This forum discusses the utility of ‘corporate constitutionalism’ as a category of historical analysis. Corporate constitutionalism privileges the constitutional activities of international trading corporations to understand the cross-cultural dynamics at work in European expansion. William A Pettigrew sets out the possibilities of corporate constitutionalism in the first essay which defines the concept, makes the case for viewing trading corporations as constitutional entities at home and abroad, signals some possible interpretive benefits for historians of empire, corporate historians, global historians, and constitutional historians, before offering an illustrative case study about the Royal African Company. Leading thinkers in international history (David Armitage), legal history (Paul Halliday), constitutional theory (Vicki Hsueh), and corporate history (Thomas Leng and Philip J Stern) offer their reflections on the possibilities of this new approach to the international activities of trading corporations. Although the Forum focuses on seventeenth century English trading corporations, it proposes to start a discussion about the utility of corporate constitutionalism for other European corporations and for periods both before and after the seventeenth century.

This article revisits the late seventeenth-century histories of two of England's most successful overseas trading monopolies, the East India and Royal African Companies. It offers the first full account of the various enforcement powers and strategies that both companies developed and stresses their unity of purpose in the seventeenth century. It assesses the complex effects that the ‘Glorious Revolution’ had on these powers and strategies, unearthing much new material about the case law for monopoly enforcement in this critical period and revising existing accounts that continue to assert the Revolution's exclusively deregulating effects and that miss crucial subtleties in the case law and related alterations in company behaviour. It asks why the two companies parted company as legal and political entities and offers an explanation that connects the fortunes of both monopoly companies to their public profile and differing constituencies in the English empire and the varying non-European political contexts in which they operated.