Open Access: “Corporate Constitutionalism” in Itinerario

The December 2015 issue of Itinerario (International Journal on the History of European Expansion and Global Interaction) features a set of articles on the constitutional activities of seventeenth-century trading corporations; Cambridge University Press is making the essays freely available at this time. According to the editors,

The trading corporation’s constitutional status and its constitutional powers provided it with the means to impersonate the state and govern trade; to subordinate itself to state power; and to operate between state jurisdictions. From the seventeenth century onwards, these transnational and constitutional characteristics played an important part in the development of corporate trade and national and international constitutions.

Articles are:

William A. Pettigrew, "Corporate Constitutionalism and the Dialogue between the Global and Local in Seventeenth-Century English History"
David Armitage, "Wider Still and Wider: Corporate Constitutionalism Unbounded"
Paul D. Halliday, "Speaking Law to the Corporate Person"
Vicki Hsueh, "Constitutional Turns and Corporate Responses to the Empire of Uniformity"
Tom Leng, " 'Corporate Constitutionalism,' the Merchant Adventurers, and Anglo-European Interaction"
Philip J. Stern, "Parasites, Persons, and Princes: Evolutionary Biology of the Corporate Constitution"