{"id":200,"date":"2006-07-04T11:08:37","date_gmt":"2006-07-04T11:08:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chriscurnow.com\/index.php\/2006\/07\/04\/a_brief_history\/"},"modified":"2006-07-04T11:08:37","modified_gmt":"2006-07-04T11:08:37","slug":"a_brief_history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chriscurnow.com\/?p=200","title":{"rendered":"A brief history of the corporation"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been thinking a lot lately about how corporations came to be and<br \/>\nhow they came to be so powerful. There is nothing wrong in my mind with<br \/>\npowerful corporations. More important is how they exercise their power<br \/>\nand what moral, ethical and legal power we have to place constraints<br \/>\non their exercise of power.<\/p>\n<p>It put me in mind of something I read some time ago written by Art<br \/>\nKleiner &#8211; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.chriscurnow.com\/books\/archives\/2006\/07\/the_age_of_here.php\">The Age of Heretics<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Kleiner, summarizing John P Davis&#8217; book <em>Corporations <\/em>(Capricorn<br \/>\nBooks1961), traces the history of the modern corporation back to \u201cthe<br \/>\nmonasteries of the early Christian Church\u2019. Commercialisation<br \/>\ncame when the mercantile stock companies began organizing expeditions<br \/>\nto far parts of the globe across dangerous waters:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>If a ship failed to return, the owner would qualify for debtor\u2019s<br \/>\nprison; if an owner died before a ship returned, his creditors might<br \/>\nnot be paid. Thus European kings and queens chartered corporations \u2014<br \/>\ncreatures of legal sovereignty, named after the Latin word for \u201cbody.\u201d<br \/>\nThe stock company had no human body, but it was corporeal in every other<br \/>\nsense. It could own property, outlive its human members, and borrow<br \/>\nor lend money. The monarchs had designed these new institutions to carry<br \/>\nout the policies that they found too risky to undertake themselves.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Kleiner goes on to recount a major turning point in corporate<br \/>\nhistory when, in 1811, the New York legislature <\/p>\n<blockquote><p>established a blanket corporate charter. Anyone who met the<br \/>\nlegal criteria was automatically granted the powers of a company.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>This led to a flurry of legislation as the states of America<br \/>\nat one and the same time competed to attract entrepreneurs but also limit<br \/>\nthose same entrepreneurs\u2019 abuse of privileges the legislatures had granted<br \/>\nthem. Finally, Kleiner concludes:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>By 1945, \u2026 the commercial corporation had come to dominate<br \/>\nthe culture of the world.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I have posted this brief history because over the next few days I want<br \/>\nto discuss the purpose of corporations. Corporations were, and still<br \/>\nare, created by an act of the state. Individuals are given protection<br \/>\nand privileges under law to act as a company. In return the state can<br \/>\nexpect those same companies to meet certain obligations and responsibilities.<br \/>\nThere&#8217;s plenty of room to discuss what those obligations and responsibilities<br \/>\nmight be, but that they exist and corporations have both a legal and<br \/>\nmoral duty to meet them is beyond dispute. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been thinking a lot lately about how corporations came to be and how they came to be so powerful. There is nothing wrong in my mind with powerful corporations. More important is how they exercise their power and what moral, ethical and legal power we have to place constraints on their exercise of power. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-200","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscurnow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscurnow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscurnow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscurnow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscurnow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=200"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/chriscurnow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscurnow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=200"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscurnow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=200"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscurnow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}