Sovereignty and Charted Companies: Objective facts, Subjective Foundations

Abstract

According to the theory of separation of sovereignty from Commercial Activities, companies do not exercise sovereignty; although this theory of French law has not been an accepted principle in all legal systems, including in Iran, where prior to the enactment of the Third Development Plan, public sector companies undertook sovereign duties too. In the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, the entanglement of sovereignty-entrepreneurship led to granting sovereign, even military powers to concessionaire companies; separation of sovereignty-ownership by France also took place in the nineteenth century, in order to advance colonial goals and to avoid recognition of the rights of the charted companies of other colonial powers. The exercise of corporate sovereignty has always been based on some legal principles: the Christian tradition and the criteria of discoverythe non-ecclesiastical natural law and the criteria of effective custody for recognition of ownership, and then, European public law and criteria of effective custody. In the nineteenth century, domestic public law was the legal system governing charted companies; however, political developments led to the emergence of spheres of influence and the establishment of non-European states; eventually, direct confrontation of European states in the colonial territories led to the formation of nation-states, the elimination of corporate's proxy role despite their efficiency, and the end of charted companies. Nevertheless, in the twentieth century, and especially in the early twenty-first century, International National Companies, with somewhat similar and, of course, non-colonial functions, became the means of exercising the extraterritorial sovereignty of their respective states.

Keywords

• colonialism
• governance
• commercial activities
• charted company
• international national company
• spheres of influence