The Origins of the Business Corporation

2020 ◽  
pp. 251-274
Author(s):  
Ron Harris
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Family Firms ◽  
Early History ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Business Corporation ◽  
Legal Personality ◽  
For Profit ◽  
Northwest Europe ◽  
History Of

This chapter explains why and how the corporation was transformed into a business corporation. It follows the early history of the corporation and examines how the corporation acquired attributes on separate legal personality and collective decision making, which were familiar to Edward Coke and his contemporaries. The chapter argues that the years around 1600 constitute an organizational revolution. It explains why European corporations were transformed around 1600 from public entities into joint-stock, for-profit entities and why this occurred in Northwest Europe and not elsewhere in Europe. The chapter also talks about why corporations were so suitable for long-distance trade that they rapidly took control of the Cape Route and rose to dominance in Eurasian trade as a whole, at the expense of family firms, merchant networks, and ruler-operated enterprises.

Going the Distance

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ron Harris
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Family Firms ◽  
Global Trade ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Business Corporation ◽  
Modern Economy ◽  
Key Factor ◽  
Silk Route ◽  
Passive Investors

Before the seventeenth century, trade across Eurasia was mostly conducted in short segments along the Silk Route and Indian Ocean. Business was organized in family firms, merchant networks, and state-owned enterprises, and dominated by Chinese, Indian, and Arabic traders. However, around 1600 the first two joint-stock corporations, the English and Dutch East India Companies, were established. This book tells the story of overland and maritime trade without Europeans, of European Cape Route trade without corporations, and of how new, large-scale, and impersonal organizations arose in Europe to control long-distance trade for more than three centuries. It shows that by 1700, the scene and methods for global trade had dramatically changed: Dutch and English merchants shepherded goods directly from China and India to northwestern Europe. To understand this transformation, the book compares the organizational forms used in four major regions: China, India, the Middle East, and Western Europe. The English and Dutch were the last to leap into Eurasian trade, and they innovated in order to compete. They raised capital from passive investors through impersonal stock markets and their joint-stock corporations deployed more capital, ships, and agents to deliver goods from their origins to consumers. The book explores the history behind a cornerstone of the modern economy, and how this organizational revolution contributed to the formation of global trade and the creation of the business corporation as a key factor in Europe's economic rise.

Islands of Stability: Engaging Emergence from Cellular Automata to the Occupy Movement

2014 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Pickering
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Cellular Automata ◽  
Black Box ◽  
Collective Decision ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
Occupy Movement ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S

"Instead of considering »being with« in terms of non-problematic, machine-like places, where reliable entities assemble in stable relationships, STS conjures up a world where the achievement of chancy stabilisations and synchronisations is local.We have to analyse how and where a certain regularity and predictability in the intersection of scientists and their instruments, say, or of human individuals and groups, is produced.The paper reviews models of emergence drawn from the history of cybernetics—the canonical »black box,« homeostats, and cellular automata—to enrich our imagination of the stabilisation process, and discusses the concept of »variety« as a way of clarifying its difficulty, with the antiuniversities of the 1960s and the Occupy movement as examples. Failures of »being with« are expectable. In conclusion, the paper reviews approaches to collective decision-making that reduce variety without imposing a neoliberal hierarchy. "

scholarly journals Of Bodies Politic and Pecuniary: A Brief History of Corporate Purpose

2020 ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
David Guenther
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Enterprise ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Enterprises ◽  
American Business ◽  
Business Corporation ◽  
For Profit ◽  
Early American ◽  
Bright Line ◽  
History Of

American corporate law has long drawn a bright line between for-profit and non-profit corporations. In recent years, hybrid or social enterprises have increasingly put this bright-line distinction to the test. This Article asks what we can learn about the purpose of the American business corporation by examining its history and development in the United States in its formative period from roughly 1780-1860. This brief history of corporate purpose suggests that the duty to maximize profits in the for-profit corporation is a relatively recent development. Historically, the American business corporation grew out of an earlier form of corporation that was neither for-profit nor nonprofit in today’s parlance but rather, served a multitude of municipal, religious, charitable, educational, and eventually business purposes in early nineteenth-century New England. The purposes of early American business corporations—rather than maximization of profit to private shareholders— were often overtly public, involving development of local transportation, finance, and other much-needed economic infrastructure. With the rise of factory-based manufacturing, railroads, and other capital-intensive industries in the middle decades of the nineteenth century and the advent of general incorporation statutes, the purpose of the American business corporation shifted fundamentally from public to private. By 1860, the stage was set for the modern firm. This Article concludes that the corporation has no intrinsic purpose. The corporation’s defining features are separate legal personality and the ability to aggregate capital toward any otherwise lawful end, whether for-profit or nonprofit. Social enterprises today more closely resemble the early American business corporation than the profit-maximizing modern firm. Social enterprise should be seen less as a legally uncertain novelty than a return to the business corporation’s nineteenth-century American roots. Finally, this Article suggests potential limitations for social enterprise.

Exiles as Stakeholders

2021 ◽  
pp. 115-140
Author(s):  
Ashwini Vasanthakumar
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Boundary Problem ◽  
Democratic Theory ◽  
Collective Decision ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Moral Hazards ◽  
Competing Interests

This chapter examines how much influence exiles are entitled to wield in the homeland. I situate this question in the broader boundary problem in democratic theory: how to determine who is entitled to participate in collective decision-making. I examine two leading principles of inclusion, and then elaborate on and apply the stakeholder principle: insofar as exiles have particular interests at stake, they are entitled to a correspondingly weighty say. The stakeholder principle admits of a hierarchy of stake and say, which protects against the moral hazards of ‘long-distance nationalism’ while reaffirming that identification alone entitles exiles to some say. I outline three types of interests exiles can have at stake and illustrate the competing interests within a stakeholder community, and the problem of some exiles having disproportionate influence. The stakeholder principle correctly diagnoses worries about ‘armchair revolutionaries’: the problem with exile influence is not when exiles have a say, but when they have too much of a say relative to others.

French officials and the insecurities of change in sub-Saharan Africa: Dakar, 19 August 1960 revisited

2013 ◽  
pp. 44-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Keese
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
Early History ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
French Military ◽  
Military Commanders ◽  
History Of ◽  
Sub Saharan ◽  
New Interpretation ◽  
New Situation

How would French services operating on the ground, charged with ‘decolonizing’ African territories, adapt to the new situation? This question is posed by Alexander Keese with regard to a dramatic incident in the decolonization process, the August 1960 stand-off between Senegalese and Soudanese politicians and officials in Dakar, an event that led to the end of the short-lived Federation of Mali between Soudan (present-day Mali) and Senegal. French military commanders were still in charge of the vast majority of the armed forces in these former colonial territories. These commanders were faced with an unfamiliar process of decision-making. Keese analyses the behaviour of these remaining French representatives on the ground, and comes to a new interpretation of a crucial event in the early history of Franco-African networks.

Cotton Textiles in England: the East India Company's Attempt to Exploit Developments in Fashion 1660-172

1969 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 28-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Audrey W. Douglas
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Daniel Defoe ◽  
Cotton Fabrics ◽  
Early History ◽  
East India Company ◽  
For Profit ◽  
Finishing Process ◽  
Cotton Textiles ◽  
History Of ◽  
Striking Success

Men and women who wish to uphold the interests of the textile trade should “make fashion follow the trade, and not trade the fashion,” declared Daniel Defoe in 1705. But long before this time the East India Company had discovered that the exploitation of fashion for profit is a more artful business than a mere dictatorship exercised by the “trade.” After 1660 the Company's policy regarding the import of cotton textiles was particularly concerned to influence the type and design of goods produced in India to make them serve current English needs and trends in taste. Striking success was achieved by the end of the century, but thereafter the flow of cotton manufactures was impeded by serious difficulties, chiefly the restrictions imposed on the trade by prohibition acts in 1701 and 1721, together with the competitive development of domestic calico-printing.The English had of course been familiar with cotton for several centuries before 1660, although the acquaintance brought little opportunity to build up technological skill in the processing of pure cotton goods from the raw state to the finished piece. Imports had included raw “cotton-wool” from the Levant for use in stuffing and quilting and fustians of European manufacture containing cotton. But probably it was not until the sixteenth century that a cotton weft was used in the production of domestic fustians, and not until the seventeenth that cotton was brought into linen and smallwares manufacturing. The early history of pure cotton fabrics in England is debatable ground, partly because of confusing terminology; so-called “cottons,” for instance, were produced in England before 1660, but the term is descriptive of the finishing process, or “cottoning,” rather than of content.

An Early History of Multiple Criteria Decision Making

2013 ◽  
Vol 20 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 87-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Murat Köksalan ◽  
Jyrki Wallenius ◽  
Stanley Zionts
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Multiple Criteria Decision Making ◽  
Early History ◽  
Multiple Criteria ◽  
History Of

Qijia and Erlitou: The Question of Contacts with Distant Cultures

Early China ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 17-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louisa G. Fitzgerald-Huber
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
Early History ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Central Plains ◽  
Southern Siberia ◽  
Eurasian Steppe ◽  
Horse Riding ◽  
History Of ◽  
Metal Age ◽  
Specific Metal

This paper investigates the relationships between the Early Metal Age cultures of the Inner Mongolia and Gansu-Qinghai area with the Erlitou culture of the Central Plains region, and addresses the issue whether specific metal objects characteristic of these cultures may have their source of inspiration in areas as remote as southern Siberia and present-day Afghanistan and southern Turkmenistan. The proposal that China at the very beginning of its Bronze Age may have been affected by long-distance cultural transmissions depends upon recent reevaluations of the early history of the Eurasian steppe, in particular the advent of nomadic pastoralism and horse riding, and upon newly recalibrated carbon dates ascertained for specific Siberian sites and for the Bactrian-Margiana complex.

The London Symphony Orchestra: The First Decade Revisited

2013 ◽  
Vol 138 (2) ◽  
pp. 313-376
Author(s):  
Simon McVeigh
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Symphony Orchestra ◽  
Governance Structure ◽  
Early History ◽  
International Standards ◽  
Financial Security ◽  
British Music ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
History Of

ABSTRACTThe early history of the London Symphony Orchestra and its association with Richter and Elgar have been well documented, yet there is much still to be learnt about the 1904 break with the autocratic Henry Wood and about the artistic and commercial decisions facing the new self-governing orchestra. From the start, the LSO confidently allied itself with international standards and cosmopolitan repertoire, and a roster of celebrated conductors to match. But financial security was less easily gained. Detailed analysis of the finances of the prestigious subscription series shows initial eclecticism giving way to concentration on the Austro-German canon in reaction to commercial and social pressures. British music came in and out of focus, despite the nationalistic mood of the time, and the analysis places in sharp relief the successes and failures of the link with Elgar. Furthermore, in an extraordinary sacrifice of self-interest, the freelance members decided to renounce normal fees for the subscription series in order to gain lucrative engagements elsewhere: thus the orchestra acted more as an agency than as a stable business proposition. Nevertheless, the innovative governance structure, underpinning a combination of resolute management, entrepreneurial energy and communal decision-making, eventually proved a viable and sustainable model that has remained influential up to this day.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document