Colonial projects were driven by sovereign self-constitution, not greed for wealth

Evidence

My main argument here is that sovereignty saturated the colonial participants at all levels, and if the individual did not, on the surface, exhibit a pronounced sense of sovereignty, it is because all colonialist projects possessed a corporate nature, and the individual was forced to corral himself within the boundaries of any collective body that permitted the closest expression of his sense of sovereignty. It is no coincidence that the first rise of the company as a corporatized body was squarely situated within a colonialist venture: the British East India Company was well known for its claims to sovereignty or quasi-sovereignty, as well as for its corrupt actions that exhibited the length and width of sovereign behavior. The self-constituting capacity of the colonists traveled from the highest to the lowest echelons of the project, and had no necessary or exclusive connection with mere greed for wealth or territory. The project, individual and collective, was about sovereign domination of a new land, in which the natives were incidental and little more than a disposable attachment, and where will to power was restrained, if at all, by none other than the will itself. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 417

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty and the exception, and to corporate personhood debates in legal history.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does the corporate form’s birth in colonial ventures explain something about modern corporate sovereignty claims?