"The Corporation as Commonwealth: Scott Bader and Gandhian Trusteeship between India and Britain"

This paper examines the legal and organizational transformation of the privately held British chemicals company Scott Bader into a worker-owned ‘Commonwealth’ through a series of constitutional changes from 1945 to 1963. It traces the varied intellectual influences of the company’s founder, Ernest Bader, highlighting his eclectic spirituality and deeply held pacifist beliefs in the context of the Second World War, alongside existing models of company conversion such as the John Lewis Partnership in Britain and the Carl Zeiss Foundation in Germany. Arguably the most important inspiration for Bader was Indian anticolonial leader Mohandas K. Gandhi’s notion of “trusteeship,” which envisioned placing capital in the service of labor without class conflict or mandated redistribution. Whereas in India trusteeship primarily operated as political rhetoric, with little direct application in the economic realm, Bader was the first business owner to pursue the realization of Gandhi’s vision through concrete legal mechanisms. For this reason, he became a close interlocutor of Gandhi’s successors in postcolonial India, Jayaprakash ‘JP’ Narayan and Vinoba Bhave, who resisted state socialism through campaigns for voluntary reform in agriculture and industry. Bader was one of the few foreign delegates to attend and contribute to the deliberations of the Seminar on the Social Responsibilities of Business, organized by JP in New Delhi in 1965. Gandhi’s ideas thus came full circle through an unexpected (but not atypical) transnational circuit. The paper argues for an expanded genealogy of what Geoffrey Jones has termed “deeply responsible business” to consider the connections, exchanges, and contestations that generated a multitude of heterodox corporate forms on a global scale.