A Decolonial Glance at Corporate Origins
Some notes on the Roman, Colonial, & Racialized History of the Corporate Structure
Last week, I pointed out that co-ops inject an innovation beneath the typical levels of business models or company purpose, down in the very DNA of corporate structure. Co-ops, when done right, decouple capital from it’s unilateral grip on power by democratizing business among is users, producers, and/or workers.
As I thought about the peculiarity of this site of innovation, I was led to ask, “Why are these structures so hierarchical and exclusive in the first place? Why did the corporation come to be this way? Why is this transformation so necessary?”
As with so many features of the modern world, we have to face honestly the ways we choose to structure our society, ask how it got that way, interrogate that history from the vantage point of the oppressed where shalom is measured, and begin to imagine how else we might share in the abundance of this world if the just and radically inclusive communion of God’s Kin-dom were the measure of all things. This takes what we might call a theologically decolonial reading of past, present and future.
I was generally aware that the first modern corporate form historians typically point to were the East India Companies—two great tools of European colonial aggression. So I started there, and just followed wherever googling “history of the corporation” took me from footnote to footnote. I’d like to synthesize all of this into a paper or article for somewhere, but for the time being, I just want to bullet out the threads I’m pursuing. I knew it was bad, but geez. Honestly, y’all. It’s quite bad.
A Rough History of the Corporation up to ~1920
The first modern corporations were vehicles for colonialism. England (1600) and the Dutch (1602) needed a way to force trade on India and then continuously move tons of goods back and forth from the opposite end of the world. Because an operation at that scale would be enormously expensive, they chartered a “joint-stock” entity that could attract private investments while uniquely shielding investors from some of the consequences of that entity’s actions (aka, limiting owner’s liabilities). Significantly, it also meant giving these new East Indian Companies the power to operate their own militaries which were necessary to force open and maintain the state of plunder called foreign trade. An economist recently estimated that Britain alone took $45 trillion from India during this period.
The key early takeaway is that the power of violence to take the land, goods, and labor of other peoples and places was at the very center of the corporation’s nature and the raison d'etre of its genesis.
Ironically considering contemporary common sense in business, we see in these early examples through the late 19th century that the first corporations were not birthed of individual entrepreneurial ingenuity, but brought into existence by governments that specified the scope of their powers and purposes.
Nor were corporations birthed with the expectation that success could produce an entity with the capacity for eternal life. Corporations were always chartered for pre-specified periods of time from a few years to a few decades, then closed up. This remained the case deep into the 19th Century.
Furthermore, corporations were originally chartered as monopolies on purpose: there was only one East Indian Company for England. In America, the Union Pacific Railroad was chartered by Congress to exclusively operate the new transpacific railroad. We often think of the Gilded Age as a historical aberration when mega corporations consolidated power over an industry and drove unimaginable wealth into the hands of a few owners (unimaginable until today, that is, whose inequality is worse). But the Gilded Age rose straight out of the shift to private control and incorporation of companies. It was essentially one business cycle into the era when private citizens could incorporate and dictate the purpose of a company independent from legislative decree. While that level of autonomy was new, the natural inclination of coporations to monopoly was not. Businesses just continuing to do exactly what they were designed to do when they were government chartered entities. Once again, contrary to the supposed competitive natural state imagined by libertarian liberalism, it was only through government regulation that competitive market environments could be designed.
One of the most disturbing discoveries I came across regards the legal ground for corporate personhood. In the US, personhood wasn’t established for companies until 1883 and was created through a warped use of the 14th Amendment — the act meant to establish personhood for former slaves. Jeffrey Kaplan explores this evolution in a brilliant article, “The Birth of the White Corporation.” Allow me to quote him here:
“In 1883, the very same year that the US Supreme Court heard arguments in favor of declaring that a corporation is a natural person, the Court also invalidated the enforcement of civil rights for African Americans. This was the first of a series of decisions that led to the Court’s approval of racial segregation. The Court eventually held that both corporate personification and racial segregation were justifiable under the Fourteenth Amendment, which was passed with the explicit purpose of protecting the rights of former slaves after the Civil War. This connection is more than a mere oddity of US legal history. These court decisions are part of a common social structure in which the exercise of social power through property rights continues to mask the concomitant disempowerment of people of color. In effect, what the courts decided is that corporations are people while African Americans are not; and that, while property could no longer be held in the form of black skins, it could still be invested in white ones.”
These links between race, private property, slavery and the corporate entity lead back where all roads lead: Rome. The legal theory and precedents drawn on at the start of the colonial age were preserved through the Middle Ages primarily for the use of incorporating towns, universities, monasteries, and other religious orders. However, the primary source was Roman law. The word corporation is derived from the Latin root corpus, meaning body. Rome devised a means for groups to organize themselves into a legally recognized, rights bearing collective being known as the corpus. There were three primary kinds. Cities came first. Then the collegia emerged through which artisan associations, religious societies, and social clubs that provided functions like providing funerals were organized.
The third Roman corpus is the most relevant for our study: the publicani. In order to manage its vast colonial territories, the Romans invented the practice of identifying private contractors to fulfill public contracts (the original triple-P, aka Public-Private Partnerships, so loved by neoliberal mayors everywhere). Much of Rome’s massive public works were bid on and built by publicani. However, their functions evolved and expanded over time, eventually to include a group of people very familiar to readers of the New Testament: tax collectors. Typically members of the propertied class just below the Senatorial elite, these proto-companies collect taxes from the empire’s peripheries and returned the tribute to Rome.
And here’s where we get back to slavery. The publicani are looked on as perhaps the earliest form of limited liability shareholder-company. However, a legal structure for limiting an owner’s exposure to risk didn’t exist at the time. Instead, the publicani “invented the practice of common slave ownership, in which a jointly owned slave served as chief executive officer of the enterprise. As slaves were ‘things’ responsible for only their own cost, they liberated the owners of their personal liabilities.” wiki.
All of this, particularly the Roman context, opens up plenty of ground for theological and biblical interpretation.
Right on the surface, it certainly calls for a reappraisal of Jesus’ teaching on and interaction with publicans (a word many of us saw in older bible translations, but were not taught to include this historical context in our exegesis). Jesus loved and spent time with these folks, but always in a way that called them out of exploitative practices and into a communion with the poor founded on justice: Zacchaeus’s return of the money he took at Jesus’ instruction and his commitment to becoming a fellow disciple of Jesus being the prime example.
It also opens new perspectives on the biblical language translated to ‘body’ in English. In the same way that calling Jesus “Lord” was a direct challenge to Caesar as the ruler of the world, and using the language of Kingdom of God undermined Roman claims, we should see the language of the Body of Christ as another challenge to the Roman imperial system. Christ invites us to share in the abundance of his body, not take our sustenance from extractive bodies. We are called to join not at the site of Rome’s corpus, but to find union in the corporate Body of Christ. The implications here are extensive.
We need to also allow the brutal violence at ever stage in the history of corporate development, in conjunction with the alternative way of embodying social life offered through Jesus, to reinterpret how we think about business, economics, and the design and privileges afforded to companies today. The publicani was a tool for implementing the extractive imperial designs of Rome. This tool was resurrected and supercharged at the dawn of the modern-colonial age. We live within and beneath the weight of these violent social bodies still today. Redesigning the company around the principles of radical inclusion, democracy, and service to the community—as the best parts of the coop and solidarity economy movement are doing—is a good first step. But it is only that: a beginning.
Some sources: