This article starts with a critical reflection on John Westlake’s reading of the history of empire and the English/British East India Company – for him, essentially, the proper concern of ‘constitutional history’ rather than international law. For Westlake, approaching this history through the prism of nineteenth-century positivist doctrine, the Company’s exercise of war powers could only result from state delegation. Against his warnings to international lawyers not to stray from the proper boundaries of international legal inquiry, the article proceeds to recover Hugo Grotius’s theory of corporate belligerency in his early treatise De iure praedae. For Grotius, corporations could wage public war on behalf of the state yet, at the same time, were in law capable of waging private war in their own right. The article proceeds to reflect on the practice of corporate belligerency in the centuries separating Westlake and Grotius; it concludes with observations on the implications of Grotius’s theory of corporate belligerency today.

本文从对约翰·韦斯特莱克对帝国历史和英国/英国东印度公司的历史的解读开始的批判性思考-对他而言，本质上是对“宪法历史”而不是国际法的适当关注。对于西湖而言，通过19世纪实证主义学说来回顾这段历史，该公司行使战争权力只能由国家授权来实现。反对他警告国际律师不要偏离国际法律询问的适当范围，本文着手恢复雨果·格罗蒂乌斯（ Hugo Grotius）在其早期论文《德·普拉德》中的公司交战理论。对于格罗蒂乌斯来说，公司可以代表国家发动公开战争，但同时，它们在法律上有能力自行进行私人战争。本文着重介绍了在分隔西湖和格罗蒂乌斯的几个世纪以来公司交战的做法；最后以对格罗蒂乌斯（Grotius）公司交战理论的启示进行观察。