ABSTRACT
This chapter frames the study of multinational corporate crime in the context of both the globalization of capital and crime, and then pursues four objectives: (1) to provide an overview of the evolution of corporate illegalities away from criminal felonies and toward civil torts; (2) to establish what constitutes economic and political power in the contemporary era of global capitalism; (3) to characterize some of the fundamental contradictions of capitalism that help to connect the inter-related and reciprocal worlds of state and corporate fraud; and (4) to explain the dynamic relationships between capitalist state control and routinized crime control. The joint stock companies such as the British South Sea Company, which had been chartered to transport and/or sell African slaves to the Spanish colonies in America, represented the creation of a new corporate legal form that rendered mergers and monopolies of limited social responsibility.
