PC: Corporations and International Organizations Considered Sovereign

Is there any way that corporations and international organizations could be considered sovereign under international law, in a similar manner to the Knights of Malta? Either where they don't have any territory aside from some buildings and such -- like how embassies function -- or where they have some territory, like the Kramer Associates from For Want of a Nail.
 
By definition, if it's sovereign it's a nation, not a corporation or a non-governmental organization anymore. So technically the answer is "no, no way."

Now, the idea of a nation whose territory consists of a building here and a building there, maybe that island over there, rather than a continuous and contiguous (or mostly c and c) bloc, is workable, but I think only in a very modern, mature-industrial setting. So long as a majority of people are engaged in agriculture, agricultural land is the source of wealth and power, and any "government" with some other theoretical basis will quickly be absorbed by a more traditional state. Only when wealth and power are no longer seen to come from farming and land.

A corporation with sovereign territory is just a nation which is up front about the idea that some people (the employees) exist for the benefit of others (the shareholders). Not a terribly original idea - I could argue that the UAE is organized that way today, and its more vicious detractors would say the same of the modern Cherokee.
 
Is there any way that corporations and international organizations could be considered sovereign under international law, in a similar manner to the Knights of Malta? Either where they don't have any territory aside from some buildings and such -- like how embassies function -- or where they have some territory, like the Kramer Associates from For Want of a Nail.

The VOC I think is the closest you can get to an independent company-state.
 
I think corporations and companies tend to function as feudal/noble Houses rather than independent nations.

However Order States and things like the BEIC and VOC are a starting point if the former can avoid secularisation and the latter assimilation by the parent country.
 
I would have said that the Knightly Orders where close to what you are discribing, and you know what happened to the Temple Knights. The trouble is they don't have the power of a nation in one place, so will always be vunerable to the states where they opperate.
 
The North Borneo Chartered Company successfully run their territory like a nation. They were responsible for taxes, recruitment of police officers, making laws, planning infrastructure and other things normaly associated with a sovereign state.
Most interestingly they were also best at developing their colony.

Here is a short description by Abdul Hadi Pasha:

You would think a chartered company with responsibility to shareholders would be rapacious, but it was actually perhaps the most responsible, humane, and conscientious colonial state ever founded. The management early on decided to establish order and infrastructure, and then make money through surpluses on taxation of economic developments encouraged by a favorable atmosphere. Also, being very weak with regard to force, it couldn't afford to be arrogant or overbearing, so it worked closely with the natives and brought them into the administration through relationships of mutual advantage. If not for the devastating and brutal Japanese occupation, Sabah would be one of the richest places in Asia. This is one of those rare cases of positive imperialism, and ironically it was done through pure capitalism and private enterprise.

So if any of the OTL big company uses their model they could at least temporary considered de facto sovereign states.

https://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=199835

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Borneo_Chartered_Company
 
Hudson's Bay Company

Though all of these companies are basically monopolies granted by colonial states to go forth and exploit since the home governments didn't want to directly do it. Not exactly something like Kramer Associates from Robert Sobel's For Want of a Nail, which was a Mexican oil and transportation company before it went abroad and went a-imperializing. I suppose resource exploitation corporations such as the United Fruit Company would be closer to that, rather than the chartered HBC/BEIC/VOC.

Alternatively, it would be interesting to explore how the modern day trope of PMCs gone amok can be applied in the pre-1900s world. Consider, for instance, if the Catalan Company pulled a Teutonic Knights and ended up administering and ruling the areas they conquered.
 
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