Maïa PAL

Rethinking multiplicity, legal form, and jurisdiction for early modern transitional practices

Debates in International Relations (IR) today are exploring concepts and practices of multiplicity as providing new fertile ground to develop theories of ‘the international’ such as the theory of uneven and combined development. One dimension of these approaches is the commercialisation model, which has become dominant in IR and international legal history to explain early modern transitions to capitalism (and thereby modernity). This article argues that this model, and the way in which it shapes the agenda on multiplicity by merging the processes of capitalism and modernity, is to the detriment of providing new theoretical tools to understand the early modern period. It contributes to broader difficulties in shifting the focus away from modern sovereignty and territory as concepts developed from the nineteenth century legal imagination and applied reductively to the early modern. Moreover, this also leads to problems when theorising the relationship between law and capitalism.
Instead, this paper examines various examples of early modern jurisdictional subjectivities, some key to the specific and later emergence of private property and state sovereignty (e.g. jurisdictional accumulation by the English/British empire), and some not (jurisdictional accumulation by the Spanish empire). It thus develops a distinction between transitional and non-transitional content i.e. the capitalist and non-capitalist agency of various early modern actors, institutions, and practices. However, transitional practices also shaped the structural determinacy of the capitalist legal form. This calls for (cautiously) combining the commodity form theory of law and Political Marxism, and developing a dialectic of legal form and jurisdiction for theorising law in capitalism. This dialectic responds to the need to integrate both a local and international approach to shift the focus away from multiple yet unilinear histories of sovereignty and territory. Thereby, jurisdiction provides an alternative to the dominant notions of commerce and trade in explaining largescale social change in the early modern period and helps to better differentiate the key phenomena of capitalism and modernity.

Maïa PAL is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Oxford Brookes University (UK). She is the author of Jurisdictional Accumulation: An Early Modern History of Law, Empires, and Capital (Columbia University Press, 2021), and most recently of “Capital is Dead. Long Live Capital! A Political Marxist Analysis of Capitalism and Infrastructure” (with Neal Harris, forthcoming in TripleC: Communication, Capitalism, and Critique). She is a member of the Editorial Board of Historical Materialism.