Maine (and Weber) Against the Grain: Towards a Postcolonial Genealogy of the Corporate Person

This essay forges ties between postcolonial methodologies and the economic sociology of law, emphasizing the history, legal production, and governmental habitus of that modern abstraction called the economy'. It pursues three interrelated sites to do so: the categories of government and economy, via Weber and Foucault; classical legal discourse on corporate or group life and its temporizing from status to contract; and the relationship between the legal subject and homo economicus, investigated and telescoped through the figure of the corporate person. Empirically, focusing on India as a lens to highlight a colonial genealogy of neoliberal modernity, the analysis animates these themes via the history of colonial market governance, its relationship to the embedded' practices of vernacular capitalism, and emergent forms of economic citizenship today, seen through Indian case law on the corporate person and corporate veil-piercing.