Economic nationalism, in one form or another, has long been the primary threat to the mobility – and thus the power – of multi-national or global corporations. A central problematic for the global corporation is therefore how to manage various economic nationalisms, including the threat of tariff barriers, corporate tax regimes, and nationalisation. A crucial jurisdictional technique for managing this problematic is corporate personality, which allows a corporation to speak and act with legal effect. When the recognition of corporate personality travels, so too can the corporation.

In this paper, I explore how the technique of corporate personality has been deployed in postcolonial states to manage first anti-colonial, and then developmental (economic) nationalisms. In doing so, I argue that while juridical personality might be a legal fiction, it is not a ‘bare’ fiction, open to unlimited manipulation. Instead, it is a fiction around which meaning and material congeal – it is never only a corporation that speaks and acts, but a foreign corporation, or a high-technology corporation, etc. As I show by turning to postcolonial Indonesia, these congealed forms of corporate personality emerge in response to postcolonial law-making. Thus, corporate personality does not spread smoothly from Global North to South, but rather it is re-shaped, re-negotiated and re-invented in the colonial and postcolonial encounter.