the Royal College of Physicians—within the language of constitutionalism, while continuing to push us beyond singular, teleological notions of territorially-bounded state sovereignty. A gross anatomy of the corporation is one, like surgery itself, that is both an art and a science, comprehending critical patterns while also remaining as complex, varied, and unpredictable as the body itself.