Date and time: 10:30am-12:00pm, Friday, 12 July, 2019
Venue: 1st conference room (3F), Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia, The University of Tokyo
Lecturer: Dr Petra Mahy (Monash University)
Title: COMPANY LAW TRANSPLANTS AND EVOLUTION IN COLONIAL SOUTHEAST ASIA
Abstract:
This paper presents a comparative study of the evolution of company law in colonial Southeast Asia, specifically in the Netherlands Indies, British Malaya and the Spanish and American Philippines. These neighbouring territories, which form present-day Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines, provide particularly valuable subjects for comparison given that they share some basic similarities in terms of geographical region and colonial histories. They were largely ‘extractive’ colonies rather than ‘settler’ colonies, and were each colonised by a different European (and in the case of the Philippines, also American) power which bequeathed distinct legal legacies to their respective colonies. In all three of these territories, company law was first introduced by the colonial regimes. The paper engages with the interrelated questions of: To what extent did colonial company law function as a tool of imperialism to facilitate both state and private exploitation of resources? To what extent was the initial transplant a direct copy of the law of the metropolis, and then to what extent did any subsequent changes continue to follow the pattern of the domestic law of the colonial power? To what extent was the law contested by local populations in the colonies and/or adapted for their use?
Lecturer profilest:
Dr Petra Mahy is a senior lecturer in the Department of Business Law & Taxation, Monash University, Australia. Petra is both a lawyer and an anthropologist and her research interests fall in the fields of socio-legal studies, regulatory studies, and law and history, with a particular regional focus in Southeast Asia. She is currently a Chief Investigator on an Australian Research Council-funded project on the "Formal and Informal Regulation of Labour Disputes in Southeast Asia" (2019-2021). This presentation draws on her publications on ‘Company Law Transplants and Evolution in Colonial Southeast Asia’ (forthcoming); Petra Mahy and Ian Ramsay, ‘Legal Transplants and Adaptation in a Colonial Setting: Company Law in British Malaya’, Singapore Journal of Legal Studies [2014] 123-150; Sean Cooney, Petra Mahy, Richard Mitchell and Peter Gahan, ‘The Evolution of Labor Law in Three Asian Nations: An Introductory Comparative Study’, Comparative Labor Law & Policy Journal (2014) 36: 23-68.