"The Law of the Land: European Empires and the Rise of the Modern Multinational"

What do Unilever, Rio Tinto, and Shell have in common? They are three of the largest companies in the world in terms of revenue; they were all founded in the late nineteenth century in metropolitan Europe; and they all expanded rapidly into the colonized world. Unilever acquired land for palm oil plantations in what was then the Belgian Congo from 1911; Rio Tinto began mining zinc in Australia in 1905; Shell, formed by a merger between a British transport firm and the Royal Dutch Petroleum Company, began drilling for oil off Sabah, British Malaya, after 1909. These companies and others like them acquired vast holdings in a range of different colonies from Canada to South Africa, from French West Africa to Hawaii. Yet despite their diversity, an important further commonality exists: these companies’ successful use of a distinctly imperial legal technology, the ‘Torrens title system,’ invented in the colony of South Australia in 1858. The Torrens system, named after its creator, an Anglo-Irish colonial official, established that title to land is contained solely in the register of titles maintained by the state, and thus centralized, bureaucratized and formalized land ownership rights in ways that facilitated mass transfer of that land from indigenous peoples to the colonial state. The boom in metropolitan European companies investing in colonial land not only hastened the creation of a global market in land, it entrenched the dominance of Euro-American corporations and capital in the twentieth century. In this paper, and in my project more broadly, I argue that the legal technology of the Torrens title system, and of empire more broadly, were crucial to the development of the modern multinationals with which people all over the world interact with every day. I extend the work of primarily America-focused histories of capitalism, asking how we can historicize economic ideas and logics, to the Euro-imperial world, and combine it with postcolonial histories of imperial law to explain the rise of a powerful cadre of firms whose actions in expanding outside Europe still reverberate in global political economy today.