Transnational and Multinational Corporations ELANA SHEVER Colgate University, United States Te anthropology of transnational and multinational corporations (hereafer T&MCs) intertwines anthropological concerns with capitalism, personhood, institutions, devel- opment, and globalization to critically examine one of the most powerful phenomena in the world. Although there is a long history of anthropological inquiry into problems in which T&MCs play important parts, it was only at the turn of the twenty-frst century that T&MCs themselves emerged as the central object of inquiry in a substantial body of anthropological research. Te resulting scholarship demonstrates that the transnational corporation is not merely a dominant economic institution, an elaborate bureaucratic structure that separates ownership from control, and a “fction” of the European legal tradition inficted on the rest of the world; it is a total social fact that shapes and is shaped by the world around it. Anthropologists have shown how T&MCs afect large-scale political–economic processes and human subjectivities across the globe. Tey have also revealed how T&MCs are themselves afected by social systems and cultural forces they do not control. As anthropology has shifed from primarily studying corporations from the perspective of their ofce buildings and factory foors to increasingly examining how corporations operate across spatial borders and institutional boundaries, it has changed how we understand what a corporation is. Te growing body of scholarship investigating the quotidian lives of particular T&MCs reveals them to be culturally constructed, unstable, and context-specifc political–economic and social organizations that need to be continually regenerated even as their power endures. Theorizing the transnational corporate form Te corporate form emerged from the European legal tradition, but its social history is global. Mauss (1985) pointed out that the conception of a corporation as a compos- ite form of personhood can be found in ancient Roman law. Tis notion of corporate personhood later traveled to Christian theology and English legal theory before being taken up in transnational business. In these early instances, a corporation is a special kind of composite person with potentially perpetual existence. Tis form of personhood has been the basis of some of the largest and most powerful entities in world history: the church, the kingdom, the state, the empire, and the colonial corporation. Yet its meaning and use have changed. For much of European history, corporations were seldom the proft-seeking enterprises they are currently. Anthropologists have revealed how the Te International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Edited by Hilary Callan. © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. DOI: 10.1002/9781118924396.wbiea2079