Lax Distributive Laws for Topology, I

For a quantaloid Q, considered as a bicategory, Walters introduced categories enriched in Q. Here we extend the study of monad-quantale-enriched categories of the past fifteen years by introducing monad-quantaloid-enriched categories. We do so by making lax distributive laws of a monad T over the discrete presheaf monad of the small quantaloid Q the primary data of the theory, rather than the lax monad extensions of T to the category of Q-relations that they equivalently describe. The central piece of the paper establishes a Galois correspondence between such lax distributive laws and lax Eilenberg-Moore T-algebra structures on the set of discrete presheaves over the object set of Q. We give a precise comparison of these structures with the more restrictive notion introduced by Hofmann in the case of a commutative quantale, called natural topological theories here, and describe the lax monad extensions introduced by him as minimal. Throughout the paper, a variety of old and new examples of ordered, metric and topological structures illustrate the theory developed, which includes the consideration of algebraic functors and change-of-base functors in full generality.