Metastatic Legality: Companies, States and the Spread of European Law

Amsterdam Centre for International Law, 26 March 2026

We know the world is deeply plural.  So how has it come to pass that Europe and its heirs (The West) get to decide what counts as Law?  This question becomes more urgent each day. We so obviously need new jurisprudential ideas, and to recover displaced imaginaries and practices, if we are to navigate an uncertain future.

In this lecture, Professor Pahuja asks how European law acquired for itself, a monopoly over legality on the international plane, and how this monopoly is maintained into the present.  Perhaps surprisingly, she will suggest that the company is crucial to the answer.  More specifically, she will locate the VOC and its early adventures in Asia, before the state was really a state (Skinner), and before religion as we know it was invented (Nongbri), in a longer story about the malignant spread of European law through the company-state relation, and the violent displacement of its rivals.

Excavating the techniques by which company and state were co-constituted and arranged as legal forms to travel southward together, can help us see what was crowded out, and may help us plant the seeds of a more jurisplural future.