The public rivalry between regulated and joint stock corporations and the development of seventeenth-century corporate constitutions

The launch of the East India Company in 1599 relied on the engagement of an investing public. Despite this, little is known about how and why ordinary individual investors chose to invest in the corporation or what institutional frameworks supported them. While the later ‘financial revolution’ would radically alter the relationship between the state, investors, and financial organizations, this process does not adequately explain the earlier development of an investing public. Using a newly developed dataset of members’ familial, neighbourhood, civic, and business connections, this article reconstructs the social networks of East India Company investors in 1599. This analysis reveals that the company was formulated within an intensely interconnected investment environment – linkages that were used to distribute information and provide access to seemingly illiquid markets. Social networks played a key role in how people decided about where, when, with whom, and how much to invest during the expansion of investment opportunities in early modern England.

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The changing place of fraud in seventeenth-century public debates about international trading corporations

Pettigrew

2017

Business History

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This essay surveys the changing role of fraud (dishonest and immoral commercial practices) in public justifications for corporate management of overseas trade in England across the seventeenth century. It argues that the perceived likelihood of fraud in international commercial settings played a critical role in public justifications for trading corporations at the beginning of the seventeenth century. The essay suggests that these justifications were challenged from the 1690s. The essay explores three aspects of this challenge: first, the ways in which agents of the East India Company convinced the Company to liberate private trade (an activity previously defined as fraudulent by the Company and the Courts); second, the arguments from the 1680s that depicted the joint-stock corporation as an unaccountable, soulless entity whose claim to public trust looked less credible; third, how decades of accumulated experience of international trading contexts (and interactions with non-European merchants) prompted pamphleteers to promote the possibility (and reality) of unregulated trade in those settings. All three helped to erode the former association between private individual trade in international contexts as likely to encourage dishonesty, immorality, and fraud. This change therefore led to the corporate body itself becoming a possible vehicle for fraud rather than the individual international merchant (who the corporation was meant originally to regulate). The paper analyses public deliberations about fraud and corporations to make interventions in the history of economic thought, the history of trading companies, and the history of economic crime (and especially its rhetorical role in debates about the regulation of trade).

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The public rivalry between regulated and joint stock corporations and the development of seventeenth-century corporate constitutions

Cited by 7 publications

References 12 publications

Leadership and the Social Agendas of the Seventeenth-Century English Trading Corporation

Leadership and the Social Agendas of the Seventeenth-Century English Trading Corporation

The Social Networks of Investment in Early Modern England

The changing place of fraud in seventeenth-century public debates about international trading corporations

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