joint-stock company

Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea
by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge
Published 4 Mar 2003

The first is merely as an organization engaged in business: this definition, as we shall see, includes everything from informal Assyrian trading arrangements to modern leveraged buyouts. The second is more specific: the limited-liability joint-stock company is a distinct legal entity (so distinct, in fact, that its shareholders can sue it), endowed by government with certain collective rights and responsibilities. This was the institution that the Utopians’ “Astonishing Fact,” the Companies Act of 1862, unleashed, and which is still spreading around the world, conquering such obstinate refuseniks as the Chinese Communist Party and the partners of Goldman Sachs. Though this is primarily a book about the joint-stock company, it unapologetically strays into broader territory. From the beginning of economic life, businesspeople have looked for ways to share the risks and rewards of their activities.

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Set beside partnerships and various forms of unincorporated companies, incorporated joint-stock companies (i.e., ones recognized by state statute) fared badly for the next century. The British and the French treated them with suspicion. “They are behind the times,” thundered one governor of Pennsylvania, “they belong to an age that is past.”2 New companies were chartered, of course; but the process of doing so was cumbersome. It was not until a combination of legal and economic changes from the 1820s onward that the modern company began to take shape.3 SLAVERS AND INDUSTRIALISTS In Britain, the prejudice against joint-stock companies created by the South Sea Bubble was later reinforced by scandals involving both the Charitable Corporation and the York Building Company.

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As we have already noted, the ironically named South Sea Bubble Act survived the scandal. It required every joint-stock company to possess a charter from parliament—something that involved huge costs in terms of money, time, and uncertainty. Most British businessmen preferred other sorts of organizations, such as partnerships and various unincorporated companies (partnerships that tried to mimic some of the qualities of companies by making their shares freely transferable and doing something to limit the liability of sleeping partners who were not directly involved in the business).4 There were several frenzies of joint-stock company creation—most notably to build canals.

Investment: A History
by Norton Reamer and Jesse Downing
Published 19 Feb 2016

Nevertheless, the beginning of democratization itself has been a dominant force in the history of investment, and we can trace its lineage to these developments. 64 Investment: A History THE EMERGENCE OF THE MODERN CORPORATE FORM The advent of the corporate form, as embodied in joint-stock companies, was a vital precursor to developing capitalism, greater economic progress, and widespread financing and ownership of commercial and industrial enterprises. While the focus of this chapter will be on the first Dutch and English joint-stock companies founded in the early seventeenth century, recall that the original precursor to the jointstock company appeared more than a millennium before—the Roman societas publicanorum.

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These sailors sought permission to engage in trade, and Ivan acquiesced, giving the sailors a missive to the English king as his official acceptance. Because King Edward VI died during the initial expedition, it was ultimately Mary I, Queen of England and Ireland, who issued a charter to the company in 1555.3 There are other early examples of joint-stock companies—for instance, one of the first investments by the European public in the natural bounty of the so-called New World was, in fact, a joint-stock company. On April 10, 1606, King James I granted a charter for the London Company. It was inspired by English envy of the Spanish, who found massive quantities of precious metals in the New World. As a condition of the charter, King James I sought to cash in on what he hoped would be abundant profits and stated that one-fifth of the metal discoveries be ceded to the throne.4 The company was composed of 145 men who sailed from England to the New World between December 1606 and May 1607, making port in Virginia (hence the company’s later name, the Virginia Company).

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In the end, of course, the fraudulent activities of Enron and Bernie Madoff are echoes of this forerunner some three centuries earlier. Adam Smith, the oft-cited “father of modern economics,” took an entirely adversarial view of the structure of the joint-stock companies The Democratization of Investment 69 and the notion of investment management more broadly. Of course, Smith was highly influenced by the South Sea Bubble collapse, and in The Wealth of Nations he wrote, “Negligence and profusion, must always prevail, more or less, in the management of the affairs of such a [joint-stock] company.” He claimed that the fiduciaries could not possibly be fully dutiful and completely concerned about the welfare of shareholders because the money is not their own: “The directors of such companies, however, being the managers rather of other people’s money than of their own, it cannot well be expected that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which the partners in private copartner[ship] frequently watch over their own.”10 Adam Smith seemed to apply the famous principle of self-interest to the management of investment funds and, in so doing, deemed it a poor idea.

Money for Nothing
by Thomas Levenson
Published 18 Aug 2020

There, these latest in the line of England’s new men—including the infamous stockjobbers—dealt in a variety of the forms money was beginning to take, especially in the shares of one of the most fertile of these inventions, the joint-stock company. * * * — AT BOTTOM, THE joint-stock structure was simple: a group of investors provided capital to pay for some action—in the early days, usually a trading venture. In return they received shares in proportion to the amount each invested. This was more than a simple pooling of resources; partnerships and more temporary alliances existed long before the joint-stock company emerged. Unlike such arrangements, a joint-stock approach shifted what it meant to own a business.

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Instead, during the 1700s and well into the next century the British government limited who could use London’s capital market. By law, only a handful of joint-stock companies could play in that sandbox, almost exclusively familiar names: the Bank of England, the East India Company, a handful of insurance companies, and a few others. For the most part, the dominant institution that had ready access to the market for debt was the Treasury itself. This was due in part to the fevered politics at the peak of the South Sea season. The “Bubble Act,” which impeded the formation of new joint-stock companies, remained in effect until 1825. While plenty of clever people managed to find other ways, often partnerships, to organize business ventures, it still blocked the majority from the most obvious source of capital for private enterprise.

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The success in raising those first two loans produced the inevitable sequel. A couple million pounds was great—but the fighting was still going on, and the escalating costs of the army deployed in the Low Countries soon exhausted those funds. One response was to create the Bank of England, which opened its doors as a joint-stock company on July 27, 1694. It existed for a reason: the price of its charter was a £1.2 million loan to the state. That requirement turned the fledgling institution into something new on Europe’s financial landscape. Because those who made deposits with the bank could use the banknotes they received in return as cash in any transaction where the other party would accept it, the Bank performed what we now call fractional reserve banking.

Boom and Bust: A Global History of Financial Bubbles
by William Quinn and John D. Turner
Published 5 Aug 2020

In contrast, the Bank of England and Bank of Scotland were largely detached from the bubble, and in 1721 both institutions actively worked to sustain credit flows and to maintain monetary stability.76 A final consequence of the bubbles, common to all three affected countries, was the decline of the joint-stock company form. Such a device 37 BOOM AND BUST was out of the question in France, which was so scarred by the experience that it reverted to its prior financial system characterised by strict adherence to religious directives on money lending. French financial institutions and markets thus remained stagnant and inefficient for over a century.77 Britain, under pressure from the South Sea Company, passed the Bubble Act in 1720, which forbade the formation of any joint-stock companies in the absence of parliamentary approval. The importance of this Act may have been overstated – joint-stock companies were already illegal under the common law – but in any case, very few formed after the South Sea scheme collapsed.78 The Netherlands passed no equivalent law but, curiously, the joint-stock format almost disappeared anyway.79 This resulted in a widespread absence of companies with transferable shares, removing the marketability side of the bubble triangle.

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The absence of reported price data and the very thin market for canal shares also makes it very difficult to assess the extent of the boom in canal share prices in this era. 4. Day, A Defence of Joint Stock Companies. 5. Davenport-Hines, ‘Wilks, John’. 6. The Times, 20 September 1826, p. 2. 7. The Times, 19 October 1826, p. 2. 8. Davenport-Hines, ‘Wilks, John’. 9. Hills, Thomas and Dinsdale, ‘The UK recession in context’, Data Annex. 10. Tooke, A History of Prices, p. 148. 11. Randall, Real del Monte, p. 33. 12. Fenn, British Investment in South America, p. 61. 13. Costeloe, ‘William Bullock’. 14. Source: English, A Complete View of Joint Stock Companies. 229 NOTES TO PAGES 43–8 15. Prospectus of the Anglo-Mexican Mining Association in English, A General Guide to the Companies, pp. 4–8. 16.

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Prospectus of the Anglo-Mexican Mining Association in English, A General Guide to the Companies, pp. 4–8. 16. English, A Complete View of Joint Stock Companies, p. 30. 17. Sources: Anon., The South Sea Bubble, pp. 171–9; Report of the Select Committee on Joint Stock Companies, 1844, Appendix 4, pp. 334–9. 18. Gayer, Rostow and Schwartz, Growth and Fluctuation, Vol. I, pp. 377–410. 19. Head, Rough Notes Taken During Some Rapid Journeys Across the Pampas, pp. 303–4. 20. Cited in Dawson, The First Latin American Debt Crisis, p. 101. 21. Excerpt in Anon., The South Sea Bubble, pp. 160–1. 22. Francis, History of the Bank of England, Vol.

How We Got Here: A Slightly Irreverent History of Technology and Markets
by Andy Kessler
Published 13 Jun 2005

What Hakluyt couldn’t have possibly imagined, but alluded to, was that the stock market would be the great allocator of capital to these joint stock companies in such a way to constantly propel society forward on a vector of progress that no King could do on his own. It’s odd that a tool of mercantilism, the ability to raise risk capital on the expectation of returns by selling shares in a company, is today the backbone of capitalism. Joint stock companies were an interesting turning point for England. In Spain and France, the monarchies owned everything. In England, joint stock companies were almost a form of stock options. They extended property rights to individuals, AND provided a big fat carrot for the company to succeed.

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Hakluyt and others suggested that funds could be raised from England’s wealthy class. Elizabeth agreed and the joint stock company was born. Rather than be funded by the Crown or just one individual, capital instead would be raised from a large group of wealthy individuals, minimizing the risk for each. Elizabeth provided the license, FUNDING BRITISH TRADE 63 so to speak, but the markets, which were nothing more than the pooled wealth of Elizabeth’s wealthy subjects, provided the capital. Liquidity would be provided as shares of these joint stock companies traded hands on the Royal Exchange, or in private transactions out on “the Street.”

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With flooded mines (market demand), Watt’s condenser (technology), Boulton’s money (capital), Parliament’s patent (intellectual property rights), a ready workforce (religious persecution), and Wilkinson’s precise cylinders (technology), they had just about everything. What they were missing was a successful business model. It was Matthew Boulton who came up with one. Boulton and Watt didn’t actually sell steam engines since no one could afford one. Most of the early customers were Cornish mines. Beyond a few Parliament-sponsored joint-stock companies, the stock market and banking system were not quite developed, especially for risky businesses. Limited liability for corporations wouldn’t be the law until 1860. Miners lived day to day and used a cost book system of accounting (I slept through accounting, too.) At the end of each quarter, all the partners in the mine would meet at the Count House to go over the numbers and split any profits.

Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Shaped the Modern World - and How Their Invention Could Make or Break the Planet
by Jane Gleeson-White
Published 14 May 2011

Huge amounts of capital expenditure were required at the outset and they were raised not through profits but from private investors on stock exchanges at a 10 per cent dividend, and managed by joint stock companies. This form of collective investment had been used in Britain from 1600 by enterprises such as the East India Company to finance long and dangerous sea voyages. But a rash of speculation and spectacular losses brought its growth to an abrupt halt with the passing in 1720 of the so-called ‘Bubble Act’, which prohibited all joint stock companies not authorised by royal charter. When the Bubble Act was eventually repealed in 1825, a second and abiding era of joint stock activity dawned in Britain—and with it came the metamorphosis of bookkeeping into a new profession: accounting.

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The concept of ‘limited liability’—which protected investors from the losses incurred by the organisations in which they had invested—was another accounting issue raised by the joint stock company. Limited liability soon became a legally required characteristic of the corporation and made the distinction between capital and income a legal necessity. It was specifically allowed for in France in the Commercial Code of 1807, and in Scotland and Ireland around the same time. But it did not exist in England. As one English Lord put it in 1788, ‘the law of England is otherwise, the rule being that if a partner shares in the advantages, he also shares in all disadvantages’. Because of its traumatic first experiences of joint stock companies, early British corporate law provided for the unlimited liability of associates.

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Crusades 16, 17, 18 currencies 100 da Gama, Vasco 29 da Pisa, Leonardo see Fibonacci da Vinci, Leonardo 7, 27, 32, 47, 60, 65, 80–2, 84, 87–8 Dafforne, Richard 120–3 Dandolo, Enrico 52 Dark Ages dark arts 35, 83 Darwin, Charles 139, 165 Das Kapital (Marx) 165 Dasgupta, Sir Partha 231–2, 237, 238, 239 Datini, Francesco 23–6, 52, 96 de’ Barbari, Jacopo 79 de’ Belfolci, Folco 34, 44 De divina proportione (Pacioli) 66, 82, 84, 85–6 De ludo scacchorum (Pacioli) 87–8 De pictura (Alberti) 60, 117 De quinque corporibus (Piero) 66 De viribus quantitatis (Pacioli) 83 Dean, Graeme W. 203 debit and credit entries 13, 55, 93–4, 100 difficulties 101–2, 122–3 The Decline of the West (Spengler) 167 Defoe, Daniel 127–8 della Francesca, Piero 7, 32, 34, 44–5, 46, 47 mathematical treatises 45, 66, 75 perspective painting 60, 64, 76–7 della Rovere, Giuliano 59 Deloitte, William 145 Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu 217 demand management 185 democracy 15 depreciation 148, 149, 231 Der moderne Kapitalismus (Sombart) 161–2, 171 derivatives market 198, 200 Descartes, René 40 d’Este, Isabella 83, 84, 88 dividends 144, 146, 147, 148, 149, 202 Doge’s Palace 50, 56 Domenici, Pete V. 191 domestic accounts 15–16 double-entry bookkeeping 8, 115, 120, 166 Badoer’s system 55 and capitalism 159–60, 161–75 and decision-making 126–7 earliest surviving 20–1 to improve the mind 125 link with rhetoric 172–3 in modern era 135–6, 249 origins 6–7, 16, 21–2 Pacioli’s definition 92–3 six essential features 20–1 texts on 117, 136 use by Datini 24, 26 Venetian 55, 67, 97–100, 123–7, 131 see also Particularis de computis et scripturis du Pont, Irénée 156 ducats 50, 55 Dürer, Albrecht 79–80 earnings per share (EPS) 219 earth see planet Earth Earth Summit 2012 248–9 East India Company 142 Ebbers, Bernie 213 eco-accounting 249 economic growth 192–3, 225, 227, 233, 242, 245, 248 economics 185 political economy 171 ecosystems 239–40, 247 education 245 Euclid’s Elements 37–8 quadrivium 36, 38, 43 trivium 38, 43 Egypt 35, 36 Eisenstein, Elizabeth 116–17 Elements (Euclid) 37–8, 39, 67, 68, 84 Elgin Marbles 15 Engels, Friedrich 162, 164, 165 England 116, 121, 131, 133, 147 Enron 3, 173, 194–9, 201, 207, 212–13, 214–16, 222–3 environmental accounting 233–8, 245, 247 environmental damage 222–3, 224–5, 232–3, 240, 241–2, 248 equity 21, 243 Erasmus of Rotterdam 68, 84–5 Erlich, Everett 235 Ernst & Young 209, 210, 216, 217 Espeland, Wendy Nelson 172–3 Euclid, Elements 37–8, 39, 67, 68, 75, 84 Eugenius IV, Pope 34 Europe 17, 20, 21, 22–3, 40, 116, 156, 188 accounting associations 153 currencies 25 medieval 26, 70–1 universities 30, 40, 42 vernacular languages 41 European Environment Agency 247 Evans, John H. 173–5 exchange rates 55 externalities 236 factory system 136–7, 138, 139–41, 165, 166 Farolfi ledger 20–1 Fastow, Andrew 213 Fells, J.M. 140–1 Fibonacci 18–19, 75 Fibonacci numbers 19–20 Liber abaci 19–20, 22, 39–41, 63, 66, 67, 75 Financial Accounting Standards Board (US) 206, 213 financial information 203–6 financial statements 5, 143, 144, 146, 200, 205, 214, 215 Fitoussi, Jean-Paul 243–4 Florence 6, 17, 34, 61, 64, 84 abbaco schools 41 bank ledger 20 expansion of commerce 21 Flugel, Thomas 127 Fondaco dei Tedeschi 56 Ford Motor Company 250–1 forests 240, 241 Forster, E.M. 154–5 Forster, Nathaniel 137 France 147 Franciscans 62, 65, 88, 89 Frankfurt Book Fair 95 Frederick II 95 Freiburg 27 Friedman, Milton 221 fund transfers 54 G20 249 Galileo 116, 166 Geijsbeek, John B. 157–8 General Electric 204 The General Theory of Employment (Keynes) 177–8, 179, 183, 185–6 Genoa 6, 17 geometry 36, 37, 38, 63, 73, 75, 81 Germany 56, 68, 183 Gertner, Jon 244 Giovanni, Enrico 244 Giovanni Farolfi & Co. 20 Glitnir 5 Global Biodiversity Outlook 3 (Sukhdev) global financial crisis (2008) 3, 5, 197, 215, 242, 243–4 globalisation, of finance 206–7, 219, 221 Goethe, Johann W. von 128–31 golden ratio 66, 86 Goodwin, Sir Fred 197 governmental accounting 120 grammar 38, 43 Great Depression 177, 178, 179, 180, 227 Greece, ancient 15 mathematics 34–5, 37–8, 61 philosophers 37 green accounting 244 Green Economy Report (Sukhdev) 248–9 Greenspan, Alan 227–8 Gross Domestic Product (GDP) 3, 180–2, 225, 227–30, 232–3, 235, 237–8, 242–3, 246 alternatives to 243–7, 249 failings of 246 Gross National Product (GNP) 1–3, 181, 190, 231 Groves, Eddy 208–9 Guidobaldo, Duke of Urbino 66, 72, 79, 92 Gutenberg, Johann 68, 77 Hagen, Everett 186 Hamilton, Alexander 22 Hammurabi’s Code 14 Haq, Mahbub ul 245 Henry VIII 25 Herodotus 36 HIH 208, 209, 213, 215 Hindu–Arabic arithmetic 34, 41, 62, 67 Hindu–Arabic numerals 18–19, 21, 26–7, 38, 44, 52, 71, 75 Hoenig, Chris 246–7 honeybee pollination 237 Hoover, Herbert 177 Hopwood, Anthony housework, unpaid 229 How to Pay for the War (Keynes) 182–3 Hudson, George 142–3 human capital 231, 248 Human Development Index 245 Humanism (Florence) 43–4, 59–60, 68 Huxley, Aldous 32–3 income measurement 218–19, 226 income statements 5, 202, 203, 219 in ancient Rome 16–17 see also profit and loss accounts India 29, 238 trade/double entry 22 Indonesia 240 industrial revolution 131, 133, 139, 200, 226 inflation 182, 183 information processing 203 Institute of Accountants and Bookkeepers of New York (IABNY) 156, 157 Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW) 153, 205–6 Insull, Samuel 202, 214 Insull Utility Investments 201–2 interest payments 25, 54, 96 international accounting 189, 207 International Accounting Standards Board 207, 214 International Monetary Fund 187 internet 204 inventory 97–9, 101 Islam 22, 39 Italy 6, 7, 16, 19, 28, 167–8 mathematics 34–42, 62 Jerusalem 17 joint stock companies 133, 136, 142, 147, 148 Joint Stock Companies Act 1844 144, 149 Jones, Edward T. 133–6 Jones’ English System of Book-keeping 133–6 journal 99, 100, 101, 103, 118, 203 Julius II, Pope 59 Kennedy, Robert F. 1–3, 229–30, 246 Keynes, John Maynard 8, 176, 177–80, 182–7, 190, 250 Klein, Naomi 221, 233 KPMG 210, 214, 217 Kreuger, Ivar 201 Kreuger & Toll 201 Kublai Khan 18 Kuznets, Simon 2, 177, 180–1, 189, 229 Lanchester, John 4, 198 Landefeld, Steven 228 Landsbanki 5 Latin 35, 41, 63, 71, 72, 73, 74, 116, 220 Lawrence, D.H. 154–5 Lay, Kenneth 195, 196, 197, 212–13, 214 ledgers 20, 93, 99–100, 103–4, 118, 203 14th century 24, 93 Badoer’s 52, 55 balancing 111 closing accounts 111–13 Farolfi 20–1 Lee, G.A. 20–1 Lee, Thomas A. 203 Lehman Brothers 5, 216 Liber abaci (Fibonacci) 19–20, 22, 39–41, 63, 66, 67, 75 limited liability 147–8, 149 Littleton, A.C. 17, 140, 146, 147, 158–9 Liverpool and Manchester Railway 141 Lives of the Most Eminent Painters (Vasari) 46 Living Planet Survey 241–2 Lloyds-HBOS 5 London and North Western Railway 141 Louis XII 82 Machiavelli 30 Mackinnon, Nick 79–80 Madoff, Bernie 142 Madonna and Child with Saints 47 magic 35, 40, 83, 220 Mair, John 118, 125, 130 Malatesta family 33–4, 43 Malthus, Thomas 171 Manchester cotton mill (Engels) 165 Mandela, Nelson 221 Mantua 83, 84 manufacturing 136–41 manuscripts 61, 70, 77 Manutius, Aldus 84 Manzoni, Domenico 118–19 maritime insurance 53 Mark the Evangelist 51–2 marketplace, 15th century 95 markets, impact on politics 221, 228 mark-to-model 213 Marshall Plan 188 Marx, Karl 162, 163–5, 171 mass production 138 mathematics 7, 22, 28, 47, 89–90 ancient Greek 34–5, 37–8, 63 Arab 18–19, 63 and art 85–6 Hindu 39–40 in Italy 34–42 and magic 35, 40, 220 medieval European 63, 251–2 taught as astrology 29–30, 42 universal application 73, 116–17 see also arithmetic Mattessich, Richard 12–13, 186 Maurice, Prince of Orange 120 Maxwell Communications 207 McDonald’s 224 Meade, James 183–4 measurement 23, 218–19 Medici of Florence 26, 64, 80, 168, 171 Mehmed II 57 Mellis, John 121 memorandum (waste book) 99, 101, 118 entering transactions 105–7, 118, 122 merchandise 104 merchant bankers 21, 26, 69 merchants 10, 23, 35, 41 Arab 18–19, 25 Indian 22 Italian 40, 42 Phoenician 36 Venetian 18, 27, 55–6, 69, 94–5, 149 Mesopotamia 12, 13, 14 metaphysics 36–7 Middle Ages 60, 251–2 Milan 30, 34, 47, 61, 80–3 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 239 Monsanto 222 Monteage, Stephen 124, 126 Morgan, John Pierpont 156 multiplication 74, 75–6 music 36, 38 Naples 50, 61–2 Napoleonic War 145 national accounts 175, 179–88, 190–3, 226–7, 230, 242, 244 natural capital 230–1, 235–9 navigation charts 23 Neighborhood Tree Survey (NY) 241, 244 Netherlands 119, 120 New Deal (Roosevelt) 177, 202 New York Light Company 155 New York Stock Exchange 155, 176, 201 New Zealand 153, 230 Nicholas V, Pope 61 No Royal Road: Luca Pacioli and his times (Taylor) 46–7 Nordhaus, William D. 180, 191, 227 numbers 37, 218, 219–20, 249 Obama, Barack 215, 246 O’Grady, Oswald 208 Oldcastle, Hugh 121, 124 Olmert, Michael 168 One.Tel 208, 209, 213, 215 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 190, 242 Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC) 188 Ormerod, Paul 244 Ottoman Empire 29, 34, 50, 51, 56, 57, 116 Pacioli, Luca 7, 8, 27–8, 34, 35, 161, 219 abbaco mathematics 40, 41 as academic 65, 80, 84, 89 astrologer 42 birth 30 bookkeeping treatise see Particularis de computis and Piero della Francesca 45–6, 47–8 education 43–8 encyclopaedia see Summa de arithmetica on Euclid 84–5 games/tricks 83–4 itinerant teacher 61–6 last years 88–90 and Leonardo da Vinci 80–2, 84 in Milan 80–3 portrait 47, 79–80 and the printing press 66–72 remembered in Sansepolcro 31–2 in Rome 58–61 in Venice 49–58 Paganini, Paganino de 67–8, 71–2, 78, 85 painting 60, 64, 81 Pakistan 224, 245 Paris 23, 50 Particularis de computis et scripturis (Pacioli) 29–30, 78, 90–114, 117–18, 121 and capitalism 163 foundation of modern accounting 30, 75, 131, 157–9, 166 profit calculation 146–7 partnerships 108–9, 147 Patel, Raj 222, , 224 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act 2010 (US) 246 patronage 59, 67, 70, 72 Paul II, Pope 59 Payen, Jean-Baptiste 139–40 Peking 18 Perspectiva (Witelo) 64 perspective 23, 42, 45, 60, 64, 76–7, 80, 82 Perugia 62–3, 64, 65 Petty, William 180 phi 86 Philip VI 23 philosophy 37, 40 Phoenicians 36 pi 36 Piazza San Marco 56 Pinto cars 250–1 Pisa 6, 17 Pitcher Partners 209, 210, 211–12 plagiarism 63 planet Earth 8–9, 248 accounting for 254 effects of cost-benefit approach 175 health of 224–5, 239 Plato 37 Platonic solids 45, 79, 86 Pliny the Elder 16 pollution 244 Polly Peck International 207 Polo, Marco 18 Ponzi scheme 142 Postlethwayt, Malachy 124 poverty 237, 246, 248, 249 Prato 23–4 Price, Samuel 145 Price Waterhouse 201, 207 PricewaterhouseCoopers 217 principlism 173–4 printing 29, 45, 60, 63, 66–72, 77–8, 90, 115–17 profit 21, 24, 97, 102–3, 127, 146–8, 159, 161, 167, 169 profit and loss accounts 55, 109–11, 112, 166 Pythagoras 35, 36–7 quadrivium 36, 38, 43 quant nerds 220 railways 141–3, 231 Ramsay, Ian 211 Ratdolt, Erhard 68, 116 record-keeping 15 Reformation 33 regulation 206–14, 215 Reid Murray Holdings 207–8 religion 24, 96, 116, 124–5, 220 see also Christian Church; Islam Renaissance 7, 8, 23, 26, 36, 59, 80, 86, 89, 168 art 6, 7, 44, 60, 86 Resurrection (Piero) 32, 33 retained-earnings statements 5, 219 rhetoric 172–3 Rialto 50, 55, 108 Ricardo, David 171 Rich, Jodee 213 Rinieri Fini & Brothers 20 Ripoli Press 70 Robert of Chester 39 Rockefeller, John D. 156 Roman numerals 19, 26–7, 38, 40, 71, 116 Romantic poets, English 131, 154 Rome 58–61, 64, 89 ancient 15–16 Rompiasi family 57, 58, 97 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 177, 178, 181, 202, 214, 215 Rose, Paul L. 71 Ross, Philip 209–10, 211 Rothschild banks 133 Royal Bank of Scotland 173, 197–8 royal estate management 16–17 Rule of Three 38, 41 Russia 153–4 salt 51 Samuelson, Paul A. 191, 227 Sansepolcro 30–4, 43–4, 48, 65, 77, 88–9, 168 Sanuto, Marco 66, 72 Sarbanes, Paul 191 Sarbanes-Oxley Act 2002 212, 215 Sarkozy, Nicolas 242–3, 245 satellite accounts 234–5 scandals/fraud 194–203, 206, 207–12, 215, 225 Schmandt-Besserat, Denise 11–12 Schumpeter, Joseph 169–70 science 35, 37, 40, 42, 67, 76, 116, 166–7 Scotland 27, 147, 150, 153 Scott, Sir Walter 150–1 Scuola di Rialto 58 Second World War 32, 181–5, 187, 227 Securities and Exchange Commission (US) 202–3, 213, 214 Sen, Amartya 243–4, 245 Sforza, Ludovico 80, 81–2, 85, 86, 168 Sikka, Prem 216, 217 Silberman, Mark 213 Simons, James 220 Sistine Chapel 65 Sixtus IV, Pope 59 Skidelsky, Robert 178, 182, 187 Skilling, Jeffrey K. 196, 197, 212, 214 Smith, Adam 171 social sciences 171, 175 socialism 171 Society of Accountants, Edinburgh 152 Sombart, Werner 161–2, 164, 165–6, 166–8, 169, 170, 171–2, 173 Spain 22, 39 Spengler, Oswald 167 Sri Lanka 232–3, 240 State of the USA 246 Stevin, Simon 120, 121, 166, 169 Stiglitz, Joseph 243–4 Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Commission 243–4 stock markets 143 stocktaking 166 Stone, Sir Richard 183–5, 188–9, 190 sub-prime mortgages Sukhdev, Pavan Summa de arithmetica (Pacioli) 57, 61, 62–3, 64, 72–7, 80, 82 printing 66–8, 71–2 publication 32, 77–9 sustainability 232, 243, 249 System of Integrated Environmental and Economic Accounting (UN) 234 System of National Accounts (UN) 189–90, 247 tabulae rationum 16 Taleb, Nassim N. 220 tariffs 63 Tartaglia, Nicholas 76 Taylor, R.

For Profit: A History of Corporations
by William Magnuson
Published 8 Nov 2022

Instead, the East India Company was simply a small society of London merchants desperately seeking to carve out a niche for themselves in the expanding world of global trade. It had been founded on New Year’s Eve of 1600, chartered by Queen Elizabeth I, and its first voyages had been profitable, but not overwhelmingly so. Yet the East India Company did have one great advantage over many other businesses: it was a “joint stock company.” Joint stock companies, a new concept in English law, proved particularly well suited to the grand voyages of the Age of Discovery. In short, they allowed businesses to sell stock in their companies to investors, who would pay in cash up front in return for a slice of future profits down the line. This was convenient for trading companies, which had high up-front costs (equipping and manning merchant vessels was expensive) and would only turn profits, if ever, several months or years later, after their ships had had time to sail halfway around the world and back again.

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This was a remarkable level of efficiency for a business operating in the seventeenth century. But one of the most important innovations of the East India Company was the idea of a stock. The East India Company was not the first joint stock company in England (others date back to as early as the 1550s), but it was certainly the most successful. The joint stock company had three key advantages over the more common partnership: investors had limited liability and thus could not be sued for any losses that the company incurred; stocks could be freely traded among the public and thus could attract capital from a wider array of people; and the company had a stable source of capital and thus could take a longer-term view of its business prospects.

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Smith believed that the shareholders of his day knew little to nothing about the business of the joint stock companies they owned. Instead, they were simply content to receive dividends at the end of the year. Directors similarly did not care much about how the business of their corporation went, as they were “the managers rather of other people’s money than of their own.” They considered it beneath their station to pay attention to small matters of profit and loss. With no one at the helm, joint stock companies were disasters waiting to happen. “Negligence and profusion, therefore, must always prevail, more or less, in the management of the affairs of such a company,” Smith wrote.1 Jensen and Meckling provided a vocabulary for understanding Smith’s original intuition about the flaws of corporations.

Money: Vintage Minis
by Yuval Noah Harari
Published 5 Apr 2018

Many other expeditions didn’t return at all. Ships hit icebergs, foundered in tropical storms, or fell victim to pirates. In order to increase the number of potential investors and reduce the risk they incurred, Europeans turned to limited liability joint-stock companies. Instead of a single investor betting all his money on a single rickety ship, the joint-stock company collected money from a large number of investors, each risking only a small portion of his capital. The risks were thereby curtailed, but no cap was placed on the profits. Even a small investment in the right ship could turn you into a millionaire.

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Thus began the French Revolution. While the French overseas empire was crumbling, the British Empire was expanding rapidly. Like the Dutch Empire before it, the British Empire was established and run largely by private joint-stock companies based in the London stock exchange. The first English settlements in North America were established in the early seventeenth century by joint-stock companies such as the London Company, the Plymouth Company, the Dorchester Company and the Massachusetts Company. The Indian subcontinent too was conquered not by the British state, but by the mercenary army of the British East India Company.

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The Dutch merchants financed conquest by getting loans, and increasingly also by selling shares in their companies that entitled their holders to receive a portion of the company’s profits. Cautious investors who would never have given their money to the king of Spain, and who would have thought twice before extending credit to the Dutch government, happily invested fortunes in the Dutch joint-stock companies that were the mainstay of the new empire. If you thought a company was going to make a big profit but it had already sold all its shares, you could buy some from people who owned them, probably for a higher price than they originally paid. If you bought shares and later discovered that the company was in dire straits, you could try to unload your stock for a lower price.

Financial Market Meltdown: Everything You Need to Know to Understand and Survive the Global Credit Crisis
by Kevin Mellyn
Published 30 Sep 2009

As a result, it got to create the modern commercial and political world in its own image. JOINT-STOCK COMPANIES The global struggle for empire also caused the English and Dutch to develop the joint-stock company. Lou Dobbs informs us that ‘‘outsourcing’’ is a very bad thing. Actually, for most of history, governments outsourced just about everything, largely because of lack of money. The English, the Dutch, and the French got rich, private citizens to do things by selling them public offices and monopolies. Some things, however, were too big and risky for any individual to undertake. The first joint-stock companies were organized as trading companies to colonize the New World and Asia.

…

The Virginian Company, the Dutch West India Company, the Dutch East India Company, the Hudson’s Bay Company, the East India Company, the Massachusetts Bay Company, and scores of other monopoly joint-stock companies were set up in the 1600s. A WORLD OF RISK European world domination was driven by joint-stock companies up to the middle of the nineteenth century. While not what we think of as a modern public company—i.e., the East India Company had its own ships, armies, and governed much of India—the early joint-stock company was the model for everything that followed. The investors swapped money for shares in the venture, shares they were free to sell to others.

…

Like government debt or ‘‘stock,’’ shares in the great English joint-stock companies soon came to be traded, again because their value went up and down with business and political conditions. In fact, they traded in the same place, the Royal Exchange. FINANCE LEARNS ENGLISH Stepping back, in the London of the 1690s, we can already see our modern financial ecology in embryo. A banking system based on bills of exchange was extending credit to merchants. Some merchants morphed into full-time bankers. There was an active market in government stock and the shares of joint-stock companies. Specialized middle men were starting to appear.

The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power
by Joel Bakan
Published 1 Jan 2003

In 1564 the Company of the Mines Royal was created as a joint- stock company, financed by twenty-four shares sold for 00 each; in 1565, the Company of Mineral and Battery Works raised its capital Page 9 HE CORPORATION 9 by making calls on thirty-six shares it had previously issued. The New River Company was formed as a joint-stock company in 1606 to transport fresh water to London, as were a number of other utilities.' Fifteen joint-stock companies were operating in England in 1688, though none with more than a few hundred members. Corporations began to proliferate during the final decade of the seventeenth century , and the total amount of investment in joint-stock companies doubled as the business form became a popular vehicle for financing colonial enterprises. The partnership still remained the dominant form for organizing businesses, however, though the corporation would steadily gain on it and then overtake it.

…

The genius of the corporation as a business form, and the reason for its remarkable rise over the last three centuries, was-and is-its capacity to combine the capital, and thus the economic power, of unlimited numbers of people. Joint-stock companies emerged in the sixteenth century, by which time it was clear that partnerships, limited to drawing capital from the relatively few people who could practicably run a business together, were inadequate for financing the new, though still rare, large-scale enterprises of nascent industrialization . In 1564 the Company of the Mines Royal was created as a joint- stock company, financed by twenty-four shares sold for 00 each; in 1565, the Company of Mineral and Battery Works raised its capital Page 9 HE CORPORATION 9 by making calls on thirty-six shares it had previously issued.

…

In postrevolutionary America, between 1781 and 1790, the number of corporations grew tenfold, from 33 to 328." In England too, with the Bubble Act's repeal in 1825 and incorporation once again legally permitted, the number of corporations grew dramatically, and shady dealing and bubbles were once again rife in the business world. Joint-stock companies quickly became "the fashion of the age," as the novelist Sir Walter Scott observed at the time, and as such were fitting subjects for satire. Scott wryly pointed out that, as a shareholder in a corporation, an investor could make money by spending it (indeed, he likened the corporation to a machine that could fuel its operations with its own waste): Page 10 Page 11 ... needy clerks, poor tradesman's apprentices, discarded service men and bankrupts-all have entered the ranks of the great monied interest.""

Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible
by William N. Goetzmann
Published 11 Apr 2016

See also market system iron industry, in eighteenth-century France, 381 iron mining: Chinese, 196; near Frobisher Bay, 314, 315 iron money, of Sichuan, 183–84 iron monopoly of Chinese state, 174 Irrational Exuberance (Shiller), 331–32 Ismail Pasha, 419–21 James II of England, 322 James River Company, 394 Jefferson, Peter, 389 Jiang Shang, 153, 154 Jiangsu Dasheng Group Company, 434 jiaozi, 184–85, 186 Jixia Academy, 155–57, 160–61 joint-stock companies: Age of Discovery and, 307; Bubble Act and, 380; in eighteenth-century England, 328, 338, 366, 380; Honor del Bazacle as, 300, 307; Muscovy company as, 309; in nineteenth-century China, 431–32, 437; Rotterdam insurance company as, 366. See also corporations Joint Stock Companies Act of 1856, 427 Jones, Alfred Winslow, 488–89 Jones, David, 117, 119 Jonker, Joost, 316 Jordan, Julius, 22–23 Jovanovic, Franck, 278, 279 J.P.

…

For example, the company experienced a severe setback in 1427, when its mills caught fire, and in 1709, the mill dam was destroyed by a flood. In these circumstances, shareholders were called on to contribute money to rebuild. In some cases, they did not have the funds. This is where two useful features of the joint-stock company become apparent. Shareholders could not be compelled to pay an unlimited amount. Instead, they had the option of surrendering their shares to the company and walking away. This is called “limited liability” and is a distinguishing feature of the modern corporation. It puts a floor on the downside risk that an investor faces.

…

Consider how different these companies were from the Honor del Bazacle, where investors could walk by their corporate assets every day. Toulouse shareholders of course knew there were risks of floods and fires, but these were at least probabilistically assessable, whereas trading ventures to the other side of the world—almost by definition—confronted the unknown. And yet, as we shall see, the joint-stock company corporate form, with tradable shares and separation between ownership and control, sufficed for both. The immediate question explored in this chapter is whether the corporate form made exploration possible, or whether the exigencies of exploration led to the independent development of the corporate form.

Wall Street: How It Works And for Whom
by Doug Henwood
Published 30 Aug 1998

Nor could they do so without the credit system that develops from the same WALL STREET mode of production. This credit system, since it forms the principal basis for the gradual transformation of capitalist private enterprises into capitalist joint-stock companies, presents in the same way the means for the gradual extension of cooperative enterprises on a more or less national scale. Capitalist joint-stock companies as much as cooperative factories should be viewed as transition forms from the capitalist mode of production to the associated one, simply that in the one case the opposition is abolished in a negative way, and in the other in a positive way (Marx 1981, pp. 571-572) At the beginning of this excerpt, Marx seemed to be writing about the formation of modern corporations in the mid-19th century, a time of Robber Barons, scam artists, and financial panics — a process being repeated today in the so-called emerging markets of the Third World.

…

But furthermore, and quite apart from the class of idle rentiers thus created, the improvised wealth of the financiers who play the role of middlemen between the government and the nation, and the tax-farmers, merchants and private manufacturers, for whom a good part of every national loan performs the service of a capital fallen from heaven, apart from all these people, the national debt has given rise to joint-stock companies, to dealings in negotiable effects of all kinds, and to speculation: in a word, it has given rise to stock-exchange gambling and the modern bankocracy. trading Treasuries The market in U.S. government bonds is the biggest financial market in the world. At the center of the market are 38 major investment and commercial banks who are certified as primary dealers by the Federal Reserve INSTRUMENTS Bank of New York — the choice inner circle with which the Fed conducts its official monetary business.

…

[It appears] as a concentrated and organized mass, placed under the control of the bankers as representatives of the social capital in a quite different manner to real production (Marx 1981, pp. 490-491; emphasis in original). The modern owning class is formed in large part through the creation and trading of standardized claims on the wealth and labor of others. What do such owners contribute? In what Marx knew as a joint-stock company, and we know as the modern large corporation, not much. Unlike classical capitalists, who ran the operation and thus earned something like a wage of superintendence along with a share of the profits, today's managers are paid a (high) wage of superintendence, while the profits go mainly to outsiders.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
by Yuval Noah Harari
Published 1 Jan 2011

Many other expeditions didn’t return at all. Ships hit icebergs, foundered in tropical storms, or fell victim to pirates. In order to increase the number of potential investors and reduce the risk they incurred, Europeans turned to limited liability joint-stock companies. Instead of a single investor betting all his money on a single rickety ship, the joint-stock company collected money from a large number of investors, each risking only a small portion of his capital. The risks were thereby curtailed, but no cap was placed on the profits. Even a small investment in the right ship could turn you into a millionaire.

…

Thus began the French Revolution. While the French overseas empire was crumbling, the British Empire was expanding rapidly. Like the Dutch Empire before it, the British Empire was established and run largely by private joint-stock companies based in the London stock exchange. The first English settlements in North America were established in the early seventeenth century by joint-stock companies such as the London Company, the Plymouth Company, the Dorchester Company and the Massachusetts Company. The Indian subcontinent too was conquered not by the British state, but by the mercenary army of the British East India Company.

…

Mythology, the ancient sociologist would have thought, could not possibly enable millions of strangers to cooperate on a daily basis. But that turned out to be wrong. Myths, it transpired, are stronger than anyone could have imagined. When the Agricultural Revolution opened opportunities for the creation of crowded cities and mighty empires, people invented stories about great gods, motherlands and joint stock companies to provide the needed social links. While human evolution was crawling at its usual snail’s pace, the human imagination was building astounding networks of mass cooperation, unlike any other ever seen on earth. Around 8500 BC the largest settlements in the world were villages such as Jericho, which contained a few hundred individuals.

New World, Inc.
by John Butman
Published 20 Mar 2018

(London: The British Library, 2017; original edition 2006), 34–37. 5 Loades, John Dudley, ix; Sutton, The Mercery of London, 369–73. 6 John Munro, “Tawney’s Century, 1540–1640,” in The Invention of Enterprise. Entrepreneurship from Ancient Mesopotamia to Modern Times, ed. David S. Landes, Joel Mokyr, and William J. Baumol (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 107–55; 128–32. Munro calls the company the “first (historically verifiable) joint-stock company.” 7 W. R. Scott, The Constitution of English, Scottish and Irish Joint-Stock Companies to 1720, 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910), 1:18. 8 John Mickelthwait and Adrian Wooldridge, The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea (London: Phoenix Books, 2005), 18. 9 Liza Picard, Elizabeth’s London, Everyday Life in Elizabethan London (London: Phoenix Books, 2004), 323. 10 Adams, “The newe Navigation,” in Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, 2:240–41. 11 “The copie of the letters missive, which the right noble Prince Edward the sixt sent to the Kings, Princes, and other Potentates, inhabiting the Northeast partes of the world…,” in Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, 2:209–11; 210. 12 The date of his birth is unknown, and his age is based on the evidence of a contemporary portrait, facing the title page in vol. 2 of Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations. 13 Adams, “The newe Navigation,” in Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, 2:240–41. 14 J.

…

The Mercers, for example, laid claim to the magnificent church, mansion, and associated lands that belonged to the order of Thomas Becket, a former archbishop of Canterbury, right in the heart of the City.5 As the merchants from the City and the courtiers from Westminster increased in wealth and enjoyed royal favors, they began to share power, and the Mysterie was one of the first ventures in which they worked together with a new unity of purpose. But what also distinguished the Mysterie was its corporate structure. It was established with what has been called “a revolutionary new form of business organization”—arguably the world’s first joint-stock company and certainly the first in England.6 Until then, English trading voyages—to Antwerp, Bordeaux, Lisbon, Seville, even the eastern Mediterranean—had been funded by individual merchants or small syndicates. Typically, the business was conducted on credit and exchange, requiring relatively little up-front capital.

…

Even though investors had been assured that the venture would promote the enlargement of the Christian faith, the English wanted to avoid any subjects that might interrupt the peaceful, commercial aims of the voyage. To this point, Cabot added a stern reminder that the company was operating according to new rules: those of a joint-stock company. This meant, he said, that no individual was to conduct business privately, on his own behalf, for his own benefit. Each was only to do business for “the common stock of the company.” Above all, Willoughby and his crew were instructed to remember that they were on a mission for king and country.

Kicking Awaythe Ladder
by Ha-Joon Chang
Published 4 Sep 2000

That is why, despite its potential to create 'moral hazard', all societies have come to accept limited liability as a cornerstone of modern corporate governance.64 In many European countries, limited liability companies - or joint stock companies as they were known in those days - had existed under ad hoc royal charters since the sixteenth century.6S However, it was not until the mid-nineteenth century that it began to be granted as a matter of course, rather than as a privilege. Generalized limited liability was first introduced in Sweden in 1844. England followed this closely with the 1856 Joint Stock Company Act, although limited liabilities for banks and insurance companies were introduced somewhat later (1857 and 1862 respectively), reflecting the then widespread concern that they could pose serious 'moral hazard'.

…

It was not until the 1860s that various German states scrapped or weakened traditional guild laws, thereby opening the door to the full institutionalization of limited liability (Saxony in 1861, Wiirttemberg in 1862 and Prussia in 1868-9). In France, limited liability only became generalized in 1867, but in Spain, while joint-stock companies (Sociedades Anonimas) began to emerge from as early as 1848, it was not fully established until 1951. It is interesting to note that in Portugal limited liability was generalized as early as in 1863, despite the country's economic backwardness at the time.67 In the USA, the first general limited liability law was introduced in the state of New York in 1811.

…

Looking at the history of NDCs, we are struck by the fact that, even in these countries, institutions regulating company financial reporting and disclosure requirements were of still very poor quality well into the twentieth century. The UK made external audit of companies a requirement through the 1844 Company Act, but this was made optional again by the Joint Stock Company Act of 1856 against the recommendation of critics such as John Stuart Mill.76 Given that limited liability companies require more transparency to control opportunistic behaviour by their dominant shareholders and hired managers, this was a significant step backward. With the introduction of the 1900 Company Act, external audit was again made compulsory for British companies.

Layered Money: From Gold and Dollars to Bitcoin and Central Bank Digital Currencies
by Nik Bhatia
Published 18 Jan 2021

These banks also gave us a look at what it meant to issue what the rest of the world considered to be its reserve currency. Central banks, world reserve currencies, and the arrival of third-layer money will be explored further in this chapter. Instant Settlement The Bank of Amsterdam (BoA) was only created thanks to the world’s first joint-stock company, the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or VOC). The VOC’s tale begins in 1585 when the Dutch swiftly ended Antwerp’s position as the center of international trade by closing off the Scheldt River and blocking access to the sea. The blockade occurred amidst the Dutch Revolt, an eighty-year struggle for Dutch freedom from the Spanish monarchy.

…

Profits attracted additional entrepreneurs, and soon a collective of international merchants started to identify with each other. Subsequent pursuits of cinnamon and ginger led to deeper profits, and soon these merchants realized their efforts could greatly multiply by joining forces and attracting capital as a unified body. The result was the first ever joint-stock company formed in 1602, the VOC. We take it for granted today, but the VOC was the first example of equity investors providing capital in exchange for a share of ownership in the form of a paper certificate. The Dutch government gave the VOC a monopoly on trade in Asia as well as the authority to hire troops and wage war on its mission to extract profit from foreign trade.

…

Weidenmier (Working Paper). “Real Shock, Monetary Aftershock: The 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and the Panic of 1907,” Claremont Colleges Working Papers in Economics, no. 2001-07. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3874987 Padgett, John F. “Country as Global Market: Netherlands, Calvinism, and the Joint-Stock Company,” in The Emergence of Organizations and Markets Book, authors John F. Padgett, and Walter W. Powell, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2012. http://www.jstor.com/stable/j.ctt1r2fmz.15 Pozsar, Zoltan. “Shadow Banking: The Money View,” Office of Financial Research, U.S. Treasury Department, 2014. https://www.financialresearch.gov/working-papers/files/OFRwp2014-04_Pozsar_ShadowBankingTheMoneyView.pdf Quinn, Stephen, and William Roberds.

23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism
by Ha-Joon Chang
Published 1 Jan 2010

Writing in 1865, when the stock market was still very much a side-show in the capitalist drama, Marx had the foresight to call the joint-stock company ‘capitalist production in its highest development’. Like his free-market opponents, Marx was aware of, and criticized, the tendency for limited liability to encourage excessive risk-taking by managers. However, Marx considered it to be a side-effect of the huge material progress that this institutional innovation was about to bring. Of course, in defending the ‘new’ capitalism against its free-market critics, Marx had an ulterior motive. He thought the joint-stock company was a ‘point of transition’ to socialism in that it separated ownership from management, thereby making it possible to eliminate capitalists (who now do not manage the firm) without jeopardizing the material progress that capitalism had achieved.

…

However, you may not have realized that the L word, that is, limited liability, is what has made modern capitalism possible. Today, this form of organizing a business enterprise is taken for granted, but it wasn’t always like that. Before the invention of the limited liability company in sixteenth-century Europe – or the joint-stock company, as it was known in its early days – businessmen had to risk everything when they started a venture. When I say everything, I really mean everything – not just personal property (unlimited liability meant that a failed businessman had to sell all his personal properties to repay all the debts) but also personal freedom (they could go to a debtors’ prison, should they fail to honour their debts).

…

At the same time, the non-managing investors in a limited liability company would also become less vigilant in monitoring the managers, as their risks were capped (at their respective investments). Adam Smith, the father of economics and the patron saint of free-market capitalism, opposed limited liability on these grounds. He famously said that the ‘directors of [joint stock] companies … being the managers rather of other people’s money than of their own, it cannot well be expected that they would watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which the partners in a private copartnery [i.e., partnership, which demands unlimited liability] frequently watch over their own’.1 Therefore, countries typically granted limited liability only to exceptionally large and risky ventures that were deemed to be of national interest, such as the Dutch East India Company set up in 1602 (and its arch-rival, the British East India Company) and the notorious South Sea Company of Britain, the speculative bubble surrounding which in 1721 gave limited liability companies a bad name for generations.

Bean Counters: The Triumph of the Accountants and How They Broke Capitalism
by Richard Brooks
Published 23 Apr 2018

(Jennings), 224 Foxley, Ian, 214, 216 France, 31, 46, 89, 127, 171–7, 204, 205 Franklin, Benjamin, 53 Friedman, Milton, 84 FTSE100 Index, 5, 14, 90, 125 FTSE350 Index, 259 Fuld, Richard ‘Dick’, 132 Future Strategic Tanker Aircraft, 189 G4S, 148, 201 Galbraith, John Kenneth, 14, 57, 263 Galbraith, Thomas, 2nd Baron Strathclyde, 208 Galilei, Galileo, 22 Gap, 163 Gauke, David, 179 Gazprom, 236, 237 GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters), 272 General Electric, 5–6, 55, 78, 154 General Electric Company (GEC), 66 General Motors, 57 General Survey Outline, 75 generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP), 109 Geneva, Switzerland, 27, 29, 178 geometry, 21, 33 Germany, 220, 233–4, 235, 240, 247, 251 Gilbert, William Schwenck, 52 Gilby, Nicholas, 215 Gladstone, William, 45, 47, 50 Glasgow, Scotland, 45, 48 City of Glasgow Bank, 51, 147 Institute of Accountants and Actuaries, 47 University of Glasgow, 136 Glass–Steagall Act (1933), 60 GlaxoSmithKline, 163, 167, 169 Glickauf, Joseph, 77–8 ‘Go-Go’ years (1960s), 59, 62, 65, 67 Goerdeler, Reinhard, ix, 235, 240 von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 235 Gol, 242–3 Goldman Sachs, 121, 134–5, 139, 148, 157 Goldsmith, James, 66, 86 goodwill, 60–61 Goodwin, Fred, 136, 137, 139 Google, 164, 165, 178, 271 Gordhan, Pravin, 250 Gordon Riots (1780), 38 Gordon, Andrew, 218 Gosling, Richard, 202 GPT, 214–19 Gramegna, Pierre, 170 Great Crash and Depression (1929–39), 14, 57–8, 59–60, 66, 73, 75, 80, 118 Great Northern Railway, 46 Great Western Railway, 46 Green, Philip, 260 Greenspan, Alan, 122 Greenwich Capital Markets Inc., 136 Griffith-Jones, John, 146, 149, 150 Grigsby, John, 39, 40–41 Grondona, Julio, 225, 227 Grosvenor Street, Mayfair, ix–x, x, 277–8 Guardian, 170, 213 Gupta, Atul, 250 Haddrill, Stephen, 143, 209, 210 Halet, Raphaël, 171–7, 176, 181 Halet, Sophie, 172, 173 Halifax, 140 Hamersley, Michael, 161 Hamilton, Lewis, 7 Hamilton, Robert, 70 Hanson, Walter, 64 Harley, Robert, 39 Harris, Steven, 264 Hartnett, David, 166, 207 Harvard University, 57, 75, 99 Haskins & Sells, 56, 58 Haskins, Charles Waldo, 56 Haughey, Charles, 163 Haute Comité de la Place Financière, 171 Havelange, João, 220, 221 HBOS, x, 13, 140–41, 142–3, 149, 150, 257 Healey, Denis, 184 HealthSouth, 109 hedge funds, 113, 115 hedging, 99 Heineken, 246 Heintz, Guy, 175 Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC), 179, 182 Hewitt, Patricia, 184 Hexham General Hospital, Northumbria, 191 HIH, 240 Hinchingbrooke hospital, Cambridgeshire, 193 Hinkley Point, Somerset, 204–6 Hippocratic oath, 276 Hodge, Margaret, 178 Hollinger, 154–5 Holocaust, 4 Holyland, William Hopkins, 49 Home Office, 201 Hong Kong, 240, 251–2 Hotel Baur au Lac, Zurich, 219, 224 House of Commons, 68 House of Lords, 68, 92, 93, 143, 146–7 Houston, Texas, 99–108 HS2, 197–9, 266 HSBC, 166, 215, 229–30, 231, 256 Hudson, George, 44–5 humanism, 28 Hungary, 213 hypothetical future value, 100 IBM, 82, 272 Iceland, 127 ICI, 69 IKEA, 166 Illinois, United States, 54, 72–4 Imperial College, London, 197 Imperial Tobacco, 202 income tax, 46, 67, 153 Income Tax Act (1842), 46 India, 233, 238, 242, 245, 249 Industrial Revolution, 18, 42–7 Inferno (Dante), 33 inflation, 85 Inglis, John, 78–9 Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW), 49, 52, 93, 210 integrated reporting, 18 interest rates, 85 Internal Revenue Service (IRS), 159, 160 International Accounting Congress (1938), 234 International Accounting Standards Board, 123–5, 126, 127, 147 International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, 169, 230, 247 International Financial Services Centre, 163 International Fiscal Association, 245 International Integrated Reporting Council, 18 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 273 International Sport & Leisure (ISL), 220–21, 222 Internet, 95 Introduction to Merchandise (Hamilton), 70 Iran, 230 Iraq, 225, 240 Ireland, 127, 143–4, 163–5 Isle of Man, 247–8 Issuers’ and Investors’ Summit on CDOs/Credit Derivatives (2006), 121 Istace, Vinciane, 173 Italy, 3, 16, 21–2, 24–36, 37, 239 ITT Corporation, 59, 61 Ivy League, 68 J. P. Morgan, 54–5, 139, 149 James Bond, 2 James O. McKinsey & Co., 75 Japan, 2, 82, 230–31, 234–5, 240–41 Jennings, Andrew, 220, 224 Jerome, Saint, 35 Jersey, 89, 94–5, 158 job costing, 43 Johnson Matthey Bank, 91, 128 Johnson, Lyndon Baines, 63 joint stock companies, 41 Joint Stock Companies Act 1844: 47 1856: 50 Jones, Lewis Davies, 54, 55, 56 Jowell, Tessa, 196 junk bonds, 85 Kanebo, 240 Kapital, Das (Marx), 3 Kattner, Markus, 225 Keating, Charles, 85–6, 91 Kellaway, Lucy, 275 Kershaw, Sue, 199 Kgosana, Moses, 250 Khodorkovsky, Mikhail, 237 King, Mervyn, 273 Kirby, Paul, 208 Klynveld Kraayenhof, 235 Klynveld, Piet, ix KMG, 235 Knievel, Robert Craig ‘Evel’, 182 Koch Industries, 171 Kohl, Marius, 168, 174–7 KPMG, ix–x, 2, 10, 11, 48, 97, 116–19, 141–2, 149–50, 256–9, 264–7, 276 and Barnier proposals, 255 and Bradford & Bingley, 141–2, 149 and Brexit, 203, 204 and British Aerospace/BAE Systems, 213 Canary Wharf base, 256 Chelsea Flower Show, 200 in China, 244, 245, 251–2 and Civil Service Live conference, 201 Claridges conference (2007), 122 and Co-operative Bank, 142, 149, 150 and Comroad, 240 and collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), 121 and Countrywide Financial Corporation, 48, 118, 257 ‘Cutting Through Complexity’, 11–12 Data & Analytics (D&A), 272 and defence, 188, 189, 200, 202, 216, 217, 265 establishment of (1987), 235 and European Central Bank, 10 and Federal National Mortgage Association (‘Fannie Mae’), 118–19, 257 and FIFA, 220–28 and Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, 145 and Financial Reporting Council, 144, 209 and General Electric, 5–6 governments, advice to, 186, 187, 188, 189, 191, 192–3, 197–9, 202–6, 249 and GPT, 216, 217 and HBOS, 141, 142–3, 149, 150, 257 and Hinkley Point, 204–6 and Hollinger, 154–5 and Hong Kong protests (2014), 251–2 and House of Lords committee (2010), 146 and HS2, 197–9 and HSBC, 229–30 and Imperial Tobacco, 202, 266–7 in India, 249 integrated reporting, 18 key performance indicators, 12 and Lockheed Martin, 202, 265 and Miller Energy, 261 and Ministry of Defence, 188, 189, 202, 216, 217, 265 and National Health Service (NHS), 192–3, 202, 266 and New Century Financial Corporation, 48, 116–18, 257 No. 20, Grosvenor Street, Mayfair, ix–x, x, 277–8 ‘One Firm’ philosophy, 275 and ‘patent box’ tax breaks, 180 Performance Club 1999 trips, 160 and Petrofac, 218 and private finance initiative (PFI), 186, 187, 188, 189, 191, 249 and Privy Purse, 68 revolving door, 206, 207, 208 and Saudi British Joint Business Council, 218 Scott London Rolex scandal (2013), 15 and securitization, 121, 122 and Siemens, 240 in South Africa, 249–50 and subprime mortgages, 10, 48, 116–19 and sustainable development, 200 and tax avoidance, 154–5, 157, 158, 159–62, 180–81, 182, 186 thought leadership, 12 and thrifts, 87 and Tier One, 257 and Wachovia, 257 and Xerox, 109–10 Kreuger, Ivar, 57 Kubena, Mike, 237 Labour Party, 66, 94, 114, 178, 179, 184–92, 194, 201, 209, 230 Lake Michigan, 73 Land, Nick, 144, 182 Lang, Ian, 95 Last Supper, The (Leonardo da Vinci), 33 Lateran Council, Third (1179), 24 Law Commission, 93 Lawson, Nigel, 146 Lay, Kenneth, 99–100, 104, 107, 108 Leary, Simon, 191 Lehman Brothers, 12, 13, 92, 119, 131–3, 138, 144, 145, 148–9 Leigh, Edward, 189 Lend-Lease programme, 60 Leonardo da Vinci, 33 Levin, Carl, 159, 161 Levitt, Arthur, 96–8, 104 Lewis, Leigh, 207 Lewis, Michael, 112, 118 Liber Abaci (Fibonacci), 21–2 Liberal party, 50, 52 Liechtenstein, 220 limited liability, 50, 52, 91–5, 114 Lincoln Savings and Loan, 85–7 Linklaters, 140 Little, Royal, 61 Liverpool, Merseyside, 49 LJM, 104–5 Lloyds Bank, 140 Lockheed Martin, 202, 212, 265 London, England Big Bang (1986), 156 Canary Wharf, 256 Chelsea Flower Show, 200 Claridges, 122 Gordon Riots (1780), 38 Imperial College, 197 ‘light touch’ regulation, 114, 131, 209 Medici Bank, 26, 30 Olympic Games (2012), 196 Price Waterhouse, 54 Royal London Hospital, 190 School of Economics, 197 St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London, 190 Tate Modern, 16 Long Term Capital Management, 113 Louis XI, king of France, 31 low-balling, 79, 91 Lowe, Robert, 50 Luce, Edward, 17 Lucerne, Switzerland, 220 Luthiger, Fredy, 222, 223, 227 Luxembourg, 165–77, 179, 180, 181, 182, 245, 267–71, 278 LuxLeaks, 169–77, 179, 181, 245, 268, 269, 278 Lybrand, Ross Bros & Montgomery, 87 Lybrand, William, 56 Lynch, Loretta, 219, 223 Lyons, 31 MacGregor, John, 128 Mair, John, 42, 53 Management Consultancies Association, 190 Mandelson, Peter, 95, 207 Mapping the Market, 193 mark-to-market, 99–102, 113, 123, 124, 129–31 mark-to-model, 124–5, 126, 127, 131 mark-to-myth, 124, 131 Marlborough, Duke of, see Churchill, John Martin, William, 122–3 Marwick, James, ix, 48–9, 56, 62, 119, 158, 217, 233, 277 Marx, Karl, 3 Masters Tournament, 104 Masters, Adrian, 191 matches, 57 Mauritius, 158 Maxwell, Robert, 66, 87–8, 91 May, George, 73, 78, 82, 277 May, Theresa, 203 McConnell, Jack, 207 McCreevy, Charles, 164 McDonald’s, 170 McFall, John, 207 McKenna, Francine, 145, 274 McKinsey, 17, 74–7, 79, 81, 99, 108, 183, 191, 226, 263 McKinsey, James, 74–7 McLean, Bethany, 101 Measelle, Richard, 103 Medici family, 16, 26–32, 36 Cosimo, 26, 27, 28, 29, 31 Giovanni, 26 Lorenzo, 28, 29, 30 Medvedev, Dmitry, 17 Melbourne, Victoria, 48 mergers and acquisitions, 11, 54, 59–69, 71, 87 Merrill Lynch, 121 Mesopotamia, 1 Messezentrum conference centre, Zurich, 228 Metcalf, Lee, 80 Metz, France, 172, 173, 176 Mexico, 229 Michael, Bill, 149–50 Microsoft, 271 Milburn, Alan, 184, 191, 194, 207 Mill, John Stuart, 50 Miller Energy, 261 Ministry of Defence, UK, 188–90, 202, 212, 215–19, 265 Missal, Michael, 115, 116–17 Missouri, United States, 74 Mitchell, Andrew, 206, 208 Mitchell, Austin, 94, 230 Mitchell, Roger, 48, 56 Model T Ford, 71 Modern Times, 71 Monde, Le, 169 monetarism, 84 money laundering, 229–31 Montagu, Nicholas, 207 Monty Python, 15–16 Moore, Paul, 141 Morgan, Henry, 39 Morgan, John Pierpont, 54–5 Morgan Stanley, 119, 148 Morse, Amyas, 206 mortgage-backed securities (MBS), 120–21 Moselle, France, 171 Mossack Fonseca, 247 Mouget, Didier, 170, 171, 173 Mumbai, Maharashtra, 242 Munger, Charlie, 18, 135, 147 Myners, Paul, 146 Nally, Dennis, 5, 148 Nassau, Bahamas, 222 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), 76 National Audit Office, 187, 189, 206 National Crime Agency (NCA), 272 National Health Service (NHS), 183–4, 187, 190, 191–5, 266 National Westminster Bank (NatWest), 136 Nazi Germany (1933–45), 4, 234, 251 Neoplatonism, 28 Netherlands ABN Amro, 138 Ballast Nedam, 218–19 Klynveld Kraayenhof, 235 Royal Ahold, 238–9 Spanish (1556–1714), 36 taxation, 163, 164–5 New Century Financial Corporation, 48, 115–18, 257 New Delhi, India, 245, 249 New Labour, 114, 184–92, 194, 209 New York, United States, 57 beer business, 54 Britnell’s ‘Reform Revolution’ speech (2011), 192–3 County Law Association, 153 Deloitte compensation case (2009), 239 FIFA indictment (2015), 219, 223 Harris’ advisory services speech (2014), 264 Issuers’ and Investors’ Summit on CDOs/Credit Derivatives (2006), 121 Levitt’s ‘Numbers Game’ speech (1998), 96, 98 Marwick & Mitchell, 48 Price Waterhouse, 54 Stock Exchange, 55, 115, 234 Wall Street, 54, 69, 96, 101, 120–21 New York Times, 118, 236 New Zealand, 256 Newton, Isaac, 22 Nicholson, Kevin, 178, 182 Nieuwe Instructie (Christoffels), 36 Nike, 163 No. 20, Grosvenor Street, Mayfair, ix–x, x, 277–8 Noncomformism, 42 Norte del Valle Cartel, 229 Northern Rock, 125–9, 142–3, 148 Norway, 72 nuclear power, 204–6 ‘Numbers Game’ speech (1998), 96, 98 O’Donnell, Augustine ‘Gus’, 207 O’Rourke, Feargal, 164, 165 off-balance-sheet financing, 101, 102, 104, 106 Office of Tax Simplification, 179 oil crisis (1973), 84 oil-for-food programme, 225, 240 Olympic Games (2012), 196 Olympus, 241 One Hundred Group, 254 OPIS (Offshore Portfolio Investment Strategy), 159, 162 Oppenheimer & Co., 112–13 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), 170, 181, 214 Osborne, George, 149, 182, 248 Oscars, 16 Overend & Gurney, 51, 126 Oxford University, 181, 184 Oxley, Michael, 114, 122 de Pacioli, Luca Bartolomeo, 32–6, 34, 100, 124 Page, Stephen, 272 Pain, Jon, 208 Palin, Michael, 15–16 Palo Alto, Silicon Valley, 82 Panama Papers scandal (2016), 247 Panorama, 169, 220 Paradise Papers scandal (2017), 7, 247 Parmalat, 239, 243 Parrett, William, 148 partners, 8 Pearson, 169, 270 Pearson, Ian, 207 Peat, Marwick, Mitchell & Co., 48, 60, 63, 64, 79, 82, 233, 235 Peat, Michael, 68 Peat, William Barclay, ix, 48, 49, 68, 233, 277 Penn Central Transport Company, 64, 79 pension funds, 67 Pepsi, 166 Pergamon, 66 Perrin, Edouard, 168, 169, 171–2, 173, 174, 175 Persson, Mats, 208 Perugia University, 32 Pessoa, Fernando, 1 Peston, Robert, 197 Peterborough hospital, Cambridgeshire, 191 Petits secrets des grandes enterprises, Les, 169 Petrofac, 218 Pfizer, 163 Piot, Wim, 173, 181, 182 Pisa, Italy, 21 place value’ system, 21 political donations, 98 Ponzi schemes, 89 ‘pooling-of-interest’ accounting, 61–2, 63, 67, 96 post-balance sheet events, 72 Powell, Ian, 128, 201–2 Poynter, Kieran, 148, 150 premiums, 45 Presbyterianism, 42 Price, Samuel Lowell, 49 Price Waterhouse & Co., 49, 53–6, 57, 65, 67, 72, 73, 78–9, 82 and conflicts of interest, 73, 277 consultancy, 78–9, 81, 82 Coopers & Lybrand, merger with (1998), 49, 95 in Germany, 233 and Great Crash (1929), 57 in India, 233 international co-ordinating company, 234 and limited liability partnerships, 94 Palo Alto technology centre, 82 and private finance initiative (PFI), 185 in Russia, 236 and tax avoidance, 164 and tax code (1954), 153–4 and United States Steel, 55, 62, 233 PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), 2, 5, 6, 49, 95, 97 and American International Group, 134–5, 144, 145, 148 and Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi, 230–31 and Barclays, 6 Booz & Co. acquisition (2013), 263–4 and Brexit, 203 and British Home Stores (BHS), 260 Building Public Trust Awards, 256 ‘Building Relationships, Creating Value’, 12 and Cattles plc., 142 cyber-security, 272–3 establishment of (1998), 49, 95 and Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, 145 and Financial Reporting Council, 142, 144, 209, 210 global operations, 235–6 and Goldman Sachs, 134–5, 148 and Google, 271 and GPT, 217, 218 and Heineken, 246 and Hong Kong protests (2014), 251–2 in India, 242 integrated reporting, 18 and Kanebo, 240 and Labour Party, 201 and National Health Service (NHS), 192, 194, 200 and Northern Rock, 126, 127–9, 142–3, 148 and Olympic Games (2012), 196 presentation (2017), 16 and private finance initiative (PFI), 187, 188–91, 196, 249 profits, 5 revolving door, 207, 208 and RSM Tenon, 210, 261 in Russia, 236–8 and Saudi British Joint Business Council, 218 and securitization, 121, 122, 129 and tax avoidance, 157, 165–79, 180, 182, 237, 246, 267–71, 278 thought leadership, 12 total tax contribution survey, 179 and Tyco, 109 in Ukraine, 238 and Vodafone, 165–6 Prince of Wales’s charity, 181 principal/agent problem, 13 Prior, Nick, 190 Privatbank, 238 Private Eye, 169, 180, 215, 255 private finance initiative (PFI), 185–91, 196, 203, 249 Privy Council, 94 Privy Purse, 68 production-line system, 71 productivity growth, 262–3 professional scepticism, 112, 130, 214, 224 professional services, 11, 72, 150, 183, 204–5, 251, 275, 279 Professional Standards Group, 105–7 Project Braveheart, 106 Project Nahanni, 102 Protestant work ethic, 3 Protestantism, 3, 42, 43 Prudential, 157 Public Accounts Committee, 281 Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB), 144–5, 242–3, 253, 261, 274 Puerto Rico, 163 Putin, Vladimir, 17, 237 Qatar, 228 Quakers, 42, 49 Railway Regulation Act (1844), 45 railways United Kingdom, 44–7, 49, 115 United States, 51, 52, 53, 70, 73 Rake, Michael, 144, 149, 150, 162, 181, 257 Raptors, 105 Rayonier, 59 Reagan, Ronald, 80, 84, 154, 184 Reckoning, The (Soll), 27 Redpath, Leopold, 46 regulation, UK, 13, 127, 209–10, 213–14, 259 and Brexit, 273 deregulation (1980s), 95 and financial crisis (2007–8), 127–8, 137–45 Financial Conduct Authority, 140, 149, 281 Financial Reporting Council, 138, 142, 144, 149, 182, 209–10, 213–14, 259, 261 Financial Services Authority, 127, 128, 137, 138, 140 ‘light touch’, 114, 131, 209–10 Railway Regulation Act (1844), 45 self-regulation, 88, 90 regulation, US, 91, 260 Bush administration (2001–2009), 114, 145, 253 Celler–Kefauver Act (1950), 59, 61 competition on price, 79–80 deregulation (1980s), 84–5, 95, 112 derivatives, 122 and Enron, 99 and Lincoln Savings and Loan, 85–7 mark to market, 99 numbers-game era (1990s), 110 Public Company Accounting and Oversight Board, 242–3, 253, 260 Roosevelt, Theodore administration (1901–9), 56–7 Sarbanes–Oxley Act (2002), 114, 122 self-regulation, 61 Trump administration (2017–), 273, 274 and Westec collapse (1966), 63 see also Securities and Exchange Commission Renaissance, 3, 16, 22, 24–37 Renjen, Punit, 275 ‘Repo 105’ technique, 131–3, 149 revolving door, 206–8, 272 Ripley, William Zebina, 57 Robson, Steve, 144, 207 Rockefeller, John Davison, 53, 71 Rolex, 15, 215 Rolls-Royce, 213 Roman numerals, 22 Rome, ancient, 24 Rome, Italy, 25, 27 Roosevelt, Franklin, 58 Roosevelt, Theodore, 56 de Roover, Raymond, 27 Rowland, Roland ‘Tiny’, 66 Royal African Company, 37 Royal Ahold, 238–9 Royal Bank of Scotland, 47, 90, 136–40, 142, 157, 241, 259 Royal London Hospital, 190 RSM Tenon, 210, 261 Russian Federation, 17, 236–8 Ryan, Tim, 134, 148 Saltwater Slavery (Smallwood), 37 Samek, Steve, 103 SANGCOM, 214–19 Sansepolcro, 32 Sarbanes, Paul, 114, 122 Sarbanes–Oxley Act (2002), 114, 122 Sassetti, Francesco, 16, 29, 30, 31, 41 Satyam, 242 Saudi Arabia, 212–19, 221 Saudi British Joint Business Council, 218 Saunders, Stuart, 64 Save South Africa, 250 savings-and-loan mutuals, 84–7, 91, 99 Sberbank, 237 Scarlett, John, 207, 272 Schlich, William, 149 Schumpeter, Joseph, 3 scientific management, 71, 76 Scotland, ix, 42, 47–9, 70, 224 Scuola di Rialto, Venice, 32 Second World War (1939–45), 59, 60, 77, 234 Secret Intelligence Service, 207, 272 Securities Act (1933), 58 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), 281 and consulting, 80, 104 and Enron, 99, 104, 108 and Hollinger, 154 Levitt’s ‘Numbers Game’ speech (1998), 96, 98, 104 and Lincoln Savings and Loan, 85, 86 and Penn Central Transport Company, 64 and ‘pooling-of-interest’ accounting, 61, 62 and Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB), 144 PwC India fined (2011), 242 and Xerox, 109–10 securitization, 101–2, 116, 119–23, 125, 129–31, 133–40, 148, 265 Seidler, Lee, 68–9, 79 self-regulation, 6, 61, 88 Serious Fraud Office, 213, 216, 217, 218, 219 Sexton, Richard, 129, 268, 278 shadow banking system, 115 Shanghai, China, 17 Shaxson, Nicholas, 247 Sheraton, 59 Sherlock, Neil, 208 short selling, 112, 115, 116 Siemens, 240 Sikka, Prem, 94 Silicon Valley, California, 82 Simec International Ltd, 214, 215 Sinaloa Cartel, 229 Sinclair, Upton, 14 Singapore, 163 Sino-Forest, 244 Skilling, Jeff, 99–100, 101, 105, 108 Skinner, Paul, 208 Slater, James, 65 slave trade, 4, 37 Smallwood, Stephanie, 37 Smallwood, Trevor, 158 Smartest Guys in the Room, The (McLean and Elkind), 101 Smith, Adam, 13 Smith, Jacqui, 207 Snell, Charles, 40 Social Justice Commission, 184 Soll, Jacob, 27 Sombart, Werner, 3–4, 22 SOS (Short Option Strategy), 159, 162 South Africa, 213, 223–4, 249–50 South Sea Company, 39–41, 42, 44 Soviet Union (1922–91), 236 Spacek, Leonard, 62, 77–8 Spain, 36, 39, 241 special investment vehicles, 115 Spinwatch, 201 Sproul, David, 256, 258 St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London, 190 St Louis, Missouri, 56 Standard & Poor’s, 149 Standard Chartered Bank, 230, 231 Starbucks, 178 steam engine, 43 Stein, Jeffrey, 161 Stephenson, George, 44 Stevens, Mark, 82–3 Stevenson, James, 1st Baron Stevenson, 141 Stiglitz, Joseph, 114 stock market, 68, 69, 92, 96 ‘Go-Go’ years (1960s), 62, 65 and Great Crash (1929), 57, 58 and J.

…

One author reported that ‘at the Company’s governor’s birthday gala he was helped out of his coach by the Duke of Marlborough’.24 Like Sassetti’s at the Medici Bank, Grigsby’s head had been turned away from the books and ledgers towards more remunerative and glamorous possibilities. The bursting of the South Sea Bubble induced a British recession deeper than any until that following the 2008 financial crash.25 The affair had even farther-reaching consequences for business. So-called joint stock companies, which brought together investors as ‘shareholders’ and had sprung up in imitation of the South Sea Company, were banned. This, however, meant that a critical lesson for the long term was missed. Companies, especially monopolistic ones, will always be prone to abuse and corruption. The real message of the South Sea Bubble was the paramount importance of professional and, above all, independent accounting to expose and prevent such things.

…

The accounts and books in every department continue to be so satisfactorily kept, that we have simply to express our entire approval of them, and to present them to you for the information of the shareholders, with our usual certificate of correctness.’8 One hundred and fifty years later, a similar assurance would be given by the firm bearing Deloitte’s name to the Royal Bank of Scotland’s shareholders just before its £45bn bailout by the British taxpayer. Old William might well have spun in his grave once or twice. THE PROFESSIONALS Exposing railway finances to investigation wasn’t Gladstone’s only favour to the burgeoning business of accounting. His other major piece of legislation in 1844, the Joint Stock Companies Act, also gave it a boost. The idea was to enable everyday businesses to operate as legal companies, raising funds by selling shares to investors. But the corporate veil afforded by ‘Gladstone’s Act’ came at the price of greater accountability. In return for being allowed to incorporate a company with a handful of signatures (as opposed to an Act of Parliament), directors would have to report to shareholders with audited balance sheets giving a ‘full and fair’ view of the company’s affairs.

Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism
by Bhu Srinivasan
Published 25 Sep 2017

This strengthened the need for the corporate form in that passive investors could be assured of not being liable for unknown debts. At the same time, their distance and duration meant that such enterprises required ample levels of capital, far beyond the risk appetite of any one investor, no matter how wealthy. The joint-stock company allowed multiple investors to buy in to a venture and hold the interest. The final push to the English joint-stock company occurred in 1553 with the Russia Company, in which adventurers committed £6,000 at £25 per share, marking the first use of the corporate form for overseas ventures. Starting then, even English privateers, state-sanctioned pirate ships looking to confiscate cargo, began using the joint-stock form to raise capital from adventurers.

…

Rather than act as a formal pool of money or resources, the adventurers had always been a loosely affiliated guild in which individual members participated in the ventures of their choosing. As the century progressed, the capital requirements of overseas ventures had coincided with and propelled development of the joint-stock company—“joint-stock” implying shareholders with transferable interests as opposed to the more intimate, closed nature of partnerships. In addition to transferability of shares, this ongoing legal evolution allowed for limiting the personal liability of any adventurer—the investor couldn’t lose any more than his initial investment.

…

These English privateering syndicates were anything but swashbuckling men with parrots and eye patches; the accounting statements of individual ventures made careful note of ship tonnage, capital invested, men involved, and number of ships in each operation—from which Sir Francis Drake’s twenty-one ships and 1,932 men stood out with invested capital of £57,000. In his thorough examination of the era’s joint-stock companies, W. R. Scott suggested that the flexibility of the corporate structure lent itself to the virtues of diversification and spreading risk, particularly in matters of piracy. From privateering’s tolerance for large losses emerged the basic principle of modern venture capital. Suppose, for instance, a capitalist was prepared to adventure 2000 Pounds in privateering, he could only fit out one ship of about 200 tons or two smaller ones.

Americana
by Bhu Srinivasan

This strengthened the need for the corporate form in that passive investors could be assured of not being liable for unknown debts. At the same time, their distance and duration meant that such enterprises required ample levels of capital, far beyond the risk appetite of any one investor, no matter how wealthy. The joint-stock company allowed multiple investors to buy in to a venture and hold the interest. The final push to the English joint-stock company occurred in 1553 with the Russia Company, in which adventurers committed £6,000 at £25 per share, marking the first use of the corporate form for overseas ventures. Starting then, even English privateers, state-sanctioned pirate ships looking to confiscate cargo, began using the joint-stock form to raise capital from adventurers.

…

Rather than act as a formal pool of money or resources, the adventurers had always been a loosely affiliated guild in which individual members participated in the ventures of their choosing. As the century progressed, the capital requirements of overseas ventures had coincided with and propelled development of the joint-stock company—“joint-stock” implying shareholders with transferable interests as opposed to the more intimate, closed nature of partnerships. In addition to transferability of shares, this ongoing legal evolution allowed for limiting the personal liability of any adventurer—the investor couldn’t lose any more than his initial investment.

…

These English privateering syndicates were anything but swashbuckling men with parrots and eye patches; the accounting statements of individual ventures made careful note of ship tonnage, capital invested, men involved, and number of ships in each operation—from which Sir Francis Drake’s twenty-one ships and 1,932 men stood out with invested capital of £57,000. In his thorough examination of the era’s joint-stock companies, W. R. Scott suggested that the flexibility of the corporate structure lent itself to the virtues of diversification and spreading risk, particularly in matters of piracy. From privateering’s tolerance for large losses emerged the basic principle of modern venture capital. Suppose, for instance, a capitalist was prepared to adventure 2000 Pounds in privateering, he could only fit out one ship of about 200 tons or two smaller ones.

Trust: The Social Virtue and the Creation of Prosperity
by Francis Fukuyama
Published 1 Jan 1995

Beginning in the sixteenth century, for example, England and Holland created legal arrangements permitting the vesting ownership in larger groups, such as joint proprietorships, joint-stock companies, or limited liability partnerships. Besides allowing owners to capture the social returns from their investments, legal structures such as these allowed unrelated people to cooperate in the creation of a business. The contract and its associated system of obligations and penalties, enforced through a legal system, could fill in the gap where the trust naturally found in families did not exist. Joint-stock companies, in particular, allowed enterprises to grow in scale beyond the means of a single family by pooling the resources of a large number of investors.

…

The economic historians Douglass North and Robert Thomas put it bluntly: “Efficient economic organization is the key to growth; the development of an efficient economic organization in Western Europe accounts for the rise of the West.”17 The development of transoceanic commerce in the fifteenth century depended on invention of the carrack, which could sail beyond coastal waters. But it also depended on the creation of the joint-stock company, by which individuals could pool their resources and share the risks entailed in funding great voyages. The extension of railroads across the continental United States in the mid-nineteenth century required large, hierarchically organized companies with geographically dispersed managers. The kinds of businesses that had existed previously were owned and operated by families.

…

Historians of economic development like Douglass North and Robert Thomas assert that the creation of a stable system of property rights was the crucial development that permitted the process of industrialization to begin.5 In some countries like the United States, a system of property rights was established early on, such that family businesses were usually also incorporated as legal entities. But in other places, such as China, where there was little security of property rights, family businesses grew quite large without legal protection. Although legal arrangements like joint-stock companies and limited liability partnerships permitted unrelated people to cooperate with one another in business, they did not automatically lead to that result or to the extinction of family businesses. In many cases, family businesses incorporated under these laws and enjoyed the protection of their property rights but in other respects operated much as before.

Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises, Sixth Edition
by Kindleberger, Charles P. and Robert Z., Aliber
Published 9 Aug 2011

Moreover there have been an impressive series of crises seven to ten years after the end of a war, long enough for expectations formed at the end of the original crisis to be falsified; these included 1720, 1772, 1792, 1825, 1873 in the United States, and 1929. Far-reaching political changes may also change expectations. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 gave rise to a boom in company promotion. By 1695 there were 140 joint stock companies with a total capital of £4.5 million; more than 80 percent had been formed in the previous seven years. By 1717 total capitalization had reached £21 million.57 In July 1720 the Bubble Act forbade formation of new joint-stock companies without explicit approval of parliament, a limitation that lasted until 1856. Although this regulation has normally been interpreted as a reaction against the South Sea Company speculation, Carswell asserts that it was undertaken to support the South Sea Company, as king and parliament sought to repress the development of rival companies that might attract cash that was intensely needed by the South Sea promoters.58 The events of the French Revolution, Terror, Directorate, Consulate, and Empire, along with incidents of the Napoleonic Wars themselves, set in motion large-scale specie movements in 1792–93 and 1797 and opening and closing markets in Europe and elsewhere for British and colonial goods.

…

William Robert Scott, The Constitution and Finance of English, Scottish and Irish Joint-Stock Companies to 1720 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911), vol. 3, pp. 449ff.; and D. Morier Evans, The Commercial Crisis, 1847–48, 2nd edn, rev. (1849; reprint edn, New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1969), pp. 33–4. A separate list for the South Sea Bubble, prepared by a contemporary and less detailed, is set out in Wirth, Handelskrisen, pp. 67–79. 26. A. Andréadès, History of the Bank of England (London: P.S. King, 1909), p. 133. 27. Carswell, South Sea Bubble, p. 142. 28. Scott, Joint-Stock Companies, p. 450. 29. Hans Rosenberg, Die Weltwirtschaftskrise von 1857–59 (Stuttgart: W.

…

This book is a study in financial history, not economic forecasting. But investors seem not to have learned from experience. 3 Speculative Manias Rationality of markets The word ‘mania’ suggests a loss of a connection with rationality, perhaps mass hysteria. Economic history is replete with canal manias, railroad manias, joint stock company manias, real estate manias and stock price manias – surges in investment in a particular activity. Economic theory assumes that men and women are rational – and hence manias would not occur. There is a disconnect between the observations that manias occur episodically, and the rationality assumption.

The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company
by William Dalrymple
Published 9 Sep 2019

The commodities they wished to buy were extremely expensive and they were carried in huge and costly ships that needed to be manned by large crews and protected by artillery masters and professional musket-men. Moreover, even if everything went according to plan, there would be no return on investment for several years. The idea of a joint stock company was one of Tudor England’s most brilliant and revolutionary innovations. The spark of the idea sprang from the flint of the medieval craft guilds, where merchants and manufacturers could pool their resources to undertake ventures none could afford to make individually. But the crucial difference in a joint stock company was that the latter could bring in passive investors who had the cash to subscribe to a project but were not themselves involved in the running of it.

…

Such a company would be ‘one body corporate and politick’ – that is, it would be a corporation, and so could have a legal identity and a form of corporate immortality that allowed it to transcend the deaths of individual shareholders, ‘in like manner’, wrote the legal scholar William Blackstone, ‘as the River Thames is still the same river, though the parts which compose it are changing every instance’.22 Forty years earlier, in 1553, a previous generation of London merchants had begun the process of founding the world’s first chartered joint stock company: the Muscovy Company, or to give it its full and glorious title, The Mysterie and Companie of the Merchant Adventurers for the Discoverie of Regions, Dominions, Islands and Places Unknown.23 The original aim was to explore an idea first mooted by classical geographers, who believed their world to be an island, surrounded by an ocean, which meant there had to be a northern route to the spices and gold of the Far East as well as that by the Cape – and that passage would be free from all Iberian rivalry.

…

This uprising very nearly ended British rule and might well have initiated a new phase of Mughal rule.168 For the Company, too, this was an historic occasion, the final denouement of its long struggle to defeat the Marathas and seize from them control of the erstwhile Mughal Empire. At the same time, it also represented the final act in the gradual penetration by the Company of the Mughal system, in which a joint stock company from the City of London slowly appropriated the power of the mighty Mughal Empire, and to some extent, under Wellesley, also took on the trappings of Mughal grandeur. In the end, the Company established its paramountcy by imposing itself on the Mughal Emperor as Regent, so finding a measure of legitimacy for itself in the eyes of India under the Mughal umbrella.

Seapower States: Maritime Culture, Continental Empires and the Conflict That Made the Modern World
by Andrew Lambert
Published 1 Oct 2018

As private trade waned the state became a major employer, finding work for the aristocracy in embassies, the Church, the navy and the administration of the cities of the terra firma and the sea empire. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, Venice had paid down the state debt: taxes declined, enabling many elite families to live off the state. Banking developed along lines pioneered elsewhere in Italy, although the chartered and joint stock companies so important to Dutch and British seapower imperialism would not be adopted for many years. During the thirteenth century Venice had deliberately created a maritime economy, blocking alternative outlets for capital, including land. The first capitalist economy would be sustained by consistent state intervention, which included measures to boost trade, including marine insurance, convoys and naval patrols.

…

Blockading the Scheldt Estuary crushed the economy of Antwerp and the southern provinces; it also stopped Spain bringing troops by sea. Privateering flourished, exploiting investment opportunities and available capital. Relative security at sea focused attention on maritime trade, as did the cash-strapped Republic’s decision to delegate overseas naval operations to joint-stock companies that evolved into quasi-national empires.9 An obvious expression of the Dutch state, the navy reflected the complexity of domestic politics and a dynamically changing international context. Created in a market-oriented society that solved strategic and organisational problems by economic and contractual methods, the navy grew organically from pre-Revolt convoys and fishery patrols and the ‘Sea Beggar’ privateers of 1572.

…

After 1582 the States General also levied a standard import tax, which went directly to the five admiralties.30 The creation of public debt tied capitalists to the state, their proximity to the commercial sector ensuring that they recognised the interests of those without political representation.31 Local control of taxes and naval finances ensured that long-term trends in naval funding were neither arbitrary nor random. Merchant elites carefully balanced cost and benefit. Joint-stock companies and banks financed trade and war, while new credit mechanisms improved the flow of trade. The model for the Amsterdam Bank was Venetian, as was much else in the new state. It became the central clearing house for global finance: smaller banks served small traders and artisans.32 The joint-stock principle also applied to canal-building, drainage projects, harbour construction, ship-owning and marine insurance, spreading ownership, profit and risk among the merchant and working classes.

Diamonds, Gold, and War: The British, the Boers, and the Making of South Africa
by Martin Meredith
Published 1 Jan 2007

Buoyed up by their defeat of imperial Britain, the Transvaal Boers now set out to expand the borders of their state to the east and to the west, and to impose their will on African chiefdoms around them. PART III 10 THE DIAMOND BUBBLE A new bout of diamond fever struck southern Africa in 1881, prompted by the formation of a host of joint-stock companies in the diamond fields as the era of independent diggers came to an end. The rush to invest in joint-stock companies was as hectic as the original diamond rush of the 1870s. Speculators thronged the main diamond market in Ebden Street in Kimberley, where a new stock exchange was established to accommodate the huge increase in business: Ebden Street [wrote Dr Matthews] was filled from morning to night with a tumultuous and maddened crowd.

…

It was astonishing how the mania seized on all classes in Kimberley, from the highest to the lowest . . . how everyone, doctors and lawyers, masters and servants, shop-keepers and workmen, men of the pen and men of the sword, magistrates and I.D.B.s [illicit diamond buyers], Englishmen and foreigners, rushed wildly into the wonderful game of speculation. Following the launch of De Beers Mining Company in April 1880, more than seventy joint-stock companies made their debut on the market within a year. Claim-holders forming joint-stock companies made their own valuation of their assets, set the capital of the new enterprises, took shares equivalent to the value they claimed for their holdings and then offered the remainder to the public. As merchants and bankers in Cape Town and Port Elizabeth scrambled to join the buying frenzy, the competition for shares became so intense that stock in 1881 traded at premiums ranging as high as 300 per cent.

…

In the first four months of 1877, Jules Porges, a Paris-based diamond merchant, spent £90,000 buying up low-priced claims, giving him a 10 per cent interest in the Kimberley mine. Porges later teamed up with two Kimberley dealers, Sammy Marks and his brother-in-law, Isaac Lewis, who had turned their small trading business into a substantial mining company. In 1880 they merged their claims to form a joint-stock company, Compagnie Française des Mines des Diamants du Cap du Bon Espérance, otherwise known as the French Company. It controlled one-quarter of the Kimberley mine and was by far the largest mining operation on the diamond fields. Another major player was Joseph B. Robinson, a cold, cantankerous claim-owner notorious for his ill-temper, meanness, and proclivity for seducing other men’s wives and daughters.

Seven Crashes: The Economic Crises That Shaped Globalization
by Harold James
Published 15 Jan 2023

A parliamentary committee chaired by a young reformer, William Ewart Gladstone, reached the conclusion that a more transparent process was needed that would guarantee investors complete and accurate information about the railways. A new Act for the Registration, Incorporation and Regulation of Joint Stock Companies in 1844 consequently set up a complex and apparently far-reaching registration process; but the unintended but perhaps predictable result was that public confidence in joint-stock companies surged and there was a new bubble.10 Third, and most consequentially, the abolition of the Corn Laws (duties on imported grain) in 1846 was designed to provide relief from high food prices. Its political effect was to split the Conservative Party (in which landlords were heavily represented) and bring down the government.

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The mid-nineteenth-century upheavals rapidly produced a dramatic transformation of politics and business. There was a revolution in government, when public authorities took on many more tasks concerned with managing the economy, including guiding the course of trade liberalization. Business was also revolutionized through new corporate forms, the limited liability joint stock company as well as universal banks that mobilized capital in innovative ways. The middle of the 1840s appeared as a classical hunger or subsistence crisis of the ancien régime of the kind that had wracked Europe at the beginning of the eighteenth century in the midst of the War of the Spanish Succession.

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The “great depression” of the 1870s followed quite straightforwardly from the apparently beneficial effects of the positive supply shock: the excitement about new frontiers, coupled with legal changes that made it much easier to establish corporations in many European countries and generated euphoria, overtrading, a wave of company formation, and speculation. The excitement, both in Europe and the United States, focused on railroad construction, the obvious way of opening up new areas that would boost supply. The new infrastructure required new methods of finance, and joint stock companies made possible the accumulation of larger amounts of capital. Railroads dominated the new stock markets that flourished across the world and drew in savings of a substantial middle class. The downside: a deflationary pressure as supplies from across the world came onto the market. The new availability of supplies of provisions and goods seemed to make anything possible: a mood that was fed by the political changes which included the ending of civil wars or wars of unification in the United States, Germany, and Italy, and a consequent boom in real estate—especially in the new capitals, Berlin, Florence, and Rome, but also in other capitals.

The Ages of Globalization
by Jeffrey D. Sachs
Published 2 Jun 2020

Confucianism rooted in the classics offered an ethic based on humanness, righteousness, appropriateness, filial piety, loyalty, the civil principle over the military, and the performance of rites.5 The Song Dynasty might justly be considered the world’s first large-scale capitalist economy: land was privately owned, merchant families invested in joint-stock companies, international trade was open, harbors were improved, and Chinese ocean-based trade expanded throughout the Indian Ocean to East Africa and the Red Sea. A navy established in the twelfth century policed the seas. Agricultural productivity rose, supporting a doubling of the Song population, to an astounding peak of around 120 million, and a massive increase of the urban population.

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Under Soviet communism in the twentieth century, the lands of the Russian Empire were industrialized and urbanized via a brutal top-down one-party state that claimed tens of millions of lives in the course of forced industrialization and the collectivization of farmlands—a “second serfdom”—that was carried out by Joseph Stalin’s regime in the late 1920s and 1930s. Insatiable Greed of the Empire Builders The remarkable scramble by the European powers for riches, glory, and colonies in the New World and Asia, and the privatization of wealth-seeking via the new joint-stock companies, ushered in a new ethos of greed. It was one thing to exploit the native populations and grab their land; it was another to create an ethos that justified such actions. The Christian virtues of temperance and charity had long preached self-control over the passions for wealth and glory. A new morality was needed to justify the remarkable efforts toward conquest and the subjugation of whole populations.

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On Drake’s return, the pirated gains were shared with the queen, who used them to pay off the national debt. Drake became a national hero, and went on to serve as vice admiral in the defeat of the Spanish armada in 1588. In 1600, the launch of the East India Company marked an even more decisive breakthrough to modern capitalism. Here was a joint-stock company formed specifically to engage in multinational trade. Once again, the private investors could count on the power and beneficence of the state. Queen Elizabeth charted the East India Company as a monopoly to engage in all trade east of the Cape of Good Hope and west of the Straits of Magellan.

The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality
by Katharina Pistor
Published 27 May 2019

A ten-year commitment had already been a radical change when compared to earlier business practices that wound down a business after completing a single voyage. In the sixteenth century, merchants often pooled their stock prior to the journey (thus the term “joint stock company”) and upon return they divided the spoils and closed down the company. Of course, they could set up a new venture and repeat the cycle; but early joint stock companies were meant to pool resources and diversify risk, not to create durable asset pools that would produce wealth over long stretches of time. The ambitions of the Dutch East India Company, however, went way beyond a single journey; it was a joint venture between merchants and the government, the Estates General of the Netherlands.

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In 1844, the UK opened the door to free incorporation after the country had tried with only limited success to keep a tap on the sprouting of all kinds of business organizations that resembled the corporation in all but name: they used the trust and pushed the limits of partnership law, they lobbied for special charters for industries that included limited liability, and they contracted with creditors of firms to ensure that they would not raise claims against the firm’s owners. These mutants may not have been as fool-proof as the corporate form, but they went a long way toward giving owners the legal protection they craved.29 The 1844 Joint Stock Companies Act allowed businesses to establish themselves as corporate entities without government approval but did not include shareholder limited liability. This feature was introduced only with the Act’s revision in 1855 but was short-lived, as it was abused by unscrupulous shareholders; in response to a series of high-profile scandals, the Parliament reversed course and eliminated this legal feature only two years later.

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And Citigroup received several capital injections, first from the sovereign wealth funds of foreign nations (Qatar and Singapore in particular) and eventually from the US government.15 So much for the basic structure of NC2, which is more complex than the trusts we encountered earlier, but the basic structure is still the same. But what about the assets in the pool? Here too we can see remarkable advances in the coding strategies that were meant to enhance the marketability of these assets. A basic securitization structure is rather simple and resembles the pooling of risks and resources of the early joint stock companies discussed in chapter 3. The claims to future payments on many home loans, all backed by mortgages, are placed behind a legal shield, like a trust. The trust then issues certificates to investors. They now hold a claim, not against an individual homeowner, but against a pool of loans to many homeowners that are backed by mortgages on their homes; what is more, by moving the assets to a trust, they become “bankruptcy remote” from their sponsor, in the case of NC2 from the Citi affiliate CMRC.

An Empire of Wealth: Rise of American Economy Power 1607-2000
by John Steele Gordon
Published 12 Oct 2009

Few were willing to take on such risks, especially in an enterprise over which they would, necessarily, have very limited control. The joint-stock company solved the problem by limiting each investor’s liability to what he had invested. This, of course, shifted some of the risk to the corporation’s creditors but made it possible for large sums of capital to be amassed from many small investments. Next to the nation-state itself, the joint-stock company was the most important organizational development of the Renaissance and, like the nation-state, made the modern world possible. Several English joint-stock companies for purposes of facilitating trade in various areas were established in the latter half of the sixteenth century, the Moscow Company (1555), the Levant Company (1583), and the East India Company (1600) among them.

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Because of double-entry bookkeeping, it became possible for people to invest in distant enterprises and still keep track of how their investment was doing. Ferdinand and Isabella saw to it that an accountant sailed with Columbus on his first voyage, to ensure that they got their full share of the hoped-for profits. The joint-stock company proved equally important. Exploring far-distant lands in full-rigged ships was both hazardous—many ships simply never returned—and extremely capital-intensive by the standards of the sixteenth century. At first, it was largely done by expeditions funded by the crown in each country. But England was a small country with a small population and lacked the financial resources available to France and Spain.

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Only about twenty-one thousand people immigrated to New England in the seventeenth century, but by the end of that century the population was ninety-one thousand, more than the white population in the Chesapeake, which had received many more immigrants. Both Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonies were founded by joint-stock companies. The members of these corporations who came to New England were known as planters. Those who remained in England and invested money in the enterprise were called adventurers, a word that is still echoed today in the term venture capitalist. These adventurers, while as anxious as any to build a New Jerusalem, were also hoping for a return on their investment as soon as possible.

The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times
by Giovanni Arrighi
Published 15 Mar 2010

This virtuous circle of expansion would never have got off the ground, let alone produce the spectacular results it did, were it not for a third policy which complemented and sustained the policies that promoted THE RISE OF CAPITAL 143 the transformation of Amsterdam into the central entrepot of world commerce and world finance. This consisted in launching large-scale joint-stock companies chartered by the Dutch government to exercise exclusive trading and sovereignty rights over huge overseas commercial spaces. These companies were business enterprises which were supposed to yield profits and dividends but also to carry out war-making and statemaking activities on behalf of the Dutch government.

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For investment and speculation in the shares of chartered companies — first and foremost of the VOC — were the single most important factor in the successful development of the Amsterdam Bourse into the first stock market in permanent session (Braudel 1982: 100-6; 1984: 224-7; Israel 1989: 75-6, 256-8). Without a large, profitable, and fast-growing joint-stock company like the VOC, such a development may never have taken place, or at least not in time to beat the old (Genoese) or the new (English) competition in high finance. But the VOC was an epochal success, and so was the strategy of accumulation to which it belonged. For more than a century, from circa 1610-20 to circa 1730-40, the upper strata of the Dutch merchant class remained the leaders and governors of the European capitalist engine.

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But once England — already the most industrialized state of the European worldeconomy — turned into the central entrepot of world trade, and on a scale never seen before, the competitiveness of English business became unbeatable in a much wider range of industries than Dutch business ever was. It was at this time that, retrospectively, Elizabeth I’s investment of plunder seized from Spain in the stabilization of the pound and in the launching of joint-stock companies chartered to promote overseas commercial and territorial expansion appeared as the best investment she could have ever made. Although for almost a century the money so invested seemed to many to have been a waste in the face of insurmountable odds in competing with the Dutch, in the eighteenth century Elizabeth’s (or Gresham’s) foresight was fully vindicated.

Capitalism: Money, Morals and Markets
by John Plender
Published 27 Jul 2015

Such periods are usually the result of policies of business or financial liberalisation that lead to booms in which ethical standards fall and sharp practice flourishes. When the boom collapses, public outrage then prompts a political backlash in the shape of re-regulation. Consider the late seventeenth century. In Nicholas Barbon’s day, joint stock companies were a rarity, because incorporation required a Royal Charter or private Act of Parliament. Since incorporation was usually accompanied by the grant of privileges such as trading rights, monarchs and governments were very careful with their largesse. Yet, after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, when London was experiencing a big expansion of trade, especially with India, a more liberal attitude to incorporation prevailed.

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Yet, after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, when London was experiencing a big expansion of trade, especially with India, a more liberal attitude to incorporation prevailed. The formation of the South Sea Company in the new century, together with the stellar performance of its stock, accelerated an already powerful slew of incorporations, with 195 joint stock companies being formed in the year to August 1720. These were popularly known as ‘bubbles’. A central feature of incorporation was that it increased the scope for fraud, because the people running the bubble companies had access to other people’s money. In the modern jargon, there was a principal–agent problem.

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One reason is that, from the nineteenth century, banks began to abandon partnership and adopt limited liability. This was a big step because the unlimited liability associated with partnership acted as a tight control on imprudent behaviour. If a bank failed, creditors had recourse to all the personal assets of the individual partners. Once partnerships turned themselves into joint stock companies, the shareholders still enjoyed unlimited potential for gain but could never lose more than the amount they spent buying shares in the bank. This asymmetry was morally hazardous in that it encouraged greater risk taking. And in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, commercial banks took more risks by extending their traditional deposit-taking and lending operations into investment banking and securities trading.

Running Money
by Andy Kessler
Published 4 Jun 2007

It had market demand (flooded mines), technology (Watt’s condenser and Wilkinson’s precise cylinders), capital (Boulton’s money), intellectual property rights (Parliament’s patent) and a ready workforce (ex-farmers). I was ready to invest—all that was missing was a business model. It was Matthew Boulton who came up with one. Boulton and Watt didn’t actually sell steam engines. No one could afford one. Most of the early customers were Cornish mines. Beyond Parliament-sponsored joint-stock companies, the stock market and banking were not quite developed, especially for risky businesses. Limited liability for corporations wouldn’t be the law until 1860. Miners lived day to day. They used a cost book system of accounting (I slept through accounting too). At the end of each 58 Running Money quarter, all the partners in the mine would meet at the countinghouse to go over the numbers and split any profits.

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They won, and by 1835, they weren’t carrying just materials—a half a million passengers were recorded. Demand for railroads, for passengers and for industrial goods exploded. You could put in a 20-mile railroad for the equivalent of $650,000 and collect that much in fees every year, because it was cheaper than horses, a lot cheaper. Joint-stock companies became the rage, and the stock market was all too happy to step in and provide capital. Then more capital. And then too much capital. By the 1840s, a railroad mania was raging, stocks selling on multiples of passenger miles, a precursor for multiples of page views that Yahoo stock would trade on 150 years later.

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Because the French and Germans were paying for these goods with their wheat and corn, and the British taxed them out of affordability. How stupid—this almost killed the British Empire in its infancy. With any foresight, the landowners should have dumped their unprofitable farms and invested the proceeds in highly profitable joint stock companies making pottery, shirts and potbelly stoves. England should have gladly bought French wheat and Dutch flowers and German barley and hops so that consumers in these countries could have turned around with the money they received and bought British manufactured goods. There was no substitute. Once you go silky smooth, you never go back.

Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy
by Nathan Schneider
Published 10 Sep 2018

The International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, for which she had also worked, pursued the commonwealth by organizing co-owned apartments for its members.7 Serious businesspeople nowadays tend to regard any alternative to the investor-owned corporation as aberrant or impossible. But the alternatives actually preceded the models that prevail today. In Britain, the first legislation for co-ops passed four years before joint-stock companies got their own law in 1856. Legal scholar Henry Hansmann has suggested that we regard investor-owned companies as a distorted kind of cooperative, bent in service of investor interests over anyone else’s.8 The kind of business that now seems normal was once strange; someday it might seem strange again.

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The Rochdale store began producing offspring within a few years of its founding. New branches opened around town, with services from shoemaking to housing, and copycat co-ops appeared elsewhere. The British Parliament helped clear the legal pathway for this with the Industrial and Provident Societies Act of 1852—again, before the 1856 Joint Stock Companies Act, the founding legislation for public, investor-owned corporations. But, as a cooperative, the Rochdale store wasn’t set up to become a rapacious conglomerate, as investor-owners would demand. It would have to grow differently. What came to be called the Cooperative Wholesale Society began in Manchester, in 1863, through a conspiracy of several hundred local co-ops across northern England, with several Rochdale Pioneers among its leadership.14 Cooperative wholesales like this had been tried before, but now they had the firm foundation of the Rochdale model to build on.

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Brooks, “Votes for Women: Rose Schneiderman in Ohio,” Life and Labor (September 1912), 288; Margaret Dreier Robins, “Self-Government in the Workshop,” Life and Labor (April 1912), 108–110; for an account of US struggles over working hours, see Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt, Free Time: The Forgotten American Dream (Temple University Press, 2013). 8. The laws in question are the Joint Stock Companies Act of 1856 and the Industrial and Provident Societies Partnership Act of 1852; Henry Hansmann, “All Firms Are Cooperatives—and So Are Governments,” Journal of Entrepreneurial and Organizational Diversity 2, no. 2 (2013). 9. State of the Global Workplace (Gallup, 2017); Francesca Gino, “How to Make Employees Feel Like They Own Their Work,” Harvard Business Review (December 7, 2015); Jocko Willink and Leif Babin, Extreme Ownership: How U.S.

The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World
by Niall Ferguson
Published 13 Nov 2007

Their liability was limited to the money they had used to buy a stake in the company. Smaller enterprises might operate just as well as partnerships. But those who aspired to span continents needed the company.1 However, the ability of companies to transform the global economy depended on another, related innovation. In theory, the managers of joint-stock companies are supposed to be disciplined by vigilant shareholders, who attend annual meetings, and seek to exert influence directly or indirectly through non-executive directors. In practice, the primary discipline on companies is exerted by stock markets, where an almost infinite number of small slices of companies (call them stocks, shares or equities, whichever you prefer) are bought and sold every day.

…

They had also reformed their currency by creating what was arguably the world’s first central bank, the Amsterdam Exchange Bank (Wisselbank), which solved the problem of debased coinage by creating a reliable form of bank money (see Chapter 1). But perhaps the single greatest Dutch invention of all was the joint-stock company. The story of the company had begun a century before Law’s arrival and had its origins in the efforts of Dutch merchants to wrest control of the lucrative Asian spice trade from Portugal and Spain. Europeans craved spices like cinnamon, cloves, mace, nutmeg and pepper not merely to flavour their food but also to preserve it.

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The only sop to shareholders was that in 1610 the Seventeen Lords agreed to make a dividend payment the following year, though at this stage the Company was so strapped for cash that the dividend had to be paid in spices. In 1612 it was announced that the VOC would not be liquidated, as originally planned. This meant that any shareholders who wanted their cash back had no alternative but to sell their shares to another investor.19 The joint-stock company and the stock market were thus born within just a few years of each other. No sooner had the first publicly owned corporation come into existence with the first-ever initial public offering of shares, than a secondary market sprang up to allow these shares to be bought and sold. It proved to be a remarkably liquid market.

Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else
by Chrystia Freeland
Published 11 Oct 2012

In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith compared the executives of a joint-stock company to “the stewards of a rich man” and warned that “being the managers rather of other people’s money than their own, it cannot well be expected, that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which the partners in a private copartnery frequently watch over their own. . . . Negligence and profusion, therefore, must always prevail.” Writing just over a hundred years later, Alfred Marshall bemoaned the feebleness of the staid British joint-stock company, compared to an America dominated by owner-entrepreneurs: “The area of America is so large and its condition so changeful, that the slow and steady-going management of a great joint-stock company on the English plan is at a disadvantage in competition with the vigorous and original scheming, the rapid and resolute force of a small group of wealthy capitalists, who are willing and able to apply their own resources in great undertakings.”

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He emerged from his Omaha fastness to join the battle between capital and talent on Wall Street in the 1990s, when he briefly chaired struggling investment bank Salomon Brothers—a period he described in the next year’s letter to shareholders as “far from fun”—and slashed the bonus pool by $110 million. But here is the catch in management’s fight to rein in superstar salaries, and one institutional reason the super-elite continue to rise: in the age of the vast, publicly traded joint-stock company, where ownership is widely dispersed and boards lack the time, expertise, and gumption to weigh in on the specifics of how companies operate, the managers themselves are superstars, too. Entertainers and athletes are the most visible superstars, but they are hugely outnumbered by the army of business managers who in the past four decades have been transformed from salarymen to multimillionaires.

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Writing just over a hundred years later, Alfred Marshall bemoaned the feebleness of the staid British joint-stock company, compared to an America dominated by owner-entrepreneurs: “The area of America is so large and its condition so changeful, that the slow and steady-going management of a great joint-stock company on the English plan is at a disadvantage in competition with the vigorous and original scheming, the rapid and resolute force of a small group of wealthy capitalists, who are willing and able to apply their own resources in great undertakings.” That small group of wealthy capitalists laid the foundations for America’s astonishing economic ascent in the twentieth century. But as the American economy matured, control of its private businesses began to pass from the hands of the vigorous, scheming, and resolute founders of Marshall’s age to a new generation of stewards.

We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights
by Adam Winkler
Published 27 Feb 2018

See Alexander Brown, The Genesis of the United States (1891), 2:1049; Alexander Brown, “Sir Thomas West. Third Lord De La Warr,” 9 The Magazine of American History 18, 28, 30 (1883). 20. See William Robert Scott, The Constitution and Finance of English, Scottish, and Irish Joint-Stock Companies to 1720 (1951), 1:255; Wesley Frank Craven, The Virginia Company of London, 1606–1624 (1993), 31–34; Kupperman, The Jamestown Project, 261. 21. Scott, The Constitution and Finance of English, Scottish, and Irish Joint-Stock Companies, 1:255; Craven, The Virginia Company of London, 31–34; Kupperman, The Jamestown Project, 261; Miller, The First Frontier, 26. 22. See Jack Beatty, “The Corporate Roots of American Government,” in Colossus: How the Corporation Changed America, ed.

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Founded several years before the Virginia Company, the East India Company by the mid-eighteenth century had grown into the most powerful corporation in the world. In 1757, the company effectively took control of India, which it ruled for the next century. Although the Scottish economic philosopher Adam Smith called this exercise of sovereign power by a joint-stock company a “strange absurdity,” it was similar to what had happened in Virginia, Massachusetts, and several other American colonies, just on a far grander scale. The corporation had become a government, with all the power that entails. Exporting silk, salt, tea, and cotton, the East India Company was immensely profitable at first.

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The court held that business corporations were included, largely because of the Dictionary Act, another federal law that officially defined the terms used in federal statutes. The Dictionary Act provided that “unless the context indicates otherwise,” the word person should be read to apply to “corporations, companies, associations, firms, partnerships, societies, and joint stock companies, as well as individuals.” As a result, the court expansively read the law to protect the rights of corporations, which deployed those rights to overturn a regulation of their business practices. Yet, as with many previous Supreme Court cases invoking corporate personhood, the underlying logic of Hobby Lobby reflected instead piercing the corporate veil.

Adam Smith: Father of Economics
by Jesse Norman
Published 30 Jun 2018

The third is what has since become known as the principal–agent problem: the problem that someone charged with carrying out a task may have a conflict of interest, an agenda of their own which affects their judgement or performance. Smith comes to this by discussing the difference between ‘joint-stock’ companies such as the East India Company, whose shares could be traded and which often had many passive outside shareholders, and partnerships or ‘copartneries’, whose members or shareholders have unlimited liability and so an interest in the company that is far more closely tied to its fortunes. In theory, at least, the directors of a joint-stock company, then as now, were the trusted agents of the shareholders, but ‘being the managers rather of other people’s money than of their own, it cannot well be expected, that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which the partners in a private copartnery frequently watch over their own.’

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He did not foresee the rapid industrialization of the nineteenth century, though he had the (lone) example of the massive Carron Iron Works in nearby Falkirk before him. He did not grasp the full importance of technological change, though he was a friend of James Watt and sponsored him to set up a workshop at Glasgow University. He would likely have been surprised, and perhaps dismayed, by the rapid subsequent growth of joint-stock companies. His speculations about the origins of money are interesting but mistaken. His remarks on value are confusing, and his cost-of-production theory and its cousin, the labour theory of value, proved to be a blind alley to most nineteenth-century theorists, and command little support today except among some Marxist economists.

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Furthermore, if we think of capitalism as the combination of open markets and of industrial corporations functioning as independent institutions and controlling autonomous pools of capital, then capitalism itself did not come into existence until the second half of the nineteenth century, eighty years or so after the publication of The Wealth of Nations. The term ‘capitalism’ appears nowhere in Smith’s writings. Indeed, it is a striking fact about Smith that he did not in any deep way foresee industrialization as an economic phenomenon, despite a few early signs of it around him, or indeed the rise of the joint-stock company, which prefigured the modern corporation. But in any case his interest runs wider even than capitalism was to stretch, to the nature and causes of commercial society. So we should hesitate to give too much credit either to Smith’s foresight or to our own hindsight. It would be absurd to blame or credit Smith for all the twists and turns that market economies, and market economics, have taken since his death.

Empires of the Weak: The Real Story of European Expansion and the Creation of the New World Order
by Jason Sharman
Published 5 Feb 2019

Even the state-building military-fiscal component, which has more purchase than the technology-and-tactics aspect, faces the obvious problem that it was a private company, or at least a private-public hybrid, that eclipsed the states, both European (the Portuguese and French) and Asian. Neither the idea that the EIC was simply an extension of British state, or a state in its own right, holds water.161 The Company was simultaneously a privately owned joint-stock company, a vassal of the Mughal emperor, the suzerain of various South Asian tributaries, and a direct ruler of increasingly vast populations in its own right. Aside from its legal status, as a matter of practicality the large majority of troops and treasure committed to conquering South Asia in the eighteenth century were raised and controlled by the Company itself, not the Crown or Parliament.

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“Looking for Someone to Blame: Delegation, Cognitive Dissonance, and the Disposition Effect.” Journal of Finance. 71 (1): 267–302. Charney, Michael W. 2004. Southeast Asian Warfare 1300–1900. Leiden: Brill. Chase, Kenneth. 2003. Firearms: A Global History to 1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chaudhuri, K. N. 1965. The English East India Company: The Study of an Early Joint Stock Company. London: Frank Cass. Chaudhuri, K. N. 1985. Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750. Cambridge University Press. Chaudhuri, K. N. 1990. “Reflections on the Organizing Principle of Pre-Modern Trade.” In The Political Economy of Merchant Empires: State Power and World Trade 1350–1750, edited by James D.

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See also Mughal empire Indian “Mutiny” (1857), 89 Industrial Revolution, 15, 90, 120, 133–34, 139 institutional isomorphism, 24–26, 134–35 insurgency wars, 7–8, 133, 144–45 International Relations, 17, 136; Eurocentrism of, 124, 127–28; historians’ views of, 16–18, 37, 121, 146; on military competition, 21 international system, 2–3, 125, 151; anarchical nature of, 21; contemporary, 132; imperialism and, 133–35, 134–35, 143–44 investment managers, 33 Iraq, 144, 145 Ireland, 149, 150 Islamist insurgencies, 7–8, 145 Italy, 46, 104, 137, 140 James I, English king, 83 Janissaries, 107, 109, 112, 113 Japan, 3, 5, 60, 127; Chinese conflicts with, 148–49; Dutch East India Company and, 68, 79; imperialism of, 137; Korea and, 60 Java, 68, 71, 73–76, 80, 86 João I, Kongo king, 50 Johnston, Alastair Iain, 127 joint-stock companies, 70 Kamen, Henry, 40 Kang, David C., 127 Karlowitz, Treaty of, 110 Kenya, 29, 51–52, 54 Kharg Island, 80 Kongo kingdom, 50, 55 Korea, 56, 60 Laichen, Sun, 74 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste de, 147 Lebanon, 144 Lee, Wayne E., 18 Lepanto, Battle (1571), 117, 118 Levy, Jack S., 124–25 Liberia, 29, 30 Libya, 118, 140 Liechtenstein, 22 Lockhart, James, 43 Lorge, Peter A., 75–76, 126, 128–29, 138, 149 Lynn, John, 24, 27 Macau, 77 MacDonald, Paul K., 11, 141 Madras, 84, 85, 88 magical beliefs: about bulletproofing, 27–33, 148; about healing diseases, 36, 72 Malabar Coast, 79–80, 87 Malacca, 57, 62, 72–74, 81, 118 Maldives, 58 Mamluks, 57–58, 101, 107, 117 Manchu dynasty.

On Grand Strategy
by John Lewis Gaddis
Published 3 Apr 2018

Had he succeeded, Philip would have required Elizabeth to end all English voyages to America.4 But from the moment his captains cut their anchor cables, Spain began a slow decline, and a new world order its gradual ascendancy. I. The English, at the time of the Armada, had barely begun overseas expansion. The word “colony” to them meant Ireland. “Newfoundland,” whose shores they’d visited, meant fish. “Exploration” meant joint-stock companies, the first of which had a grand title—“The Mystery, Company, and Fellowship of Merchant Adventurers for the Discovery of Unknown Lands &c”5—but an ill-conceived mission: it directed its energies, in an age of global cooling, toward finding trade routes to China through Hudson’s Bay and around northern Russia.

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There can be reasons, therefore, for resisting uniformity, for respecting topography, even for dithering. Elizabeth ruled in this way, pioneering such innovations as reigning without marrying, tolerating (within limits) religious differences, and letting a language gloriously grow. Each arose in response to circumstances: none reflected grand designs. Joint-stock companies could be similarly flexible. “The absence of close control by the British crown in the early stages of colonization,” Elliott points out, left considerable latitude for the evolution of those forms of government that seemed most appropriate to the people actively involved in the process of overseas enterprise and settlement—the financial backers of the enterprise and the colonists themselves—as long as they operated within the framework of their royal charter.

…

Somerset, Elizabeth I, pp. 72–88, provides a thorough analysis of Elizabeth’s religious policies. 41. Somerset, Elizabeth I, pp. 280–82; Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, pp. 60–61. For a thorough discussion of Elizabethan finance, see William Robert Smith, The Constitution and Finance of the English, Scottish and Irish Joint-Stock Companies to 1720 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911), pp. 493–99. 42. Somerset, Elizabeth I, pp. 70–71. 43. For a rousing account, see A. N. Wilson’s chapter on Sir Francis Drake in The Elizabethans, pp. 173–84. 44. Thought, by a few fools even now, to have written the plays of William Shakespeare. 45.

Rummage: A History of the Things We Have Reused, Recycled and Refused To Let Go
by Emily Cockayne
Published 15 Aug 2020

The company was cagey about it, but the recipe probably included sulphuric acid, guano, bones, charcoal dust and ammonia, possibly in the form of urine, or possibly from coal gasification.74 Whether or not they were having a positive impact on the environment, both manure and buttons were becoming increasingly difficult businesses to make a profit in, not helped by events. Meggitt’s sons managed different parts of the company in different parts of the country, unified in a joint stock company in 1893. A series of misfortunes afflicted the Meggitts thereafter. In 1896 a glue-boiler died after falling into a pan of boiling water.75 In 1902 Director and manager Joseph Bloom Meggitt went bankrupt. Liquidated, the company was split into two: one division concentrating on the button trade, the other on glues and manures.76 Joseph’s younger brother Arthur Cockayne Meggitt managed one of the company’s bone mills in Mexborough, but committed suicide in 1903.77 In July 1902, between Joseph’s bankruptcy, Arthur’s death and the formation of the new business, the Sheffield bone mill caught fire under ‘peculiar circumstances’.

…

For a while he had dabbled with dying cottons using Turkey red (a process using waste bullock’s blood73) but argued, unsuccessfully, that he was not liable to bankruptcy laws.74 Koops cropped up again in 1797 at the centre of a bizarre case of tampering with a bill of exchange, concerning the prince of Monaco. This bill had been reduced ‘to a blank’ using ‘Chaddick’s Solvent for the Stone’, an ink extractor.75 De-inking was in Koops’s blood. A further reason for Koops’s demise was the failure of the joint-stock company. Limited status did not protect his capital of £71,000 (as with Fritz Viëtor eighty years later).76 The creditors to whom two instalments were due successfully disputed the fractional shares sold in the company.77 By December 1802 the Straw Paper Manufactory was no longer a going concern (despite shares being advertised in late October).

…

The 1670s were marked by anti-Catholic hysteria, which saw the enactment of Test Acts – laws that limited public office to professionals who conformed to the established religion and so barred Catholics and nonconformists – and also the fictitious ‘Popish Plot’ (1678–81), for which Titus Oates, a clergyman, was found guilty of perjury after fabricating a plot to assassinate Charles II. The Bank of England was established in 1694, and there was a ‘Great Recoinage’ in 1696, which aimed to replace the hammered silver coins in circulation. A joint-stock company called the South Sea Company was founded as a public–private partnership in 1711 with the aim of reducing the national debt. The company was granted a monopoly to trade in the South Seas, but foreign conflict meant the company never gained any significant profit. Stock in the company rose as it focused more on the government debt, with a peak inflating the share price in 1720: this was ‘The South Sea Bubble’, followed by a collapse which burst the bubble.

Finance and the Good Society
by Robert J. Shiller
Published 1 Jan 2012

The invention of the newspaper came soon after, and it was not long before the prices of the East India Company’s shares were reported regularly, spurring immense public interest in the investment. The issuance of shares in joint stock companies (companies owned jointly by a number of people through shares) was limited at rst. To mount an IPO, each corporation needed its own special charter, which was hard to get. The Bank of England was chartered as a joint-stock company in 1694, but at the same time it was given a monopoly on joint stock banking. No other bank could have more than six partners, making it virtually impossible to compete with the Bank of England. A quarter century later, in 1720, Parliament further restricted joint stock companies by mandating—in what later became known as the Bubble Act—that no joint stock company could ever be started without a royal charter.

…

A quarter century later, in 1720, Parliament further restricted joint stock companies by mandating—in what later became known as the Bubble Act—that no joint stock company could ever be started without a royal charter. Perhaps this was an e ort to support the rise in the price of shares in the South Sea Company, which was at the time soaring in an obvious bubble. But as time went on pressures to democratize nance prevailed, enabling more corporations to be formed. Parliament restricted the Bank of England’s monopoly to an area within sixty- ve miles of London in 1826, and in 1844 the monopoly was eliminated altogether. This led to an expansion of banking activities, and within two decades England had seen bank offices proliferate to even small towns.2 The Democratization of Investment Banking Investment banking received further impetus on the other side of the Atlantic in 1811 with the passage of a corporate law in New York State that made it clear that anyone who satis ed minimal requirements could set up a corporation, without special action by the government, and that clearly established limited liability for corporations.

To the Ends of the Earth: Scotland's Global Diaspora, 1750-2010
by T M Devine
Published 25 Aug 2011

It was no coincidence, therefore, that lawyers were the prime factors in the formation of the trusts which played such a key role in the history of Scottish overseas investment in this period. Two institutional developments were also central to the overseas investment boom. The first was the mid-nineteenth-century legislation governing joint stock companies that culminated in the Joint Stock Companies Acts of 1856 and 1862. A previous constraint on individuals of modest wealth investing some of their assets in productive enterprises was the danger of losing all their possessions if the venture collapsed. The joint stock companies legislation came as a godsend because henceforth the investor would only be liable for the nominal shares in the business to which he subscribed. At a stroke, the savings of great and small individuals of means were liberated for investment purposes.

…

By 1913, the company owned 25 per cent of the land in that colony possessed by British agency houses, by far the greatest share.51 Especially impressive was the move of the great Scottish textile firm of James Finlay and Co. from specialization in cotton to investment in Indian tea and jute.52 Other famous names were also established in this period. Thomas Sutherland, chairman of P&O, founded the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank in 1864, with the help of several fellow Scots. Predictably it was run on ‘Scottish principles’ with a heavy reliance on joint-stock company traditions, acting as a bank of issue through a broad network of branches and with the aspiration to attract both British and Chinese capital.53 At the time of writing, HSBC, long shorn of its Scottish roots, is both the world’s largest banking group and the world’s sixth largest business corporation.54 Another eminent name, the Burmah Oil Company, the parent of British Petroleum, developed out of the Rangoon Oil Company.

Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 1 Jun 2009

Through this new opportunity for quiet and passive participation, the nobility became mad for investing. As the operators of these huge projects sought to secure even more capital from a wider range of regions and social classes, they formed a more advanced form of limited partnership called the joint stock company, which could generate investment from shareholders on an open market. This broke business open, allowing for the creation of businesses by virtually anyone capable of getting investors. It almost heralded an era of business meritocracy, which would have generated unprecedented churn in the class structure.

…

It almost heralded an era of business meritocracy, which would have generated unprecedented churn in the class structure. The wealthiest merchants were now as vulnerable to upstarts as the aristocracy. Finally, the monarchy had something it could offer the bourgeoisie who threatened to unseat them. A Child Is Born Although monarchs might have lacked the vast financial resources of joint stock companies, they still enjoyed a structural advantage over any of them: central legal authority. Taking a cue from the Church, which had a tradition of “incorporating” groups of monks into single entities, royals exercised their authority to sanction a new kind of chartered body: the corporation. It was genius.

…

The corporation was not a business or a government entity, but a combination of the two. Its government supporters—the monarchs—had the authority to write the trade laws and grant monopolies; its business participants—the chartered companies—would enjoy the exclusive right to exploit them. By granting a specific joint stock company a legal charter to do business, monarchs could give it a monopoly control of its business sector. So a shipping company that once competed with others for the resources of a set of islands now enjoyed exclusive, royally mandated control over that domain. No other corporation could do business in that region, and even locals or colonists would be prohibited by law from competing against the corporation extracting their resources or selling them goods.

Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded
by Simon Winchester
Published 1 Jan 2003

The Hudson's Bay Company, set up half a century later solely to trade, remains today: the Bay, its flagship department stores, can be found in all of Canada's cities (and in not a few more isolated Arctic settlements), and its owner, a cheerfully eccentric peer called Ken Thomson, lives modestly and happily in a suburb of Toronto. But there was a difference about the VOC. Right from its beginnings, it was cleverly constructed as a joint-stock company. The good burghers of Holland who had initially sent out their own small fleets decided to band together to back a much larger, much more ambitious company, with each backer owning a ‘share’ of this company's value, with the value of each share depending on the amount by which each shareholder backed it. This new concept, of a joint-stock company, with in this case a start-up capital of six and a half million guilders, was to become the model for all the thousands upon thousands of publicly traded firms that are listed on the world's bourses and stock exchanges today, and whose raison d'être, the sharing of risk and sharing of reward, lies now at the beating heart of the modern capitalist system.

…

.: Tectonic Evolution of Southeast Asia 52 Halmahera 61 Hambantota, Ceylon 279 Hamburg, Mr (ship passenger) 174 Hammersley Range, western Australia 264 Handl, Johann 360–61 Handl's Bay, Krakatoa Island 356 Hapsburgs 29n Harmonie club, Batavia 147, 153, 172, 202–3 Hastings-on-Hudson, New York 274 Hatfield, Oscar 152, 234 Haughton, Mr (in Ceylon) 287 Hawaii Island (Big Island) 102, 103, 104 Hawaiian Islands 102–5, 121, 306, 354n Heims, Father 159–60 Helen (a square-rigger) 59 Her Majesty K II submarine 89 Her Majesty K XIII submarine 89 Hermak, Baluchistan 190 Hess, Professor Harry 90, 91, 92, 97–100 ‘ History of Ocean Basins’ 98n Hesse, Elias 49–50, 135 Hevea brasiliensis (Brazilian rubber) 224, 225 Hibernia (converted cargo ship) 189 High Court, London 263n Himalayan Mountains 74, 112 Hinduism 128, 332 Holland 29n, 44 see also Dutch; Netherlands Hollandsche Thuyn (long-rangepacket) 48 Hollmann, Captain 158–9 Hollwood 113, 393, 394 Holtan community 132 Holtum, John (‘Cannonball King’) 205–6 Holy War (perang sabil) 336, 337, 340, 342 Homo erectus 116 Hondius, Henricus 25 Hong Kong 220, 278 Honolulu 289 Hooghly River 276 Hooker, Sir Joseph 62, 63 Hoorn, Zuider Zee 20, 33 Hope (a barque) 175 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 288 Hôtel des Indes, Batavia 206, 207, 208–9 hotspots 103, 104, 347n House of Orange 151 Houtman, Cornelis de 15–18 Houtman, Frederik de 15 Huaynaputina volcano, Peru 308 Hudson, USA 283 Hudson River School 283 Hudson's Bay Company 30 human sacrifice 303 humongous explosion 309, 312 Hurgronje, Snouck 41, 333–4 Hutton, James 69 Huxley, Sir Thomas 63 hydrochloric acid 243 ice cores 129, 131, 133, 296, 308n Iceland 82, 96, 306 Illustrated London News 155n Imperial Beacons & Coastal Lighting Service 170 India 11, 13, 22, 24, 40, 44, 55, 74, 112, 144, 191, 197, 276, 280, 325, 326, 331, 332 India Rubber, Gutta Percha & Telegraph Works Company 187–8, 197 Indian Mutiny 326n Indian Ocean 2, 21, 53, 114, 161n, 182, 182, 231, 261, 264, 278, 280, 285 indigo 330 Indo-Australian Plate 111, 115, 116 Indonesia (formerly Dutch East Indies) xiv, 63, 68, 116, 137, 145–6, 308, 309, 325, 331 independence 38, 342 International Date Line 112, 219n International Meridian Conference (Washington, DC, 1884) 219n Io 302 Iran 112, 331 Ireland 188, 196, 264 Irian 55, 61 iron oxide compounds 84, 85 Isla de Pascua 308 Islam Sumatra and Java Islamicized 17 rigid formalisms 32 local form of 40–41, 332–3 orthodox 40, 41 birth of 133 and the 1883 eruption 321 becomes entwined with local political developments 325 power of 325 upsurge in Islamic zealotry in the East Indies 325 stand against colonialism 327 number of Muslims in Indonesia 331 an imperial religion 331 collision with the West 331 first comes to the East Indies 331–2 the haj 332, 333 threatened by Western imperialism 334 fundamentalism 339 Isonandra gutta 187 Istanbul 378 Italy 22, 242 I wo Jima 384n ‘s Jacob, Governor-General Frederik 148–9, 149, 150–53, 169, 172, 201, 215 ‘s Jacob, Leonie 151 Jakarta History Museum, Java 46n Jakarta (previously Jayakarta and Batavia) 2, 21, 38, 126, 137, 373, 379 Jakarta Radio 9 James I, King 12 Jammersley Range, New Guinea 264 Japan 34n, 42, 44, 196, 244, 308, 309 Java 1, 2, 6, 7, 66, 78, 242 coffee 10, 141 spice-trading 10, 11, 31 first treaty with the Dutch 16 colonization 16 Islamicized 17, 40 mapping 22, 24 British colonial intentions 34 described 40–41 and slavery 44 volcanic 83 and the Java Trench 89 volcanically unstable 114–15 splits from Sumatra 126, 155 anti-Chinese riots 91998) 138 earthquakes 154 response to impending eruption (1883) 164 and gutta-percha 188 explosion sounds not heard by all 266 number of active volcanoes 309, 326 attacks by white-robed figure 323–4, 325, 337 First Military Region 324 Islam 325, 342 mysticism 327 Java Bode 162, 255 Java Head 155, 161n, 182, 220, 231, 379n Java Major 25, 25, 26 Java Man 116 Java Minor 22 Java Pars. 27 Java Sea 45, 172 Java Trench 89, 111, 114 Javasche Courant 153 Jayabaya 128 Jayakarta (later Batavia, then Jakarta) 34, 38 Jeffreys, Sir Harold 76, 304 jetstream 290 Jogjakarta, Java 2, 153 joint-stock companies 30 jökulhlaups 244 Judd, John 315–16 Volcanoes 315 Julius II, Pope 13n Jupiter 302 Jurassic period 96 Kaimeni 347 Kamchatka Peninsula 309 Kamula volcano, Java (Gede) 126 kangaroos 65, 65, 116, 137n ‘Kapi, Mount’ (in Ranggawarsita's history) 125, 126, 129 Karachi 190, 280 Karim, Haji Abdul 334–5, 337, 338, 339, 341 Kartodirdjo, Sartono: The Peasants' Revolt of Bantenin 1888 322 Katmai, Mount, Alaska 5 Kauai Island 102–3, 104 Kaula 102 Kavachi 384n Kedirie (ship) 299, 313 Keith, Brian 394 Kennedy, Henry George 235, 272 Kerala 44 Kerm-an, Teheran 190 Kertsch, Crimea 190 Ketimbang, Sumatra 156, 164–5, 167, 226–30, 233, 245, 251, 259 Kew weather observatory, Surrey 270 Keys, David: Catastrophe 132, 133, 134,395–6 Kilauea: Halemaumau Crater, Hawaii 1093 Kinematics, Inc. 376, 378, 386 King of the Netherlands, The (steam-yacht) 323 Kiribati, Republic of 100 kites 72 Kittery Island 102 Knossos, Crete 244 Koeripan River 256, 257, 258 Kokkulai, Ceylon 287 Kosrae Island, Pacific Micronesia 298 Kowalski, Bernard 394 Krakatoa archipelago 379 Krakatoa Committee, Royal Society 272–3, 275, 276, 286–7 Krakatoa, East of Java (film) 2, 394–5 Krakatoa Iron & Steel Works 340n Krakatoa Island present remains of 1–2 van Linschoten describes 25–6 first mentioned by its current name 27 derivation of the name 27–8 cultivation 120–21 lush coastal jungle 122, 354–5 Schuurmann describes 173 Ferzenaar visits (August 1883) 176–8 disappearance of 178, 237, 239, 240, 260, 300, 337, 338 surrounded by small faults and zones of weakness 320 purity after the 1883 eruption 355–6 repopulation of 356–66, 372 Krakatoa Islands xv Krakatoa Problem 364, 366 Krakatoa Time 219, 248, 275 Krakatoa Volcanic Observatory 375, 376, 389 Krakatoa volcano (general refernces) see also Danan cone; Perboewatan cone; Rakata cone and the Wallace Line 57, 64 notoriety 68, 116, 286, 393 number of eruptions 117–18 ruins compared with Anak Krakatoa 353, 354 Krakatoa volcano ( possible eruption of AD 416) 123–9, 133 Krakatoa volcano (the confusions of AD 416 or AD 535) 129–31 Krakatoa volcano (the likely eruption of AD 535) 123, 131–4 Krakatoa volcano (the near-certain eruption of 1680) 123, 134–9 Batavians and seamen unaware of potential danger 45–6 first recorded eruption 46, 47 Vogel's report 48–9 Hesse's report 49–50 Schley's painting 138–9, 140 Krakatoa volcano (before the certain eruption of 1883) 139–49 Krakatoa volcano (eruption of 27 August 1883) 4–5, 28, 123, 134, 209 the event 210–39, 240 the effects 241–61 the experiences 261–321 death statistics 5, 313 telegraphy 5, 7, 28n, 146, 167,184–7, 192–4, 215 undersea cables 5, 6, 184, 187, 189 lack of geological knowledge at the time 5–6 religious fears 6 and birth of global village 6–7 impact on climate 7 a Plinian eruption 12 and subduction zones 111 Banten flood destruction 127 warnings of forthcoming eruption 154–63 Perboewatan erupts 167–9, 175, 176, 180, 184–5, 193–4 excursions to visit 172–4 Danan erupts 176, 177 statistics of deaths and injuries 242 the sound of 262–8 progress of the shock waves 273–5, 313 art and 282–5 and temperature 293–6 floating bodies 296–300 existed above a large chamber of magma 318–19 burial of the dead 321, 322 rebuilding after 321, 323 political and religious consequence 321, 342–3 reluctance to settle near the volcano 379 Kramat 260 Kultuurstelsel (Cultivation System) 328–9, 333 Kurile Islands 309 Kurrachee 276 Kyoto 297 Labuan, Java 337 lahars (volcanic mud and water slurry) 243 Lakagígar (Hekla), Iceland 294 Lamongan 155 Lampong Bay 166, 216, 219, 228, 234, 247, 249, 250, 251 Lancaster, James 34 Lang Island, Krakatoa (previously Panjang, now Rakata Kecil) xv, 118n, 158n, 314, 318, 354 Laos 34n Lascar volcano, Chile 308 Laurasia 73, 74, 75 lava flows 369 Laysan Island 102 Le Havre 282 Leicestershire 57, 58 Lemuria 53n Liciala spinosa 355 Lincoln, President Abraham 196, 219n Lindeman, Captain T.H. 173, 174, 216, 219, 230 Linnean Society, Burlington House, Piccadilly, London 52–3, 54, 62, 64, 65 Linschoten, Jan Huyghen van 23–6, 26 Itinerario 24, 25 Lippincott Gazetteer 190n Lisbon 14, 15, 191 Lisianski Island 102 lithosphere 109–10, 302 Llaima volcano 308 Lloyd's of London 161, 168, 180–83, 186, 193, 232, 261 Committee 182, 197 Foreign Intelligence Office 193 Lochart, Nanette 208, 209 Locomotive 151 Lodewijcksz, Willem 25, 26 Logan, Captain William 223–4 Lombok Island 61, 66, 69 Lomu, Jonah 384n London 19, 179–80, 189, 190, 191, 196, 197, 270, 284 London Station 193 Londonderry 196 long waves 278, 279–80 Los Angeles 200 Luzon 24 Lyell, Sir Charles 62, 63, 69 Macassar, Celebes, Macasserese 31, 44, 265, 326 Macau 19 McColl, Mr (Lloyd's agent) 181, 259–60 mace (aril) 11, 18 MacKenzie, Captain 157, 161 McLuhan, Marshall 184, 198 Madagascar 16, 53 Madras 190, 191, 280 Madura 17 Magellan, Ferdinand 23 Magellan Strait 19 magma 84, 103, 104, 305, 315, 316,318–20 magnetic airborne detector (MAD) 93n magnetism and basalts 84, 85 moon's surface 100 remanent 91–2, 96, 97, 102 underwater 93–5 magnetite 84–5, 85, 92n magnetometers 93–6, 97, 101, 107 Magpie, HMS 265, 272 Mahdi 322, 335, 336, 337, 342 Malabar Coast 11 Malacca 11, 18, 22, 29, 34, 44 Malaku 61 see also Moluccas Malay Archipelago 59, 60, 190 Australian (eastern) end of 55, 64, 65 Indian (western) end of 55, 64, 65 Wallace's preferred term 59 Malay language 59 Malaya peninsula 22, 24, 29, 31, 40, 53, 190, 326, 331 Maldives 23 Malta 191 Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society 294 Manchus 157n Manhattan, New York City 295 Manila 196, 264 Manley, Reverend W.R. 288 maps 21–7, 26, 155 Mardijkers 44 Marie (Danish salt-carrying barque) 219–20, 230, 234, 246 Mars 302 Mason, Ron 93–5 Massachusetts Bay Company 30 Mataram sultan of 40 Matuyama, Motonari 96 Maui Island 103 Mauk 260 Maurice of Nassau, Prince 16n Mauritius 16n, 34n, 261, 263n, 270 Maan civilization 133 Mayon, Mount 266 Mecca 332–5, 336, 337, 342 Mecca's Plain of Arafat 333n Medea (British ship) 216, 231 Mediterranean 14, 23, 191 Mediterranean region 133 Mekong 24 Melbourne 270 Merak, Java 160, 222, 225, 238, 246, 249n, 250, 252–3, 259, 260, 337 Merapi, Mount 48, 155 Merbapu, Mount 48, 155 Mercator, Gerardus 71 Merchant Adventurers 30 Merchant Staplers 30 Meteorological Council 270 meteorology 70, 76, 275, 290.

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Silver & Company 187 swiftlets 21 Sydney 189, 264n Sydney Morning Herald 232 Symons, G.J. 272–3 Tabr-iz, Persia 190 Tachard, Guy 27–8 Tambora, Mount, Sumbawa 5, 48, 244, 283n, 294–5, 296, 308n, 312, 393 Tambora language 295 Tamils 44 Tangier 325 tapirs 68 tarekat (Abdel Karim's brotherhood) 337 Tasmania 289 Taupo, Mount, New Zealand 5, 312 Taylor, Frank 72n tea 141, 238–9, 330 Teheran 190 telegraph cable, submarine 5, 6, 146, 184, 187–92, 188 telegraph, electric 5, 7, 28n, 146, 167, 175, 179, 184, 186–7, 189–90, 192, 195, 215, 238, 246, 260 telegraph system 271 Telok Betong, Sumatra 166, 216, 219, 228, 234, 247, 249n, 250, 251, 253–9, 277 temperature 293–6 Tenison-Woods, Julian 232, 233n, 234n Tennyson, Alfred, Lord St Telemachus 286 ‘ The Deep-Sea Cables’ 191 tephra 242, 244 Tern Island 102 Ternate 56, 60, 61 Tertiary period 84, 87 Tethyan Ocean 73, 74 Texel 15, 19, 23 Thailand 21, 34n Thames River 284, 290 Theodore the Studite, St 10 Theosophy 53n thermometers, recording 267 Thiara carolitaciturni (a mollusc) 367n Thomas Cook guides 143 Thomson, Captain 216, 231 Thomson, Ken 30 Thor, Mr (in Batavia) 205 thorium isotopes 109 Thornton, Ian 369 Krakatau: The Destruction and Reassembly of an Island Ecosystem 396 thrushes 55, 65, 66, 116, 137n Thunderer, The 194 Thwart-the-Way Island 161n, 237, 260n, 278 Tidal Survey of India 276 tidal wave 242n, 313, 319 tide-gauges 276, 277, 278, 280, 282 tide-meter 252, 253–4, 277–8 Tiflis, Georgia 190 time zones 219, 248, 263 Times, The 179–80, 185, 185n, 186n, 187, 193–4, 197, 272, 291, 299 Timor 13n, 19, 23, 29, 55, 168 tin 148 Tjeringin, Java 238, 253, 260 Toba, Mount, Sumatra 5, 309, 312 tobacco 330 Tokyo 196, 200 Tonga 112, 384n Tordesillas Line 13n, 14 Toronto 103, 274 transcurrent fault 106, 107 transform fault 105, 106, 106 tree-ring samples 129, 131, 133, 296 trees 137, 148, 166, 298 repopulation of Krakatoa Island 359–60 Trenton, New Jersey 263 Treub, Melchior 364, 365 trilobites 73 Trincomalee, Ceylon 264 Trobriand Islands 55 troposphere 285 Troy, New York 319 Tsingtao, Shandong peninsula 157–8n tsunamis 113, 231, 242n, 244, 246, 249, 257, 275–8 Tunisia 295 Turkey 112, 290 Turkey Company 30 Turner, J.M.W. 283n Tuzo Wilson, J. 101–7, 106, 109, 306 ‘A New Class of Faults and Their Bearing on Continental Drift’ 105 Typhon 303 Tyringin, Java 246, 250, 259 Ujung Kulon National Park 379n United States Coast Guard 93 United States Geological Survey 207, 375 United States Government 93 United States Navy 93, 107, 107 United States of America 197 evidence of crustal movement 91, 93 makes peace with Britain 139n and Diego Garcia 263n high number of volcanoes 308 Universit of Auckland 290 University of Graz, Austria 76 University of Hawaii 290 University of Melbourne 290 University of Rhode Island 133, 290, 397 Universit of Toronto 101 Unzen, Mount 244, 266, 378 uranium isotopes 109 Usk, south Wales 57 Utrecht 37 Vail, Alfred 146 van den Broecke, Mr (storekeeper) 35 van der Stok, Dr J.P. 162–4, 216 van der Stok, Mrs 162 Varanus salvator (five-banded swimming monitor lizard) 389–91, 390 Vava'u Group 384n Venice 13, 34 Vening Meinesz, Felix 88–90 Verbeek, Dr Rogier Diederik Marius 170, 250n employment 169–70, 171 misses first part of eruption 171 sees Krakatoa in July 1883 176 and van der Stok 216 on renewed activity of Krakatoa 347, 348 the first on to Krakatoa Island after 1883 eruption 356 Krakatau 169, 266–7, 313–14, 315, 347, 367, 397 Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC) 48, 50, 119, 138, 144 chartered by the Dutch government 30, 31 rights 30 and capitalism 30 joint-stock company 30 ‘Gentlemen Seventeen’ 31, 33 rules most of East Indies for two centuries 31 Coen and 35 corporate logo 38, 38 formative years 38–9 and Batavia 42, 47, 135, 139 hat rule 44n courts 45 harsh treatment by security officers 47 employee care 48 buildings reportedly damaged by earthquake (1681) 50 and naval blockades 139 collapse in 1799 31, 141, 143 Vereker, Captain Hon.

The Tyranny of Metrics
by Jerry Z. Muller
Published 23 Jan 2018

In 1862, Robert Lowe, a Liberal member of parliament who oversaw the committee on education, proposed a new method for government funding of schools, which would be based on “payment by results.” Lowe had distinguished himself in 1856 by shepherding through parliament a seminal piece of legislation in the history of capitalism. That was the Joint Stock Companies Act, which, together with legislation passed the previous year, the Limited Liability Act, set out a new law for corporations based on the principal of limited liability. From reforming the structure of business, Lowe turned to reforming government-supported schools. Lowe’s scheme was based on the premise that “the duty of a State in public education is … to obtain the greatest possible quantity of reading, writing, and arithmetic for the greatest number.”1 Schools were to be funded based on the performance of their students in the “3 Rs.”

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See metric fixation Forbes, 76 Ford Motor Company, 34 foreign aid and philanthropy, 153–56 Freedom of Information Act, 162 From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession, 12 gaming the metrics, 3, 24–25, 149–50 Geisinger Health System, 108–9, 110–11, 123 General Motors, 33 Geographical Information Systems (GIS), 126 Gibbons, Robert, 55–56 goals: displacement of, through diversion of effort, 169–70; value of short-term over long-term, 20 Goodhart’s Law, 19–20, 24 Google Ngram, 40, 159 Google Scholar, 79 Government Accountability Office, 156 Guardian, The, 163 Halbertal, Moshe, 160, 164 Hayek, Friedrich, 12, 59, 60–61 Healthgrades, 115 Henderson, Rebecca, 150 higher education, 9–14, 175–76; designed to make money, 86–87; encouraging everyone to pursue, 67–68; grading institutions in, 81–86; higher metrics through lower standards in, 69–73; measuring academic productivity, 78–80; pressure to measure performance in, 73–75; raising the number of winners lowering the value of winning with, 68–69; rankings, 75–78; value and limits of rankings in, 81 high-stakes testing, 93 Holmstrom, Bengt, 52, 169 Howard, Philip K., 41 human capital, 72, 98 impact factor measurement, 79 Improving America’s Schools Act, 90 information, distortion of, 23–24 innovation, 20; discouragement of, 140, 150–51, 171–72; employees moving to organizations that encourage, 173; unmeasurable risk for potential benefits of, 61–62 Institute of Medicine, 118–19 intimacy, 160 intrinsic rewards, 53–57, 119–20 Iraq War, 131–34 Johns Hopkins University, 109–10 Johnson, Lyndon, 98 Joint Commission, 115 Joint Stock Companies Act, 30 judgment, 6–7; distrust of, 39–42; measurement demanding, 176–77 “juking the stats,” 2 Kedourie, Elie, 62–63, 73 Kelvin, Lord, 17 Kennedy, Edward, 90 Keystone project, 109–10, 111–12, 176 Khurana, Rakesh, 12 Kilcullen, David, 131–34 Kiplinger, 76 Klarman, Seth, 47 Knight, Frank, 61–62, 151 knowledge: forms of, 59–60; practical, local, 62; pretense of, 60 Kohn, Alfie, 62 Kolberg, William, 90 Kozlowski, Dennis, 144 Lancelot, William, 33 leadership and organizational complexity, 44–47 Lehman Brothers, 146–47 Levy, Steven, 47 Limited Liability Act, 30 litigation, fear of, 42 London Business School, 138–39 Lowe, Robert, 29–30 Lumina Foundation, 67–68, 71 Luttwak, Edward, 35–37 luxury goods, 104 managerialism, 34–37 Manning, Bradley (later Chelsea),162–63 Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge, and Change, 172 Masters of Management, 13 materialist bias, 36 Mayer-Schönberger, Viktor, 35 McNamara, Robert, 34–37, 131 measurement and improvement, 16–17, 101, 107, 111, 119, 123, 132, 176, 183 measuring inputs rather than outcomes, 23–24 “Measuring Progress in Afghanistan,” 132 measuring the most easily measurable, 23 measuring the simple when the desired outcome is complex, 23 Medicaid, 104 Medicare, 104, 114–16, 120–23 medicine: broader picture on metrics, pay-for-performance, rankings, and report cards in, 112–20; case selection bias in, 117–18; Cleveland Clinic, 107–8, 110–11; conclusions from success in, 110–12; cost disease and, 44; discouraging cooperation and common purpose in, 172; financial push to control costs in, 103–4, 119–20; Geisinger Health System, 108–9, 110–11, 123; Keystone project, 109–10, 111–12, 176; measured performance metrics in, 2–5, 107, 123, 176; ranking the American system of, 105–7; reducing readmissions test case, 120–23; rise of metric fixation with increased critique of, 42–43; tales of success in, 107–10 Mercurio, Jed, 2–3 Merton, Robert K., 12, 170 metric fixation, 4–9, 13; in business and finance, 137–51; cost disease and, 44; critique of the professions and apotheosis of choice in, 42–44; defined, 18; distortion of information with, 23–24; distrust of judgment leading to, 39–42; in higher education, 9–14, 67–87, 175–76; innovation and creativity stifled by, 20; key components of, 18; leadership and organizational complexity and, 44–47; lure of electronic spreadsheets in, 47; managerialism and, 34–37; in medicine, 2–5, 42–44, 103–23, 172, 176; by the military, 35–37, 131–35, 176; negative transformations of nature of work with, 19; pay for performance and, 19; in philanthropy and foreign aid, 153–56; in policing, 125–29, 175; predicting and avoiding negative consequences of, 169–73; recurrent flaws in, 23–25; relationship between measurement and improvement in, 17–19; in schools, 11, 24, 89, 175–76; Taylorism and, 31–34; theory of motivation and, 19–20; and transparency as enemy of performance, 159–65 metrics: checklist for when and how to use, 175–83; corruption or goal diversion in gathering and using, 182; costs of acquiring, 180; development of measures for, 181; diagnostic, 92–93, 103, 110, 123, 126, 176; diminishing utility of, 170; gaming the, 3, 23–24, 149–50; kind of information measured by, 177; media depictions of, 1–4; philosophical critiques of, 59–64; purposes of specific measurements and, 178–79; reasons leaders ask for, 180–81; recognition that not all problems are solvable by, 182–83; transactional costs of, 170; used to replace judgment, 6–7; usefulness of information from, 177–78 Michigan Keystone ICU Project, 109–10, 111–12, 176 Middle States Commission on Higher Education, 10–11 Milgrom, Paul, 52, 169 military, American, 35–37, 131–35, 176 Minsky, Hyman, 148 Mintzberg, Henry, 52 Mitchell, Ted, 82 Moneyball, 7 Morieux, Yves, 45, 170 mortgage backed securities, 146–47 motivation: extrinsic and intrinsic rewards and, 53–57, 119–20, 137–38, 144; theory of, 19–20 Muller, Jerry Z., 79 Mylan, 140–42, 143 National Alliance of Business, 90 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 91, 97, 99 National Center for Educational Statistics, 97 National Center on Performance Incentives, 95–96 National Health Service, 104, 114, 116–17 National Security Agency, 163 Natsios, Andrew, 155–56 New Public Management, 51–53 Newsweek, 76 No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, 11, 24, 89, 100; problem addressed by, 89–91, 96; Race to the Top after, 94–95; unintended consequences of, 92–94.

War and Gold: A Five-Hundred-Year History of Empires, Adventures, and Debt
by Kwasi Kwarteng
Published 12 May 2014

At this point, the directors of the Company started selling shares to buy them back at a lower price. By the end of September the share price was below £200. This represented a fall of around 75 per cent in four weeks.32 This is a very bald account of the speculation which haunted London for decades, and which seriously damaged the reputation of the joint-stock company. There were, of course, human stories of tragedy and triumph during those fevered summer months of 1720. Thomas Guy, the philanthropist who founded Guy’s Hospital on his gains, started selling his shares on 22 April, and was out of the stock in six weeks. He had converted a £54,000 holding into £234,428.

…

This was the prelude to the intense period of bloodshed and repression known as the Terror. Contrary to what one might expect, the Terror stopped the incipient runaway inflation, which the chaos of the summer months had set in train. The government imposed severe legal restrictions, closing the stock market, abolishing joint-stock companies and imposing very harsh measures on those who refused to take the assignat at par. The Jacobins, which was the name given to the French revolutionary extremists, resorted to authoritarian methods, perhaps the most efficient way of preserving the value of a paper currency. Grain prices, consumer prices and wages were all controlled by the so-called laws of the Maximum.

…

As Goschen, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, observed in a speech in Leeds Town Hall in January 1891, ‘the stock of bullion at the centre of this country is 24 millions, compared with 95 millions of gold and silver in the Bank of France’, while there were ‘142 millions in the United States’.17 On Friday 14 November, the day on which the fund was arranged, Lidderdale saw the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, to inform him of the solution and of the reserve fund which he had organized for Barings. The conclusion of the drama was that Barings ceased to be a partnership and was reconstituted as a joint-stock company, in which there would be limited liability. The whole transaction was conducted with admirable swiftness, and banks outside London were ‘hardly sensible of the crisis’. Remarkably, there were no failures among the county banks, either in the towns or in the countryside.18 On Monday 17 November, the City was beginning ‘to breathe again a little more freely’.19 Lidderdale, despite being widely praised, was asked to be Governor for only an extra year, but it meant a third year in office which was almost unprecedented in the history of the Bank of England up to that point.

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy
by Philip Coggan
Published 6 Feb 2020

Cotton manufacturing played a huge part in Britain’s expansion, going from less than 3% of economic output in 1770 to more than 20% by 1830,31 but other economies managed to industrialise without such a dependence on the textile industry. Believers in free markets as the main driver of expansion need to explain why high British taxes (in relative terms) and restrictive legislation, such as the 1720 Bubble Act that made it difficult to form joint-stock companies, did not hold the country back. British institutions were far from perfect; property rights were just as good in France or China.32 And Britain suffered plenty of political turmoil, including a civil war in the mid-17th century. So it seems more likely that all of these factors had to come together for industrialisation to occur.

…

This area deliberately excluded the Austrian Habsburg territories, part of a long battle for control of Germany between Prussia and Austria that ended with the former’s triumph in 1866. The entire country was united under the Prussian Kaiser after a war with France in 1870–71. Well before unification, parts of Germany were industrialising rapidly. The 1850s was the key decade, marked by a railway boom, the creation of joint-stock companies and banks, and the development of the iron and steel industry.48 Coal output rose from 2m tons in 1850 to 114m tons in 1913,49 by which stage the Ruhr region was supplying 60% of the country’s coal needs.50 With the help of fertilisers, the German grain harvest grew 3.7-fold between 1845 and 1914.51 That allowed the country to feed its growing population, which jumped from 41m in 1871 to 68m in 1913.

…

The capital moved to Edo (renamed Tokyo), and the power of the emperor was boosted in 1868, events known as the Meiji restoration. A delegation journeyed to the US and Europe to study their societies. On its return, the Japanese adopted the Western calendar, metric weights, a new monetary system and joint-stock companies. Toshimichi Okubo, the finance minister, promoted road and railway building and set up state-run arms manufacturers, shipyards and textile mills.66 The first Japanese railway opened in 1872 and expansion was so fast that 5,370 miles had been constructed by 1910.67 The textile industry was Japan’s biggest success.

In Pursuit of the Perfect Portfolio: The Stories, Voices, and Key Insights of the Pioneers Who Shaped the Way We Invest
by Andrew W. Lo and Stephen R. Foerster
Published 16 Aug 2021

There was one noteworthy constraint on share turnover: in addition to paying a large notary fee, new shareholders had to host a dinner for the entire board of directors. The first “modern” joint-stock companies were the British East India Company (EIC), founded in 1600, and the Dutch East India Company, also known as the Vereenigte Ost-Indische Compagnie (VOC), founded in 1602.22 The EIC was formed as a monopoly to trade in India and later China, while the VOC was a government-directed amalgamation of several Dutch companies that were granted a monopoly on trade in India. In 1609, the VOC was the first modern joint-stock company to raise a large amount of capital by issuing dividend-paying shares. For over a century, the shares paid dividends of an incredible 22 percent.

…

In 1720, however, when expected profits were slow to materialize, the stock price plummeted. Law was forced to flee the country and went to live in Venice, where he continued to gamble and traded in paintings. A parallel bubble was playing out in England around the same time.30 The South Sea Company was a joint-stock company, founded in England in 1711. The company had monopoly trading rights to much of South America, even though Spain and Portugal had well-established empires there. This trade, however, was of minor importance, since it was established to help the government organize the national debt (much like the Mississippi Company), which was incurring high borrowing rates after nearly twenty years of expensive warfare.

…

Vertin Award, received by Leibowitz, 200 Janus Henderson Investors, 169, 352–53n79 Jarrow, Robert, 180, 190–91 Jefferson, Thomas, 333 Jenrette, Richard, 260 Jensen, Michael, 90, 96, 109, 146, 218, 347n46; agency problem and, 108–9; collaboration with Scholes and Black, 146, 148; education of, 143; on efficient market hypothesis, 81; publications of, 148 Johnson, Craig, 75 John von Neumann Theory Prize, Markowitz as winner of, 336n6 joint-stock companies, modern, first, 8–9 Journal of Finance, 27 JP Morgan, Merton Model and, 185 Kahneman, Daniel, 42, 83–84 Kamstra, Mark, 253, 254 Kaplan, Paul, on Markowitz’s contribution to portfolio construction, 44 Katona, George, 228 Ketchum, Marshall, 23, 338n40 Keynes, John Maynard, 283, 320; Cambridge University endowment managed by, 16–17; lack of impact on investing, 17; publications of, 15, 16, 17, 132; on sources of return, 132 Kindleberger, Charles, 240–41 Klein, Lawrence, as Nobel Prize winner, 22 Klingenstein, J.

Money: The Unauthorized Biography
by Felix Martin
Published 5 Jun 2013

The tried and tested solution was to take a scythe to the sovereign’s creditors’ claims by devaluing the monetary unit or announcing an outright default. But Law’s plan was to play not on creditors’ fears, but on their greed. In 1717, with his prestige buoyed by the success of his Bank, he had convinced the Regent to allow him to form a joint-stock company, the Company of the West, and to award it the rights to develop French North America, which had until then been held by the arch-bloodsucker Antoine Crozat. These vast and virgin territories were sure, Law publicly predicted, to yield gigantic profits for the new company—and all of it with the endorsement of the French crown.

…

Investors turned in their sovereign bonds and bills at Law’s office in the Rue Quincampoix in return for equity shares in the ever-expanding Company. By the middle of 1719—now officially renamed the Company of the Indies, but known popularly after its most glamorous asset as the Mississippi Company—Law’s giant corporation had subsumed every major joint-stock company in France. In August 1719, Law put the final phase of his plan into action. The Company acquired the rights to collect all the indirect taxes in France. It no longer represented only the crown’s foreign interests; its revenues now derived from the French economy as a whole. At the same time, it announced its intention to buy up the entire remaining part of the sovereign debt.

…

Just as the sovereign had lent its unique authority to the Bank, so the Bank had over time got into the practice of lending its authority to the universe of other banks; and, until the policy reversal of 1858 that had heralded the beginning of the end for Overends, to the bill brokers as well. The result was a modern monetary economy in which “[o]n the wisdom of the directors of one Joint Stock Company, it depends whether England is solvent or insolvent … [a]ll banks depend on the Bank of England, and all merchants depend on some banker.”46 Here was the reason, Bagehot explained, that Lombard Street was the money market of the entire global economy: the place where more banks were able to issue more money than ever before in the history of the world.

Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India
by Shashi Tharoor
Published 1 Feb 2018

Sterling companies tended to focus on utilities, tea and jute; this meant that there were significant barriers to entry for Indians in these markets, which the British reserved for themselves. Moreover, all sterling companies were required to have a British managing agent to oversee them before London-based investors would commit capital. Indian investors were simply kept out. Thus, of 385 joint stock companies in the tea industry in India as late as 1914, 376 were based in Calcutta; and all were owned by the British. Scholars have established that in 1915, 100 per cent of the jute mills in India were in British hands; by 1929 this was down to 78 per cent, still enshrining British dominance. British India occupied a unique position in the imperial trade and payments system.

…

Presiding over all of this was the governor-general of India, an executive appointed by the East India Company but, in effect, the monarch of all he surveyed. William Dalrymple quotes one contemporary observer as saying: ‘Of all human conditions, perhaps the most brilliant and at the same time the most anomalous, is that of the Governor-General of British India. A private English gentleman, and the servant of a joint-stock company, during the brief period of his government he is the deputed sovereign of the greatest empire in the world; the ruler of a hundred million men; while dependent kings and princes bow down to him with a deferential awe and submission. There is nothing in history analogous to this position…’ The ad hoc nature of the expansion of British power brought with it its own deinstitutionalization of India’s governance.

…

It may seem frivolous to confine my appreciation of British rule to cricket, tea and the English language. I do not mean to discount other accomplishments. In outlining the exploitation and looting of India by British commercial interests, for example, I should acknowledge that in the process the British gave India the joint stock company, long experience of commercial processes and international trade, and Asia’s oldest stock exchange, established in Bombay in 1875. Indians’ familiarity with international commerce and the stock market has proved a distinct advantage in the globalized world; India’s entrepreneurial capital and management skills are well able to control and manage assets in the sophisticated financial markets of the developed West today, as Tatas have demonstrated in Britain by making Jaguar profitable for the first time in years, and India’s businessmen and managers are familiar with the systems needed to operate a twenty-first-century economy in an open and globalizing world.

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet
by Klaus Schwab
Published 7 Jan 2021

As Europe opened its eyes to the vastness of the world, the motors of economic development were jump-started by international trade. Using joint stock companies, traders and financial investors pooled their risks to ensure the most advantageous outcomes of their overseas trade. The most famous of these were the English and Dutch East India Companies. European governments often granted monopoly privileges, giving particular companies exclusive trading access to colonies. This allowed joint stock companies to operate as states to become by some measures the largest companies the world has ever seen. This helped fuel the creation of stock markets, such as in Antwerp and Amsterdam, and financial products of credit and currency exchange.

…

[…] The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole Earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep.” Keynes also noted a similar situation was also true in the world of investing. Those with the means in New York, Paris, London, or Berlin could also invest in internationally active joint stock companies. One of those, the French Compagnie de Suez, constructed the Suez Canal connecting the Mediterranean with the Indian Ocean and opened yet another artery of world trade. Others built railways in India or managed mines in African colonies. Foreign direct investing, too, was globalizing. While Britain was the country that benefited most from this globalization, as it had the most capital and the best technology, others did too, by exporting other goods.

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet
by Klaus Schwab and Peter Vanham
Published 27 Jan 2021

As Europe opened its eyes to the vastness of the world, the motors of economic development were jump-started by international trade. Using joint stock companies, traders and financial investors pooled their risks to ensure the most advantageous outcomes of their overseas trade. The most famous of these were the English and Dutch East India Companies. European governments often granted monopoly privileges, giving particular companies exclusive trading access to colonies. This allowed joint stock companies to operate as states to become by some measures the largest companies the world has ever seen. This helped fuel the creation of stock markets, such as in Antwerp and Amsterdam, and financial products of credit and currency exchange.

…

[…] The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole Earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep.” Keynes also noted a similar situation was also true in the world of investing. Those with the means in New York, Paris, London, or Berlin could also invest in internationally active joint stock companies. One of those, the French Compagnie de Suez, constructed the Suez Canal connecting the Mediterranean with the Indian Ocean and opened yet another artery of world trade. Others built railways in India or managed mines in African colonies. Foreign direct investing, too, was globalizing. While Britain was the country that benefited most from this globalization, as it had the most capital and the best technology, others did too, by exporting other goods.

The Great Economists Ten Economists whose thinking changed the way we live-FT Publishing International (2014)
by Phil Thornton
Published 7 May 2014

He again resorted to a biological analogy, noting how in a forest some trees fail as they are overshadowed by taller neighbours who continue to grow taller until ‘age tells on them’ and they are overtaken by other new trees. However, he realised that this theory was weakened by the growth of joint-stock companies – what we would now call FTSE-listed plcs – which he acknowledged could secure a ‘prominent and permanent place’ in the economy. Marshall saw that these large firms found it easier to maintain their vigour than smaller rivals as they could benefit from both internal economies by exploiting technology and increased specialisation, and external economies thanks to the extra marketing power their size gave them.

…

Bush 139 influence on Margaret Thatcher 138–9 influence on Ronald Reagan 139 influence on the monetarists 138–9 key economic theories 122–36 key ideas 142 libertarian views 134–6, 140 long-term legacy 137–41 nature of the free market system 131–3 Nobel Prize (1974) 137 opposition to central state planning 134–6, 140 out of fashion 129–31 prices and knowledge 131–3 Prices and Production (1931) 126, 130 rejection of government control of the economy 120 study of philosophy and economics 121–22 The Road to Serfdom (1944) 135, 138, 140 time and the value of capital 124–6 verdict 141–2 Hegel, Georg 51–2, 54 herd behaviour 105 heuristics and bias in decision making 222–5 Hicks, John 173 High Speed 2 train line from London to the North 125 hindsight bias 227 242Index Hobbes, Thomas 5 hubris hypothesis 227 human behaviour, Becker’s approach 212–15 human capital theory (Becker) 200–2, 210 human decision making processes (Kahneman) 221–5 Hume, David 4, 97 Hutcheson, Francis 3–4 illusion of validity concept 220, 224 income inequality in the present day 64–6 individualism, view of Friedman 155–7 industrial districts 84–6, 87 industrial economics 84–6, 87 Industrial Revolution 11 inflation 107, 110 actions of the central banks 161 and Keynesian policies 127 and money supply 151–2 relationship with unemployment 153–5 Institute of Economic Affairs 138, 161 interest rates effects of adjustments 103–4 effects of credit expansion 123–4 natural rate of interest (Hayek) 123 intergenerational economics 178–80 International Bank of Reconstruction and Development 109 international economics and trade, view of Samuelson 183–7 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 108–9, 113, 186 international trade and comparative advantage (Ricardo) 35–8 international trade theory 184–5 intervention during economic depression, view of Keynes 92–3, 94, 105–6 investment, volatility caused by uncertainty 104–5 invisible hand concept (Smith) 7–9 Johnson, Harry 94 Johnson, Lyndon B. 110, 190 joint-stock companies 86 Kahneman, Daniel (1934– ) 206, 217–36 behavioural economics 218–19, 233–6 biases and errors in financial decision making 225–32 cognitive biases 222–5 decision making under risk 228–32 early life and influences 219–20 economic writings and theories 221–32 from psychology to economics 225–32 gambler’s fallacy (misconception of chance) 224 heuristics and bias in decision making 222–5 human decision making processes 221–5 illusion of validity concept 220, 224 long-term legacy 233–4 loss aversion 230–2 multidisciplinary approach to economics 218 Nobel Prize for economic sciences (2002) 218, 220 optimism bias and overconfidence 226–7 Prospect Theory 228–32, 234 Thinking, Fast and Slow (2012) 226–7, 234 verdict 235–6 Kennedy, John F. 110, 190 Keynes, John Maynard (1883–1946) 19, 73, 86, 91–116, 171 aggregate demand and the role of government 102–4 Bretton Woods agreement 95, 108–9 causes of unemployment 101 challenging the classical consensus 99–106 Index243 clash with Hayek 120, 126–31 criticism from monetarists 110–11 criticism of self-correction of markets 99, 105–6 criticism of the gold standard 95, 98, 107 criticism of the quantity theory of money 97 drivers of recession 101 early life and influences 93–4 effects of changes in money supply 97 effects of interest rate adjustments 103–4 effects of reducing wages 101–2 elevation to the House of Lords 106 end of the Keynesian revival 113–14 First World War and aftermath 95–7 focus on demand side economics 127 General Theory 99–106 Great Crash (1929) 98, 99 Great Depression (1930s) 99–100 International Bank of Reconstruction and Development 109 International Monetary Fund 108–9 investments as King’s College Bursar 98, 114 investor expectations and uncertainty 104–5 key ideas 115–16 liquidity preference theory 105, 113 long-term legacy 109–14 marginal propensity to consume (MPC) 103 marginal propensity to save (MPS) 103 move into economics 94–8 multiplier concept 103 national economist to international statesman 106–9 paradox of thrift 101 periods in and out of favour 92–3 plans for post-WWII international economy 107–9 popularity of Keynesianism 109–10 revival in the 2008 financial crisis 111–13 savings and investment 100–1 Second World War and aftermath 106–9 severe falls in output 101–2 state intervention during economic depression 92–3, 94, 105–6 Treaty of Versailles 95–6 and investment volatility 104–5 unpopularity beginning in the 1970s 110–11 verdict 115 Keynes, John Neville 93 Klaus, Vaclav 140 Kotlikoff, Laurence 179 Krugman, Paul 180, 191 Kuznets, Simon 148 Laar, Mart 140 labour-intensive goods, effects of increase in wages 33 labour market, human capital concept 200–2, 210 laissez-faire economic system 9 rejection by Keynes 105–6 law of diminishing returns 31 Lehman Brothers collapse (2008) 42, 67 Leviathan (Hobbes) 5 Levitt, Steve 234 libertarian views Friedman 157 Hayek 134–6, 140 life choices, economic perspective 203–6 Lindbeck, Assar 168 liquidity preference theory 105, 113 London School of Economics (LSE) 122, 126, 128 loss aversion 230–2 Lucas, Robert 202 244Index Mackintosh, William 109 Malthus, Thomas Robert 31, 33, 169 marginal analysis 80–2 marginal change concept (Marshall) 80–2 marginal propensity to consume (MPC) 103 marginal propensity to save (MPS) 103 marginal rate of substitution 180 market equilibrium price 76–7 market mechanism (Smith) 15–16 market price, supply and demand factors 15–16 market self-correction, criticism by Keynes 99, 105–6 marriage, economic perspective 203–6 Marshall, Alfred (1842–1924) 71–89, 170 and the business world 84–6 ceteris paribus approach to economic analysis 79–80 concept of time in supply and demand 77–9 early life and influences 73–4 economics as a science 73, 86 economics theories 75–86 elasticity of demand 82–4 geographical effects in economics 84–6 industrial districts 84–6, 87 industrial economics 84–6, 87 influence on Keynes 93, 95 interaction between costs and value 75–7 key ideas 88–9 long-term legacy 86–8 marginal analysis 80–2 marginal change concept 80–2 mathematical approach to economics 72 microeconomics 72, 86 political economy 74 price as interaction of supply and demand 75–9 Principles of Economics (1890) 72, 76, 77–8, 87–8, 188 supply and demand model 75–84 verdict 88 Marx, Karl (1818–83) 19, 49–68 and the global financial crisis (2008) 61–3 capitalist exploitation of the working class 56–8, 62–3 capitalist production process 54–6 communism 50 Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels) 52, 58–61 Das Kapital 52, 53–4, 59–61, 62, 67–8 distribution of economic value 54–6 downfall of capitalism 56–8, 61–3 early life and influences 51–3 economics theories 53–8 ‘fictitious capital’ concept 62 income inequality in the present day 64–6 key ideas 68 long-term legacy 63–7 surplus value of labour 54–6 verdict 67–8 view of Marxist governments 66 mass production 11 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) 170 mathematical approach to economics Marshall 72 Samuelson 169–70 mercantilism 7–8, 22–3 mergers and acquisitions 226–7 Merton, Robert 187 microeconomics 172–3, 174, 196 work of Marshall 72, 86 Microsoft 233 middle class, rise of 64 Mieses, Ludwig von 121–2 Mill, James 30–1 Mill, John Stuart 30, 181 The Principles of Political Economy (1848) 188 Modigliani, Franco 173 monetarism 110, 138–9, 146, 151–2 monetarist rule 152 Index245 money supply and the Great Depression (1930s) 150–2 effects of changes in (Keynes) 97 role in running the economy 151–2 monopolies evil of 10–11 regulation to prevent 21–2 multiplier effect 103, 174–5 Murphy, Kevin 201, 210–12 NAIRU (non-accelerating inflation of unemployment) 153–5 Nashat, Guity 206 neoclassical synthesis 174 neo-Keynesianism 168–9, 173–5 net profit 81 New Classical Economics 159 New Deal (Franklin D.

Toward Rational Exuberance: The Evolution of the Modern Stock Market
by B. Mark Smith
Published 1 Jan 2001

But other industrial concerns soon followed, as mechanical power, in the form of steam engines, became available to factories. Businesses now often required more capital than a single individual could provide; hence the “joint stock” company (the forerunner of the modern corporation) over time became a popular form of business organization, replacing sole proprietorships and partnerships. And the stock market became the vehicle through which joint-stock companies could raise the capital they needed. In 1817 the New York Stock and Exchange Board (the predecessor of the New York Stock Exchange) was formed by brokers who felt the market needed more structure than was provided by the original Buttonwood Agreement and its subsequent modifications.

…

income taxation index arbitrage index funds Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs) industrial revolution industrials inflation; Federal Reserve policies to control; growth investing and; OPEC oil price increases and Inland Steel insider trading; outlawed Institutional Investor institutional investors; and crash of 1962; Nifty Fifty and; portfolio insurance and; reduction in transaction costs for; see also mutual funds; pension funds insurance companies: investments by; stocks of Internal Revenue Service (IRS) International Business Machines (IBM) International Mercantile Marine Internet investment trusts Investors Overseas Services (IOS) ITT Izvestia Johnson, Edward Crosby, II Johnson, Lyndon B. Johnson & Johnson joint stock companies Journal of Business Journal of Finance Journal of the American Statistical Association Journal of the Royal Statistical Society junk bonds Justice Department, U.S. “just in time” corporate strategies Keene, James R. Kendall, Maurice Kennedy, John F. Kennedy, Joseph P. Kennedy, Robert F.

Philanthrocapitalism
by Matthew Bishop , Michael Green and Bill Clinton
Published 29 Sep 2008

The second golden age of philanthropy followed the return of peace, stability, and economic growth at the start of the eighteenth century. The merchant classes could get back to making money. In the coffeehouses of London, a new financial capitalism blossomed, with increasingly sophisticated trading of securities and a big idea: the invention of the joint stock company. Not only did the success of the joint stock company make many people wealthier, so increasing the capital available for philanthropy, it also inspired a new way of giving, in which philanthropists pooled their resources to meet urgent social needs. The most popular object of this “joint stock philanthropy” was the collection of subscriptions to fund hospitals.

…

But modern philanthropy was invented several centuries before that, in Europe, at the same time as the emergence of what we now call capitalism. The Buffetts and Gateses of this first golden age of philanthropy were the merchants of Tudor England and Renaissance Europe, who helped the poor in growing trading cities like London, Florence, and Bruges. Next, in the eighteenth century, philanthropy was embraced by the inventors of the joint stock company and the original hedge-fund-like speculators such as Thomas Guy, who sold at the top of the South Sea Bubble and used his profits to found Guy’s Hospital in London. This was also the age of the enlightened financiers who backed crusading activists such as William Wilberforce, destroyer of the slave trade.

The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations?
by Ian Bremmer
Published 12 May 2010

It was, after all, an Englishman, Henry Hudson, a protoglobal citizen working secretly for the Dutch, who sailed into New York harbor a little more than four hundred years ago and set in train the inclusion of what later became the United States into the early mercantilist imperial world. 13 There were other examples of the British crown or government giving privately owned joint-stock companies similar trade monopolies. For example, the Muscovy Company, perhaps the world’s first joint-stock company (formed in 1555), had a monopoly on trade with Muscovy and on whaling; the Hudson Bay Company (1670) had a monopoly on the “Indian trade,” mostly fur, in British Canada; and the South Sea Company (1711) had a monopoly on trade with Spanish South America. 14 “Defense of Great Britain depends very much upon the number of its sailors and shipping.

Self-Reliance and Other Essays
by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Published 12 Oct 1993

My mission in life is to listen to my own voice as much as possible and follow my instincts. Whenever I do this, I always feel good about myself eventually and I get the glimpse of the freedom of being outside the Matrix. It’s a hard thing to do, but it’s worth it every time. I never lose when I trust myself. Ji Lee ● ● ● Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs. Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.

The Invisible Web: Uncovering Information Sources Search Engines Can't See
by Gary Price , Chris Sherman and Danny Sullivan
Published 2 Jan 2003

Search Form URL: http://www.tornado-insider.com/radar/ comp AdvSearchForm.asp Federally Incorporated Companies Canada http://strategis.ic.gc.ca This database produced by the Canadian Government allows searching by corporation name, location, status, and more. It also allows results sets to be sorted by corporate name or corporate number. Search Form URL: http://strategis.ic.gc.ca/cgi-bin/sc_mrksv/ corpdir/dataOnline/corpns_se Related Resources: (Nova Scotia) Registry of Joint Stock Companies Database Search http://www.gov.ns.ca/snsmr/rjsc/search.stm Business and Investing 167 Fortune 500 http://www.fortune.com The well-known business list identifies the largest U.S. publicly traded companies. Search Form URL: http://www.fortune.com/fortune/fortune500/ Related Resources: Forbes Private 500 (Largest U.S.

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See also audio; images; multimedia; video coverage, 53–54 crawlers and, 66 indexing, 35 Invisible Web searches, 143 search engines and, 57–58 NoodleBib (Bibliography Creator), 333 Noodlequest (Search Tool Selection Aid), 333 North American Industry Classification System (NAICS), 182 SIC Correspondence Tables, 330 Northern Light maps, 97 News Search, 287 Special Collection, 47, 104 Northwest Territories Geographic Names Database, 336 NoteCards (Xerox), 10 Notess, Greg, 34 notifiable diseases, 243 Nova Scotia, Registry of Joint Stock Companies Database, 166 NSERC Awards Search Engine Canada, 363 NTIS (National Technical Information Service) Electronic Catalog, 158 Nua Internet Surveys, 204 Nuclear Explosions Database, 354 Nuclear Power Plant Databases, 354 Nunavut Environmental Database (NED), 351 Nursing Home Compare, 252–253 Nutrition Analysis Tool 2.0, 253 nutritional information resources, 253–254 428 The Invisible Web O obituaries, newspaper, 286 Occupational License Search (Alaska), 308 Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) Accident Investigation Search, 259 SIC search, 181–182, 330 Ocean Information Center, Research Ship Schedules, 364 oceanography information resources, 362–364 Ockerbloom, John Mark, 159 OCLC Participating Institution Search, 332 Oddens, Roelof P., 40 Odden’s Bookmarks, 40 Office of Assistant Secretary of Health (OASH), 257–258 Official Netscape Guide to Internet Research (Calishain), 110 oil, crude, 358 Oil Spills, Historical Incident Reports, 358 Olympic Winners Database, 322 192.Com (U.K.), 187, 297 OneLook, 99 O*Net, 186–187 Online Archive of California (OAC), 158–159 Online Books Page, The, 159 Online Calendar of Henry James’ Letters, 268 Online Distance Education Catalog, 212 Online Public Access Catalogs (OPACs), 98 Online Telephone Book Directory, 188, 297 OnTerm (Canada), 327 opaque Web, 70–72 Open Directory Project (ODP), 22–26, 25 OperaBase, 223 Oran’s Law Dictionary, 276 O’Reilly & Associates, 12 Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), 9 orphan drugs, 244–245 Oscars, recipients of, 100 Oscars Database, 321 OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration), 182 Oxford Companion to Wine, 328 P Pacific Film Archive, 219 package tracking, 314 PackTrack, 314 page capture utilities, 112 Papers of Thomas A.

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Road Construction Database, 338 RAPID (European Union News), 233 Rare Disease Database, 244–245 RateNet, 190 RDF (Resource Description Framework), 129 Reading Pathfinder Database, 209 real estate information resources, 193–194, 229, 281, 303, 307, 320 Real Estate Investment Trusts (REIT) Directory, 194 Real Estate Retrieval System (FDIC), 194 Real-Time 911 Dispatches (Seattle Fire Department), 313 Real-Time Airport Status, U.S., 316 real-time data, 60–61, 66–67, 102–103 real-time information resources, 311–317 Real-Time Streamflow Water Data, USGS, 312 Realtor.Com, 194 recall CPSC, 169 precision and, 94–95 recalls, products, 169, 324 ReCap Biotech Alliance Database, 179 Recent Advances in Manufacturing (RAM), 181 Recent Home Sale Purchase Prices, 194 Recent Marine Data, National Buoy Data Center, 313 recipes, 328 RECON-Regional Economic Conditions, 100, 172 Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), 223 Records and Information Management System (RIMS), 274 Records Search: National Archives of Australia, 159–160 Recreational Opportunities on Federal Lands, 341 Red Cross Chapter Locator, 334 Red Herring Company and Persons Search, 168 redherring.com, 167, 168 Redlist (Threatened Species Database), 347 REEF Database (Marine Species Data), 362 ReefBase, 357 reference resources, 319–341 REFORGEN (forestry), 348 Refugee Caselaw Site, 282 Regional Economic Data, U.S., 172 Regional Economic Forecasts, 170 Regional Economic Information System, 170 Regional Gasoline Costs, U.S., 323 Registered Aircraft Databases, 383 Registered Identification Number Database, 181 Registry of Joint Stock Companies Database (NS), 166 REIT (Real Estate Investment Trusts) Directory, 194 relevance ranking calculations, 32 definition, 21 Invisible Web content, 142–143 manipulation of, 112 metasearch engines, 46 religion information resources, 378–379 Religious Centers, Directory of, 378–379 Remote Sensing Glossary, 352 reputation, directory resources, 141 resAnet, National Library of Canada, 157–158 Research Index search engine, 74 research resources, 193 Research Ship Schedules, 364 Research Ship Specifications, 364 ResearchBuzz, 110 432 The Invisible Web ResearchIndex, 67, 104, 202 resources collection goals, 153 customized collection of, 111, 113 discovery of, 78–79 Restaurant Health Inspection Reporting System (Denver), 308 Restaurant Inspection Search (Boston), 308 results maximum viewable, 72 speed of, 35 results-output format, 30 Reverse Telephone and Address Lookup, 188 Reverse Telephone Directory, 188, 298 RhymeZone, 327 RIAA Gold and Platinum Database, 223 Rice Bibliography, 348 Right-to-Know Network, 357 River Statistics, U.S., 385 rivers, 385 Roberts, Larry, 2 robots, 26 Robots Exclusion Protocol, 53, 72–73, 73, 89–90 robots.txt, 73 Roll Call U.S.

Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future
by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson
Published 26 Jun 2017

These companies are trying to make it as easy as possible for some types of partners to enter and leave a business relationship with them, giving rise to the notion of an “on-demand economy.” Other companies are exploring how to deliver value with blockchains, smart contracts, and other technologies of extreme decentralization. But they’re almost all pursuing these radical goals within the highly traditional structure of a joint-stock company, an organizational form that has existed for well over four centuries.*** When we visit these companies, we’re struck by how normal they look. They all have employees, job titles, managers, and executives. They all have a CEO and a board of directors. Very few of them are purely virtual; instead, they have physical office space, desks, and meeting rooms.

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As Holmström and Paul Milgrom noted, the firm itself, including all its rules and norms, can be usefully thought of as an incentive system. Bengt Holmström and Paul Milgrom, “The Firm as an Incentive System,” American Economic Review 84, no. 4 (1994): 972–91, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2118041. ## These might include labor unions, local communities, central governments, powerful customers, or key suppliers. *** Joint-stock companies issue shares that can be bought and sold by people without affecting the operation of the company. They date back at least as far as 1602, when the Dutch East India Company issued shares on the Amsterdam Stock Exchange. Andrew Beattie, “What Was the First Company to Issue Stock?” Investopedia, accessed March 13, 2017, http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/08/first-company-issue-stock-dutch-east-india.asp.

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Louis, 163 fees Stripe, 172–73 in two-sided networks, 215 fiat currencies, 280, 286, 305 FICO scores, 46–47 file sharing platforms, 144–45 film photography, 131 financial crisis (2008), 285, 308 financial services automated investing, 266–70 crowdlending platforms, 263 as least-trusted industry, 296 and regulation, 202 TØ.com, 290 virtualization of, 91 find-fix-verify, 260 firms economics of, 309–12 theory of, See TCE (transaction cost economics) FirstBuild, 11–14 Fitbit, 163 5G wireless technology, 96 fixed costs, 137 flat hierarchy, 325 Fleiss, Jennifer, 187 Flexe, 188 focus groups, 189–90 “food computers,” 272 food preparation recipes invented by Watson, 118 robotics in, 93–94 Forbes magazine, 303 forks, operating system, 244 Forsyth, Mark, 70 “foxes,” 60–61 fraud detection, 173 “free, perfect, instant” information goods complements, 160–63 economics of, 135–37 free goods, complements and, 159 freelance workers, 189 free market, See market “freemium” businesses, 162 Friedman, Thomas, 135 Friendster, 170 Fukoku Mutual Life, 83 Gallus, Jana, 249n garments, 186–88 Garvin, David, 62 Gazzaniga, Michael, 45n GE Appliances, 15 Gebbia, Joe, 209–10 geeky leadership, 244–45, 248–49 gene editing, 257–58 General Electric (GE), 10–15, 261 General Growth Properties, 134 General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, The (Keynes), 278–79 generative design, 112–13 genome sequencing, 252–55, 260–61 Georgia, Republic of, 291 Gershenfeld, Neil, 308 GFDL, 248 Gill, Vince, 12n Giuliano, Laura, 40 global financial crisis (2008), 285, 308 GNU General Public License (GPL), 243 Go (game), 1–6 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 178 Go-Jek, 191 golden ratio, 118 Goldman Sachs, 134 gold standard, 280n Goodwin, Tom, 6–10, 14 Google, 331; See also Android acquiring innovation by acquiring companies, 265 Android purchased by, 166–67 Android’s share of Google revenue/profits, 204 autonomous car project, 17 DeepMind, 77–78 hiring decisions, 56–58 iPhone-specific search engine, 162 and Linux, 241 origins of, 233–34 and self-driving vehicles, 82 as stack, 295 Google AdSense, 139 Google DeepMind, 4, 77–78 Google News, 139–40 Google search data bias in, 51–52 incorporating into predictive models, 39 Graboyes, Robert, 274–75 Granade, Matthew, 270 Grant, Amy, 12n graphics processing units (GPUs), 75 Great Recession (2008), 285, 308 Greats (shoe designer), 290 Grid, The (website design startup), 118 Grokster, 144 Grossman, Sandy, 314 group drive, 20, 24 group exercise, See ClassPass Grove, William, 41 Grubhub, 186 Guagua Xiche, 191–92 gut instincts, 56 gyro sensor, 98 Haidt, Jonathan, 45 Hammer, Michael, 32, 34–35, 37, 59 hands, artificial, 272–75 Hannover Messe Industrial Trade Fair, 93–94 Hanson, Robin, 239 Hanyecz, Laszlo, 285–86 Hao Chushi, 192 “hard fork,” 304–5, 318 Harper, Caleb, 272 Hart, Oliver, 313–15 Hayek, Friedrich von, 151, 235–39, 279, 332 health care, 123–24 health coaches, 124, 334 health insurance claims, 83 Hearn, Mike, 305–6 heat exchangers, 111–13 “hedgehogs,” 60–61 Hefner, Cooper, 133 Hefner, Hugh, 133 hierarchies flat, 325 production costs vs. coordination costs in, 313–14 Hinton, Geoff, 73, 75–76 HiPPOs (highest-paid person’s opinions), 45, 63, 85 hiring decisions, 56–58 Hispanic students, 40 HIStory (Michael Jackson), 131 hive mind, 97 HMV (record store chain), 131, 134 Holberton School of Software Engineering, 289 “hold-up problem,” 316 Holmström, Bengt, 313, 315 Honor (home health care platform), 186 hotels limits to Airbnb’s effects on, 221–23 Priceline and, 223–24 revenue management’s origins, 182 “hot wallet,” 289n housing sales, 39 Howell, Emily (music composition software), 117 Howells, James, 287 Hughes, Chris, 133 human condition, 121, 122 human genome, 257–58 human judgment, See judgment, human Hyman, Jennifer, 187 hypertext, 33 IBM; See also Watson (IBM supercomputer) and Linux, 241 System/360 computer, 48 ice nugget machine, 11–14 idAb algorithm, 253, 254 incentives, ownership’s effect on, 316 incomplete contracting, 314–17 incremental revenue, 180–81 incumbents advantages in financial services, 202 inability to foresee effects of technological change, 21 limits to disruption by platforms, 221–24 platforms’ effect on, 137–48, 200–204 threats from platform prices, 220–21 Indiegogo, 13–14, 263, 272 industrial trusts, 22–23 information business processes and, 88–89 in economies, 235–37 O2O platforms’ handling of, 192–93 information asymmetries, 206–10 information goods bundling, 146–47 as “free, perfect, instant,” 135–37 and solutionism, 297–98 information transfer protocols, 138 infrared sensors, 99 InnoCentive, 259 innovation crowd and, 264–66 ownership’s effect on, 316 Instagram, 133, 264–66 institutional investors, 263 Intel, 241, 244 Internet as basis for new platforms, 129–49 economics of “free, perfect, instant” information goods, 135–37 evolution into World Wide Web, 33–34 in late 1990s, 129–31 as platform of platforms, 137–38 pricing plans, 136–37 intuition, See System 1/System 2 reasoning inventory, perishing, See perishing/perishable inventory investing, automated, 266–70 investment advising, 91 Iora Health, 124, 334 Iorio, Luana, 105 iOS, 164–67, 203 iPhone apps for, 151–53, 161–63 Blackberry vs., 168 curation of apps for, 165 demand curve for, 156 introduction of, 151–52 and multisided markets, 218 opening of platform to outside app builders, 163–64 user interface, 170 widespread adoption of, 18 iron mining, 100 Irving, Washington, 252 Isaac, Earl, 46 Isaacson, Walter, 152, 165 iteration, 173, 323; See also experimentation iTunes, 217–18 iTunes Store, 145, 165 Jackson, Michael, 131 Java, 204n Jelinek, Frederick, 84 Jeopardy! (TV show), 17 Jeppesen, Lars Bo, 259 Jobs, Steve curation of iPhone platform, 165 Dropbox acquisition offer, 162 and iPhone apps, 151–53, 157, 163 joint-stock company, 320 journalism, See newspapers Joyce, James, 178 judges, parole granted by, 39–40 judgment, human as complement to computer power, 35 in decision-making loop, 53–56 flaws in, 37–42 and justification, 45 “superforecasters” and, 60–61 System 1/System 2 reasoning, 35–46 justification, 45 Kadakia, Payal, 178, 179, 184 Kaggle, 261 Kahneman, Daniel, 35–36, 43, 44, 56, 325 Kalanick, Travis, 200 Kapor, Mitch, 142 Katz, Michael, 141n Kaushik, Avinash, 45 Kay, Alan, 61 Kazaa, 144 Kehoe, Patrick J., 21 Keirstead, Karl, 143 kernel, 240 Keynes, John Maynard, 278–79, 287, 309–10 Khosla, Vinod, 94 Kickstarter, 262 “killer app,” 157 Kim, Pauline, 40–41 Kimberley Process, 289–90 kinases, 116–17 kitchen, automated, 94 Kiva Systems, 103 Klein, Gary, 56 knowledge access to, in second machine age, 18 markets and, 332 prediction markets and, 238 knowledge differentials, See information asymmetries Kodak, 131, 132 Kohavi, Ronny, 45, 51 Kohl’s, 62–63 Koike, Makoto, 79–80 Komatsu, 99 Koum, Jan, 140 Krawisz, Daniel, 304 Kurzweil, Ray, 308 Lakhani, Karim, 252–55, 259 landline telecommunications, 134–35 land title registry, 291 language learning styles, 67–69 Lasker, Edward, 2 Lawee, David, 166 law of one price, 156 Lea, Ed, 170 leadership, geeky, 244–45, 248–49 lead users, 265 LeCun, Yann, 73, 80, 121 ledger, See blockchain Legg, Shane, 71 Lehman, Bastian, 184 Lei Jun, 203 Leimkuhler, John F., 182 “lemons,” 207 Lending Club, 263 level 5 autonomy, 82 leveraging of assets, O2O platforms for, 196–97 Levinovitz, Alan, 3 Levinson, Art, 152 libraries, 229–32 Library of Congress, 231 links, 233 Linq, 290–91 Linux, 240–45, 248, 249, 260 liquidity and network effects, 206 O2O platforms as engines of, 192–96 Livermore, Shaw, 22–23 locking in users, 217 lodging; See also Airbnb differences between Airbnb and hotels, 222–23 Priceline and, 223–24 “Logic Theorist” program, 69 Long, Tim, 204 Los Angeles, California hotel occupancy rates, 221–22 Postmates in, 185 Uber’s effect on taxi service, 201 LTE networks, 96 Luca, Michael, 209n Lyft, 186, 201, 208, 218 Ma, Jack, 7 machine age, See second machine age machine intelligence mind as counterpart to, 15 superiority to System 1 reasoning, 38–41 machine learning, 66–86; See also artificial intelligence AlphaGo and, 73 back-office work and, 82–83 early attempts, 67–74 in Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign, 48–51 O2O business data and, 194 statistical pattern recognition and, 72–74 machine(s); See also artificial intelligence; robotics; standard partnership and business process reengineering, 32–33 and creativity, 110–19 defined, 14 human connection in digitized world, 122–24 human judgment and, 34–45 new mind-machine partnership, 46–62 and uniquely human domains, 110–26 Mad Men (TV drama), 48 Madrigal, Alexis, 295–96 magazines ad revenue (late 1990s), 130 ad revenue (2013), 132–33 new content platforms’ effect on revenue, 139 MakerBot, 273 maker movement, 271–72 Makhijani, Vish, 324–25 malls, 131, 134 Malone, Tom, 311, 313 management/managers continued importance of, 320–23 and economics of the firm, 309 as portion of US workforce, 321 in post-standard partnership world, 323–26 manufacturing electricity’s effect on, 19–24 robotics in, 102 transition from molds to 3D printing, 104–7 Manyika, James, 332 Manzi, Jim, 62–63 Marchant, Jo, 66n Marcus, Gary, 5, 71 marginal costs bundling and, 147 of computer storage, 136 of digital copies, 136, 137 of perishing inventory, 180, 181 of platforms, 137 of platforms vs. products, 147, 220 and Uber’s market value, 219 marginal utility, 258–59 “Market for ‘Lemons,’ The” (Akerlof), 207 market research, 13–14, 261–63 market(s) centrally planned economies vs., 235–37 companies and, 309–11 costs inherent in, 310–11 as crowd, 235–39 information asymmetries and, 206–7 prediction markets, 237–39 production costs vs. coordination costs, 313–14 Markowitz, Henry, 268 Marshall, Matt, 62 Martin, Andrew, 40–41 Marx, Karl, 279 Masaka, Makoto, 79–80 “Mastering the Game of Go with Deep Neural Networks and Tree Search” (Nature article), 4 Maugham, Somerset, 110 Mazzella, Frédéric, 190 McCarthy, John, 67 McClatchy Company, 132 McDonald’s, 92 McElheren, Kristina, 42 McKinsey Global Institute, 332 Mechanical Turk, 260 Medallion Fund, 267 medical devices crowd-designed, 272–75 3D printing and, 106 medical diagnosis, 123–24 Meehl, Paul, 41–42, 53–54, 56, 81 MegaBLAST, 253, 254 Menger, Carl, 25 Men’s Fitness, 132 Merton, Robert K., 189 Metallica, 144 Microsoft core capabilities, 15 machine learning, 79 proprietary software, 240 as stack, 295 Windows Phone platform, 167–68 Microsoft Research, 84 Milgrom, Paul, 315n milking systems, 101 Mims, Christopher, 325 mind, human as counterpart to machine intelligence, 15 undetected biases in, 42–45 Minsky, Marvin, 73, 113 Mitchell, Alan, 11, 12 MIT Media Lab, 272 mobile telephones, 129–30, 134–35 Mocan, Naci, 40 molds, 104–5 Moley Robotics, 94 Momentum Machines, 94 Moody’s, 134 Moore, John, 315 Moore’s law, 308 and Cambrian Explosion of robotics, 97–98 defined, 35 neural networks and, 75 System 2 reasoning and, 46 and 3D printing, 107 Morozov, Evgeny, 297 Mt.

Rigged Money: Beating Wall Street at Its Own Game
by Lee Munson
Published 6 Dec 2011

It was the Dutch that got us into this mess more than 400 years ago. While trade and commerce is an ancient practice, the first stock didn’t spontaneously generate until 1602, when the Dutch East India Company was founded. Why was this important, outside of being the first stock? First of all, this was the first joint-stock company, meaning regular people like middle class merchants were able to invest in a public company. On September 1 the public subscription period was over. Five hundred thirty-eight subscribers, including craftsmen and small entrepreneurs, were given shares that were freely transferable.1 Before this there was a barrier to entry for investments.

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See Home Mortgage Disclosure Act hold holding period home equity line of credit (HELOC) Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) hyperinflation I idea flow income investor index index fund Indications of Interest (IOI) Individual Retirement Account (IRA) inflation information sheets The Intelligent Investor interest rates investment banking, stock sales and investment plan, tax-deferred investment scenarios investment, sustainability of investor returns investors, types of IOI. See Indications of Interest IRA. See Individual Retirement Account J joint-stock company junk bonds K Kinder, Gary L Lefèvre, Edwin Lehman Black Book liquidity liquidity providers Lo, Andrew London Gold Pool low-latency trading lower-risk environment M Malkiel, Burton market efficiency market maker market orders Market Participant Identifier (MPID) Market Wizards markets, sideways Markowitz, Harry master limited partnerships (MLPs) Master Settlement Agreement (MSA) May Day 1975 McClellan, Tom Meisler, Helene MLP.

Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages
by Carlota Pérez
Published 1 Jan 2002

For this reason it was possible for family finance and previous accumulation in foreign trade (the famous ‘nabobs’) to fund the process. By contrast, the development of railways in the installation period of the second surge did need great quantities of investment from the beginning that were rarely available to a single firm. At that time the development of joint-stock companies concentrated capital, spread the risks and made the diffusion of that important innovation possible. Nevertheless, the stock market and the other elements of the financial system were still underdeveloped, so it was individual promoters who usually did the underwriting.110 It was during the third surge that investment banking and institutionalized financial capital became a powerful and indispensable part of the industrial system.

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There is surely much more to come. C. Institutional Innovations: From Old to New Economy Appropriate financial innovations need to be supported and regulated by adequate institutional innovations attuned to the same paradigm. Without their corresponding legal frameworks, neither local banks nor joint-stock companies would have been safe and reliable for participation to occur. Without welfare and unemployment insurance schemes, masses of consumer durable goods would have had to be returned due to consumer default with each economic downturn. Without recognized labor unions, salaries would not have been enough to serve as solvent demand much beyond food and basics.

The Money Machine: How the City Works
by Philip Coggan
Published 1 Jul 2009

But the main economic rationale for an exchange is that it is a place where industry can raise the long-term finance it needs. The Exchange’s origins lay in the seventeenth century, when merchants clubbed together to form joint-stock companies, like the East India Company, to conduct foreign trade. After a time, some merchants sold their holdings to others, and in the process there developed a secondary market for shares in the joint-stock companies. At first, the shares were traded in the coffee houses which were then fashionable, but in 1773 the different sites for trading were centralized for the first time. By 1801, the Stock Exchange was established in roughly its modern form.

Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data
by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Thomas Ramge
Published 27 Feb 2018

The generation of Medici after Cosimo, as well as other wealthy Italians, discarded the practice of accounting in favor of more “intellectual” pursuits, such as politics and the arts. Accounting was deemed to be below their elite status. The modern conception of a company was also still in its infancy, and many executives—including at the storied East India joint-stock companies set up under the auspices of Europe’s crowns—were more concerned with share prices and market speculation than with internal control, efficiency, and the steady generation of profits. Most firms might keep a set of basic books and ledgers, balancing them when required by law, but the accounts were often inaccurate; and in some cases, the books were “cooked,” obfuscating a company’s financial problems in order to keep investors’ money rolling in.

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See progressive data-sharing mandate dating websites, 49, 82–84, 163 decentralization, 7, 11, 13, 32, 90, 121 automation and, 80 bad decisions mitigated by, 38–39 of communicative coordination, 26 dyadic information exchange and, 72 firms and, 125, 127 matching and, 74, 127 decentralization with coordinated control, 101 decision-making automation overextension in, 116–120 centralized vs. decentralized (see centralization; decentralization) in firms, 95–107 irrational, 42–44 in markets, 42–44, 49, 161, 169–171 money and price simplification of, 49 delegation, 97–101, 106, 117, 218–219 Deloitte, 75, 126 Descartes, René, 223 Didi Chuxing, 163 digital Taylorism, 89 Distillers, 42 distributive policy measures, 186–187, 189, 190, 193, 197–200 See also taxes Doriot, Georges, 216 dotcom bubble, 6, 142–143 double-entry bookkeeping, 92–93 driving systems, autonomous, 78, 181–183, 213 Durant, William, 98 East India joint-stock companies, 93 eBay, 9, 69, 70, 75, 209, 215 decline in, 1–3 network effects and, 163 worth of goods traded on, 1 Economist, 89 education sector, 6–7, 199, 214 Ek, Daniel, 122–123 Embark, 182 Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, 134 Encyclopédie, 21 energy markets, 213 enterprise resource planning (ERP), 100 ESPN, 67, 69 eToro, 152 Europe, 135, 136, 164, 196, 198 European Parliament, 187 European Union, 140 evolution, 20–21, 22 Expedia, 70 Expertmaker, 70 externalities, 73, 74 Ezrachi, Ariel, 166 Facebook, 30, 148, 178, 196 feedback effects and, 169 market concentration in, 161 network effects and, 163, 166 fair value, 172–173 feedback effects, 78–80, 104, 157–179, 210, 211 development of theory, 159–160 government control via, 175–179 market concentration and, 161–169, 171 regulatory measures proposed for, 171–175 threat posed by, 166–167 Ferguson, Niall, 45 Ferrucci, David, 115 finance capital.

A History of Future Cities
by Daniel Brook
Published 18 Feb 2013

Shifting easily between the official European world of the Bombay stock exchange and the informal Indian world of the Share Bazaar—a shaded spot under a banyan tree near Town Hall where each day a group of traders gathered to wheel and deal stock certificates—Roychand was nicknamed the “Supreme Pontiff of Share Speculation.” Always offering market tips on the sixty-two joint stock companies that had arisen since 1855, he was particularly fond of touting his own portfolio of a dozen banks and reclamation companies. As the most prominent businessman of the Bombay boom, Roychand was the de facto head of the government-chartered Bank of Bombay, entrusted with a blank book of promissory notes he could issue at will, often on the collateral of share certificates in one of his other companies.

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As the default of his business empire rippled through the Bombay markets, the entire speculative edifice collapsed. July 1, 1865, the designated day for “time bargain” futures contracts to be delivered, became known as “Black Day,” the day Share Mania died. The contracts were unsellable and those left holding the bag were ruined as the near-worthless cotton and joint stock company shares were delivered. As The Economist reported in its coverage of “The Crisis at Bombay,” “ ‘Woe to the last holder,’ is the motto of the panic.” As an eyewitness later recalled, “Men who had been reputed millionaires . . . were left penniless. [T]he lawyers swept up the débris.” In 1866, the Back Bay Reclamation Company was partially bailed out by the Bombay government, which bought out the shareholders at a fraction of its one-time trading price.

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Maclean, Recollections of Westminster and India (Manchester: Sherratt & Hughes, 1902), 30. 112 the price of cotton surged fourfold: Rekha Ranade, Sir Bartle Frere and His Times: A Study of His Bombay Years, 1862–1867 (New Delhi: Mittal Publications, 1990), 64–65. 112 the city’s population more than doubled: Albuquerque, Urbs Prima in Indis, 174–175. 113 plots that went for less than five hundred rupees: Dwivedi and Mehrotra, Bombay: The Cities Within, 80. 113 sold for fifteen times: Albuquerque, Urbs Prima in Indis, 175. 113 “The whole community”: Maclean, Recollections of Westminster and India, 31. 114 “Supreme Pontiff of Share Speculation”: Albuquerque, Urbs Prima in Indis, 19. 114 sixty-two joint stock companies: Ranade, Sir Bartle Frere and His Times, 80. 114 “Everyone became suddenly a millionaire”: Maclean, Recollections of Westminster and India, 30–31. 115 price of Indian cotton immediately collapsed to a quarter of its wartime value: ibid., 32. 115 “ ‘Woe to the last holder’ ”: “The Crisis at Bombay,” The Economist, June 10, 1865, 686. 115 “Men who had been reputed millionaires”: Maclean, Recollections of Westminster and India, 32. 115 “the best abused man in Bombay”: Albuquerque, Urbs Prima in Indis, 26. 116 “To the present generation”: Ranganathan, Govind Narayan’s Mumbai, 3. 116 “His profession”: Rahul Mehrotra and Sharada Dwivedi, A City Icon: Victoria Terminus, Bombay, 1887, Now Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, Mumbai, 1996 (Mumbai: Eminence Designs, 2006), 93–95. 117 £45 million a year: Dwivedi and Mehrotra, Bombay: The Cities Within, 138. 118 “The viewer’s eye”: Mehrotra and Dwivedi, A City Icon, 168. 119 fourteen-foot-tall goddess: London, Bombay Gothic, 92. 120 “That there should be one law”: B.

The Divided Nation: A History of Germany, 1918-1990
by Mary Fulbrook
Published 14 Oct 1991

A myth soon grew up of 'social partnership' between employers and employees. 'Co-determination' in industry (Mitbestimmung) was in fact only introduced, against considerable employer opposition, in a limited fashion in 1951, so that all joint stock companies in the coal and steel industries with over a thousand employees had to have representation of workers' views at the managerial level. (It was extended, again against considerable employer opposition, in 1976 to cover all joint stock companies with over two thousand employees.) In 1952, the Works Constitution Law provided that there should be works councils for enterprises with more than twenty employees. West Germany had a relatively low strike record.

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Much of the equipment became rusty or was damaged during its transportation to the Soviet Union; and more complex equipment, once dismantled, could not be successfully reassembled in the USSR. One solution was to ship out German experts along with their machinery, in order to reassemble and operate it in the USSR. Another was to leave equipment in Germany but appropriate the product. In June 1946 twenty-five Soviet joint-stock companies (SAGs) were formed, with 213 firms, producing thirty-two per cent of the total production of the Soviet zone, taken over into Soviet ownership. These were gradually phased back into German state ownership in the period 194954. The Soviets also exacted considerable reparations and occupation costs.

How to Speak Money: What the Money People Say--And What It Really Means
by John Lanchester
Published 5 Oct 2014

When the company loses all its money, it goes broke; before limited liability, the investors in the company would then be personally liable for any outstanding debts, and could end up bankrupt. The invention of limited liability was central to the creation of the joint stock company, which is the basis of modern capitalism: the company is a legal entity, like a person, in which shareholders have shares and exercise control in proportion to the number of shares they own. You can have a company without having limited liability; in the United States, a joint stock company in its modern sense is just that. In the UK, this structure is called unlimited liability. It obviously makes the shareholders a lot more careful, since they are on the hook for all losses, not just the losses up to the point where the company goes broke.

The Communist Manifesto
by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
Published 1 Aug 2002

*This applies chiefly to Germany where the landed aristocracy and squirearchy have large portions of their estates cultivated for their own account by stewards, and are, moreover, extensive beetroot-sugar manufacturers and distillers of potato spirits. The wealthier British aristocracy are, as yet, rather above that: but they, too, know how to make up for declining rents by lending their names to floaters of more or less shady joint-stock companies. Return to text. * Phalanstères were Socialist colonies on the plan of Charles Fourier; Icaria was the name given by Cabet to his Utopia and, later on, to his American Communist colony. Return to text. * The party then represented in Parliament by Ledru-Rollin, in literature by Louis Blanc, in the daily press by the Réforme.

The Right to Earn a Living: Economic Freedom and the Law
by Timothy Sandefur
Published 16 Aug 2010

All corporations are said to be ecclesiastical or lay: ecclesiastical are either regular, as abbeys, priories, chapters, &c. or secular, as bishoprics, deanries, archdeaconries, &c. lay, as those of cities, towns, companies, or communities of commerce, &c.43 There is nothing in this definition to indicate what the word would come to signify within a century. Today’s corporations trace their roots to the English “joint-stock companies,” organized in the 17th century to assemble capital and operate large-scale enterprises.44 These joint-stock companies were 26 “Corporations” and “Monopolies,” Part I: 1602–1870 granted royal charters—official permission to engage in a lucrative trade, which were monopolies by definition.45 Any person engaging in projects such as establishing colonies, or transporting and selling tea or other commodities, without this royal approval ran the risk of severe penalties.

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Robert Hessen, In Defense of the Corporation (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1979), pp. 3–33; and Margaret M. Blair, “Locking in Capital: What Corporate Law Achieved for Business Organizers in the Nineteenth Century,” UCLA Law Review 51 (2003): 414–23. 45. “What frequently distinguished incorporated from unincorporated joint-stock companies [in the 18th century], therefore, was that the former were owned by politically well-connected merchants who had paid a handsome price to secure a monopoly, while the latter lacked the money or connections to gain similar privileges.” Paul G. Mahoney, “Contract or Concession? An Essay on the History of Corporate Law,” Georgia Law Review 34 (2000): 887. 46.

Are Trams Socialist?: Why Britain Has No Transport Policy
by Christian Wolmar
Published 19 May 2016

By reducing the cost of transport by as much as 75%, the system of canals, navigable rivers and coastal shipping that emerged widened the market for manufactured goods and consequently began the economic take-off that was greatly accelerated by the advent of the railways. The key financial mechanism that enabled the canals to be financed and built was the joint stock company. The concept had been around for centuries (there are competing claims in several European countries to being the first such venture) but the canal age gave confidence to the small investor, given the comfortable returns on these pioneering projects. Consequently, it was private capital, with permission from parliament through the ‘Bill process’, that created this network.

The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism
by David Harvey
Published 1 Jan 2010

This was what the nineteenth-century financiers the Péreire brothers, schooled in Saint-Simonian theory, effectively achieved through the new credit institutions they set up to help Baron Haussmann transform the built environment of Second Empire Paris in the 1850s. (The boulevards we see today date from this period.) In the case of limited and joint stock companies and other corporate organisational forms that came into their own in the nineteenth century, enormous quantities of money power are amassed and centralised (often out of myriad small amounts of personal savings) under the control of a few directors and managers. Acquisitions (both friendly and hostile), mergers and leveraged buy-outs have also long been big business.

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King 79, 80 hunger, world 80 I Icarian communes 130 Iceland bankrupt 6, 37 exposure of national banks to toxic assets 141 idealism 133 immigration 59, 131 anti-immigrant fervour 103 colonisation of urban neighbourhoods 247 encouraging 14 Immigration and Nationality Act (1965) 14 imperialism 108, 109, 113, 144, 171, 204, 207, 212 Inca gold 47, 144 India anti-land grab movement 257 British goods 108, 158 British-imperialist-controlled 144 caste distinctions 62 colonial occupation 205 democracy 200 growth 222 labour reserves 64 Maoist movements in rural India 226 and oil market 83 partition 208 plundering of wealth from 109, 113 rural uprisings in 38 Indian Supreme Court 179 individualism 131, 132, 150, 170, 175, 197, 199 Indonesia Asian Currency Crisis 271 excessive urban development 8 industrial development 256 ‘industrial reserve army’ 15, 58, 59 industrial revolution 160 industrialisation 6, 33, 35, 68, 92, 172, 209 infant mortality 137, 152 inflation 15, 108, 114, 222 accelerating 113 ‘grand inflation’ (16th century) 48 and oil prices 80 rapid 111 Weimar 141 ‘informal sector’ 145 infrastructure disasters 86 educational 93 investment in 86, 167, 222 payment for use of 86–7 social 93 inheritance taxes 44 innovation 89, 90 communications 42, 93 labour-saving 94 organisational 97, 101 product 95 technological 67, 96–7, 101, 103 transport 42, 93 waves of 92–3 insider trading 99 insurance companies 4–5 intellectual property rights 34, 40, 221, 245–6 interest rate swaps 262 interest rates and austerity programmes 246, 251 Fed cuts 5, 261 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 5, 28, 34, 36, 51, 69, 200, 223, 246, 247 and asset values 6 bail-outs in Asian Currency Crisis 261 ‘Fifty Years is Enough’ campaign 55 ‘structural adjustment programs’ 19, 261 internet 190 investment capital 93, 203 debt-fuelled 166 devaluation of prior investments 93 infrastructure 86, 167, 222 in production 114 profitable 19 spreading of investment risks 85 subsidies for 36 iPods 131, 150 Iran: US threats 210 Iraq: US interventionism 210 Ireland: property-led crisis (2007–10) 5–6, 261 Isaacs, William 8 Israel dispossession of Palestinian land 247 kibbutzim 130 ivory 73 J Jacobs, Jane 171, 177 Japan boom of 1980s 8 collapse of stock market 8 depression in economy 45 falling exports 6 industrialisation 68, 92 invasion of US auto market 15 negative population growth 146 plunging land prices 8, 9 property-market led bank crisis 261 reconstruction of economy after Second World War 202 rise in the 1960s 35 joint stock companies 49 J.P. Morgan 142, 173, 219 ‘just-in-time’ principle 68 K Kay, Kenneth 53 Kerala, India, and remittances 38 Keynes, John Maynard 32, 53, 55, 87, 111, 160, 226, 237, 238 General Theory 114 Keynesian, Keynesians 168, 238, 255, 261 Kohl, Helmut 64 ‘Kondratieff cycles’ 96 Krieger, Andy 24–5 Krugman, Paul 235–6 kulaks 250 L labour and capital 56, 88, 169–70 casual 242 competition 61 costs 15, 16, 88 disempowered 16 divisions of 196, 213 exploitation of 94 feminisation of the global labour force 258 ‘floating’ army of laid-off workers 60 geographical mobility of 59–60, 213 guild 160 import of 14 integration of peasant populations into 58 laws 59, 103 living standards 88–9 massive reserves 64 and new technologies 60 organisations 61 and politics of populist outrage 55–6 power of 12, 14, 15, 40–41, 103, 172 quality requirements 93 regulation of conditions of 59 rights 251 scarcity of 12, 59, 60 social divisions of 67 supply 47, 121 supply and demand for 60 surplus 5, 15, 215 ultimate power of the workforce 63, 101–2 unionised 108 unrest 66 labour markets geographically segmented 59 local 63 regulating dynamics of 60 labour power demand of 115 released as a commodity into the market place 58 and standard of living 62–3 supply of 63, 65, 115 value of 64 labour process 105 collective 104 resistance or inefficiencies in 47 labour unions 256 laissez faire 128 land capital embedded in the 191 enclosures 48 fertility 82 Israeli dispossession of Palestinian land 247 land use degradation 77 reform 249 rights 88 speculation 187–8 values 181, 182, 183, 234 landlords 40 laptops 131 Las Vegas, foreclosure crisis in 2 Latin America anti-neoliberal struggles 226 bilateral trade with China 173 and the Catholic Church 254 land bought up in 220 population growth 146 Latin American Southern Cone group (MERCOSUR) 200 Latvian government 37 Lazard’s 11 lead-based paints 74 ‘learned societies’ 91 Lebanon economic stimulus 140 rebuilding of 202 Leeson, Nicholas 37, 100, 190 Lefebvre, Henri 128 legitimation crises 217 Lehman Brothers 2, 5, 12, 21, 37, 132, 211 Leipzig, Germany 142 Lenin, Vladimir 46, 136, 227 Leningrad 243 Leninism 134 lesbians, and colonisation of urban neighbourhoods 247 leveraged buy-outs 50 leveraging 30, 31 Leverhulme foundation 44 life expectancy 137, 152, 250 limited companies 49 liquidity crisis in 206 liquidity injections vii, 261 liquidity trap 111 surplus 5, 28, 30 living standards 10, 46, 62–3, 72, 88–9, 96, 120 Locke, John 90, 233 London, territorial organisation of 196 London School of Economics vii, 235 Long Term Capital Management crash and bail-out (1998) 8, 100, 261 ‘long waves’ 96 Luddite movement 60, 96 Luxemburg, Rosa 108, 116–17 luxury goods 70, 110 M McCarthyism 169 machinery 66, 113, 114, 127 Mackinder, Sir Halford 209–10 macroeconomics 237 McVeigh, Timothy 248 Maddison, Angus 26 Mahan, A.T.: The Influence of Sea Power upon History 209 maintenance failures 86 Malaysia: resorts to capital controls 198 Malthus, Thomas 72, 94 Manchester 27 Mao Zedong 59 Cultural Revolution 137 dialectical sense of how contradictions worked 136 Great Leap Forward 137, 138, 250 health care 137 recognised that a revolution had to be permanent or nothing at all 136–7 Maoism 133 Maoists 253 Marcos, Imelda 43 Marcuse, Herbert 169 market laws 198 market share 43 markets credit 2, 5, 37 export 141, 218 free 10, 90, 100, 128, 131 internal 109 market connections 162–3 niches 131, 175 see also derivatives markets; futures markets; labour markets; options markets Marshall, Arthur 162 ‘Marshallian’ industrial production districts 162 Marx, Karl 46–7, 98, 110, 160, 232–3 and Bakunin 225 on barriers 84, 88 the capitalist creed 103 capitalist development 117 changing the world 119–20 on the cotton industry 67 and falling profitability 94 goal of 238 on an ‘industrial reserve army’58 and Keynes 111 and limitless money 47 and Luddite movement 96 on Malthus and Ricardo 72 on the power of the labourer 101–2 on ‘primitive accumulation’58, 249 and rent 81 and reproduction schemas 70 on the rise of capitalism 135, 250 systematic critique of capitalism and its crisis tendencies 237 understanding and transparency 99, 100 on the world of high finance 54–5 Capital 53–4, 70, 89, 119, 126, 237 Grundrisse der Kritik des Politischen Ökonomie 47, 155 Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich: The Communist Manifesto 89, 115, 127, 157, 237, 259 Marxian theory 56, 183 Marxists 253 Meadows, Donella h.: Limits to Growth 72 meat-based diets 73, 74 Medicare 28–9, 224 Mellon, Andrew 11, 98 mercantilism 206 merchant capitalists 40 mergers 49, 50 forced 261 Merrill Lynch 12 Merton, Robert 100 methane gas 73 Mexico debt crisis (1982) 10, 19 northern Miexico’s proximity to the US market 36 peso rescue 261 privatisation of telecommunications 29 and remittances 38 standard of living 10 Mexico City 243 microcredit schemes 145–6 microeconomics 237 microenterprises 145–6 microfinance schemes 145–6 Middle East, and oil issue 77, 170, 210 militarisation 170 ‘military-industrial complex’ 91 minorities: colonisation of urban neighbourhoods 247, 248 Mitterrand, François 198 modelling of markets 262 modernism 171 monarchy 249 monetarism 237 monetisation 244 money centralised money power 49–50, 52 a form of social power 43, 44 limitlessness of 43, 47 loss of confidence in the symbols/quality of money 114 universality of 106 monoculture 186 Monopolies Commission 52 monopolisation 43, 68, 95, 113, 116, 221 Monsanto 186 Montreal Protocol (1989) 76, 187 Morgan Stanley 19 Morishima, Michio 70 Morris, William 160 mortgages annual rate of change in US mortgage debt 7 mortgage finance for housing 170 mortgage-backed bonds futures 262 mortgage-backed securities 4, 262 secondary mortgage market 173, 174 securitisation of local 42 securitisation of mortgage debt 85 subprime 49, 174 Moses, Robert 169, 171, 177 MST (Brazil) 257 multiculturalism 131, 176, 231, 238, 258 Mumbai, India anti-Muslim riots (early 1990s) 247 redevelopment 178–9 municipal budgets 5 Museum of Modern Art, New York 21 Myrdal, Gunnar 196 N Nandigram, West Bengal 180 Napoleon III, Emperor 167, 168 national debt 48 National Economic Council (US) 11, 236 national-origin quotas 14 nationalisation 2, 4, 8, 224 nationalism 55–6, 143, 194, 204 NATO 203 natural gas 188 ‘natural limits’ 47 natural resources 30, 71 natural scarcity 72, 73, 78, 80, 83, 84, 121 nature and capital 88 ‘first nature’ 184 relation to 121, 122 ‘the revenge of nature’ 185 ‘second nature’ 184, 185, 187 as a social product 188 neocolonialism 208, 212 neoliberal counter-revolution 113 neoliberalism 10, 11, 19, 66, 131, 132, 141, 172, 175, 197, 208, 218, 224, 225, 233, 237, 243, 255 Nepal: communist rule in 226 Nevada, foreclosure wave in 1 New Deal 71 ‘new economy’ (1990s) 97 New Labour 45, 255 ‘new urbanism’ movement 175 New York City 11 September 2001 attacks 41 fiscal crisis (1975) 10, 172, 261 investment banks 19, 28 New York metropolitan region 169, 196 Nicaragua 189 Niger delta 251 non-governmental organisations (NGOs) 35, 253–4 non-interventionism 10 North Africa, French import of labour from 14 North America, settlement in 145 North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA) 200 Northern Ireland emergency 247 Northern Rock 2 Norway: Nordic cris (1992) 8 nuclear power 188 O Obama, Barack 11, 27, 34, 210 Obama administration 78, 121 O’Connor, Jim 77, 78 offshoring 131 Ogoni people 251 oil cheap 76–7 differential rent on oil wells 83 futures 83, 84 a non-renewable resource 82 ‘peak oil’ 38, 73, 78, 79, 80 prices 77–8, 80, 82–3, 261 and raw materials prices 6 rents 83 United States and 76–7, 79, 121, 170, 210, 261 OPEC (Organisation of Oil-Producing Countries) 83, 84 options markets currency 262 equity values 262 unregulated 99, 100 Orange County, California bankruptcy 100, 261 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) 51 organisational change 98, 101 organisational forms 47, 101, 121, 127, 134, 238 Ottoman Empire 194 ‘over the counter’ trading 24, 25 overaccumulation crises 45 ozone hole 74 ozone layer 187 P Pakistan: US involvement 210 Palley, Thomas 236 Paris ‘the city of light’ 168 epicentre of 1968 confrontations 177, 243 Haussmann’s rebuilding of 49, 167–8, 169, 171, 176 municipal budget crashes (1868) 54 Paris Commune (1871) 168, 171, 176, 225, 243, 244 Partnoy, Frank: Ubfectious Greed 25 patents 221 patent laws 95 patriarchy 104 pensions pension funds 4, 5, 245 reneging on obligations 49 Péreire brothers 49, 54, 98, 174 pesticides 185, 186, 187 petty bourgeois 56 pharmaceutical sector 129, 245 philanthropy 44 Philippines: excessive urban development 8 Phillips, Kevin 206 Pinochet, General Augusto 15, 64 plant 58 Poland, lending to 19 political parties, radical 255–6 politics capitalist 76 class 62 co-revolutionary 241 commodified 219 depoliticised 219 energy 77 identity 131 labour organizing 255 left 255 transformative 207 pollution air 77 oceanic 74 rights 21 ‘Ponts et Chaussées’ organisation 92 Ponzi schemes 21, 114, 245, 246 pop music 245–6 Pope, Alexander 156 population growth 59, 72, 74, 121, 167 and capital accumulation 144–7 populism 55–6 portfolio insurance 262 poverty and capitalism 72 criminalisation and incarceration of the poor 15 feminisation of 15, 258 ‘Great Society’ anti-poverty programmes 32 Prague 243 prices commodity 37, 73 energy 78 food grain 79–80 land 8, 9, 182–3 oil 8, 28, 37–8, 77–8, 80, 82–3, 261 property 4, 182–3 raw material 37 reserve price 81–2 rising 73 share 7 primitive accumulation 58, 63–4, 108, 249 private consortia 50 private equity groups 50 private property and radical egalitarianism 233, 234 see also property markets; property rights; property values privatisation 10, 28, 29, 49, 251, 256, 257 pro-natal policies 59 production expansion of 112, 113 inadequate means of 47 investment in 114 liberating the concept 87 low-profit 29 offshore 16 production of urbanisation 87 reorganisation and relocation of 33 revolutionising of 89 surplus 45 technologies 101 productivity agreements 14, 60, 96 agricultural 119 cotton industry 67 gains 88, 89 Japan and West Germany 33 rising 96, 186 products development 95 innovation 95 new lines 94, 95 niches 94 profit squeeze 65, 66, 116 profitability constrains 30 falling 94, 131 of the financial sector 51 and wages 60 profits easy 15 excess 81, 90 falling 29, 72, 94, 116, 117 privatising 10 rates 70, 94, 101 realisation of 108 proletarianisation 60, 62 property markets crash in US and UK (1973–75) 8, 171–2, 261 overextension in 85 property market-led Nordic and Japanese bank crises 261 property-led crises (2007–10) 10, 261 real estate bubble 261 recession in UK (after 1987) 261 property rights 69, 81–2, 90, 122, 179, 198, 233, 244, 245 Property Share Price Index (UK) 7 property values 171, 181, 197, 248 prostitution 15 protectionism 31, 33, 43, 211 punctuated equilibrium theory of natural evolution 130 Putin, Vladimir 29, 80 Q Q’ing dynasty 194 quotas 16 R R&D (research and development) 92, 95–6 race issues 104 racism 61, 258 radical egalitarianism 230–34 railroads 42, 49, 191 Railwan, rise of (1970s) 35 rare earth metals 188 raw materials 6, 16, 37, 58, 77, 101, 113, 140, 144, 234 RBS 20 Reagan, Ronald 15, 64, 131, 141 Reagan-Thatcher counter revolution (early 1980s) 71 Reagan administration 1, 19 Reagan recession (1980–82) 60, 261 Real Estate Investment Trusts (US) 7 recession 1970s 171–2 language of 27 Reagan (1980–82) 60, 261 Red Brigade 254 reforestation 184 refrigeration 74 reinvestment 43, 45, 66–7, 110–12, 116 religious fundamentalism 203 religious issues 104 remittances 38, 140, 147 rentiers 40 rents differential rent 81, 82, 83 on intellectual property rights 221 land 182 monetisation of 48, 109 monopoly 51, 81–2, 83 oil 83 on patents 221 rising 181 reproduction schemas 70 Republican Party (US) 11, 141 reserve price 81 resource values 234 Ricardo, David 72, 94 risks, socialising 10 robbery 44 Robinson, Joan 238 robotisation 14, 136 Rockefeller, John D. 98 Rockefeller brothers 131 Rockefeller foundation 44, 186 Roman Empire 194 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 71 Rothschild family 98, 163 Royal Society 91, 156 royalties 40 Rubin, Robert 98 ‘rule of experts’ 99, 100–101 Russia bankruptcy (1998) 246, 261 capital flight crisis 261 defaults on its debt (1998) 6 oil and natural gas flow to Ukraine 68 oil production 6 oligarchs 29 see also Soviet Union S Saddam Hussein 210 Saint-Simon, Claude Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de 49 Saint-Simonians 87, 168 Salomon Brothers 24 Samuelson, Robert 235, 239 Sandino, Augusto 189 Sanford, Charles 98 satellites 156 savings 140 Scholes, Myron 100 Schumer, Charles 11 Schumpeter, Joseph 46 Seattle battle of (1999) 38, 227 general strike (1918) 243 software development in 195 Second World War 32, 168–70, 214 sectarianism 252 securitisation 17, 36, 42 Sejong, South Korea 124–6 service industries 41 sexism 61 sexual preferences issues 104, 131, 176 Shanghai Commune (1967) 243 shark hunting 73, 76 Shell Oil 79, 251 Shenzhen, China 36 shop floor organisers (shop stewards) 103 Silicon Valley 162, 195, 216 Singapore follows Japanese model 92 industrialisation 68 rise of (1970s) 35 slavery 144 domestic 15 slums 16, 151–2, 176, 178–9 small operators, dispossession of 50 Smith, Adam 90, 164 The Wealth of Nations 35 social democracy 255 ‘social democratic’ consensus (1960s) 64 social inequality 224 social relations 101, 102, 104, 105, 119, 121, 122, 123, 126, 127, 135–9, 152, 240 loss of 246 social security 224 social services 256 social struggles 193 social welfarism 255 socialism 136, 223, 228, 242, 249 compared with communism 224 solidarity economy 151, 254 Soros, George 44, 98, 221 Soros foundation 44 South Korea Asian Currency Crisis 261 excessive urban development 8 falling exports 6 follows Japanese model 92 rise of (1970s) 35 south-east Asia: crash of 1997–8 6, 8, 49, 246 Soviet Union in alliance with US against fascism 169 break-up of 208, 217, 227 collapse of communism 16 collectivisation of agriculture 250 ‘space race’ (1960s and 1970s) 156 see also Russia space domination of 156–8, 207 fixed spaces 190 ‘space race’ (1960s and 1970s) 156 Spain property-led crisis (2007–10) 5–6, 261 unemployment 6 spatial monopoly 164–5 special drawing rights 32, 34 special economic zones 36 special investment vehicles 36, 262 special purpose entities 262 speculation 52–3 speculative binges 52 speed-up 41, 42 stagflation 113 stagnation 116 Stalin, Joseph 136, 250 Standard Oil 98 state formation 196, 197, 202 state-corporate nexus 204 ‘space race’ (1960s and 1970s) 156 state-finance nexus 204, 205, 237, 256 blind belief in its corrective powers 55 ‘central nervous system’ for capital accumulation 54 characteristics of a feudal institution 55 and the current crisis 118 defined 48 failure of 56–7 forms of 55 fusion of state and financial powers 115 innovation in 85 international version of 51 overwhelmed by centralised credit power 52 pressure on 54 radical reconstruction of 131 role of 51 and state-corporate research nexus 97 suburbanisation 171 tilts to favour particular interests 56 statistical arbitrage strategies 262 steam engine, invention of 78, 89 Stiglitz, Joseph 45 stimulus packages 261 stock markets crash (1929) 211, 217 crashes (2001–02) 261 massive liquidity injections (1987) 236, 261 Stockton, California 2 ’structural adjustment’ programmes vii, 19, 261 subcontracting 131 subprime loans 1 subprime mortgage crisis 2 substance abuse 151 suburbanisation 73, 74, 76–7, 106–7, 169, 170, 171, 181 Summers, Larry 11, 44–5, 236 supermarket chains 50 supply-side theory 237 surveillance 92, 204 swaps credit 21 Credit Default 24, 262 currency 262 equity index 262 interest rate 24, 262 Sweden banking system crash (1992) 8, 45 Nordic crisis 8 Yugoslav immigrants 14 Sweezey, Paul 52, 113 ‘switching crises’ 93 systematic ‘moral hazard’ 10 systemic risks vii T Taipei: computer chips and household technologies in 195 Taiwan falling exports 6 follows Japanese model 92 takeovers 49 Taliban 226 tariffs 16 taxation 244 favouring the rich 45 inheritance 44 progressive 44 and the state 48, 145 strong tax base 149 tax rebates 107 tax revenues 40 weak tax base 150 ‘Teamsters for Turtles’ logo 55 technological dynamism 134 technologies change/innovation/new 33, 34, 63, 67, 70, 96–7, 98, 101, 103, 121, 127, 134, 188, 193, 221, 249 electronic 131–2 ‘green’ 188, 221 inappropriate 47 labour fights new technologies 60 labour-saving 14–15, 60, 116 ‘rule of experts’ 99, 100–101 technological comparative edge 95 transport 62 tectonic movements 75 territorial associations 193–4, 195, 196 territorial logic 204–5 Thailand Asian Currency Crisis 261 excessive urban development 8 Thatcher, Margaret, Baroness 15, 38, 64, 131, 197, 255 Thatcherites 224 ‘Third Italy’, Bologna 162, 195 time-space compression 158 time-space configurations 190 Toys ‘R’ Us 17 trade barriers to 16 collapses in foreign trade (2007–10) 261 fall in global international trade 6 increase in volume of trading 262 trade wars 211 trade unions 63 productivity agreements 60 and US auto industry 56 trafficking human 44 illegal 43 training 59 transport costs 164 innovations 42, 93 systems 16, 67 technology 62 Treasury Bill futures 262 Treasury bond futures 262 Treasury instruments 262 TRIPS agreement 245 Tronti, Mario 102 Trotskyists 253, 255 Tucuman uprising (1969) 243 Turin: communal ‘houses of the people’ 243 Turin Workers Councils 243 U UBS 20 Ukraine, Russian oil and natural gas flow to 68 ultraviolet radiation 187 UN Declaration of Human Rights 234 UN development report (1996) 110 Un-American Activities Committee hearings 169 underconsumptionist traditions 116 unemployment 131, 150 benefits 60 creation of 15 in the European Union 140 job losses 93 lay-offs 60 mass 6, 66, 261 rising 15, 37, 113 and technological change 14, 60, 93 in US 5, 6, 60, 168, 215, 261 unionisation 103, 107 United Fruit Company 189 United Kingdom economy in serious difficulty 5 forced to nationalise Northern Rock 2 property market crash 261 real average earnings 13 train network 28 United Nations 31, 208 United States agricultural subsidies 79 in alliance with Soviet Union against fascism 169 anti-trust legislation 52 auto industry 56 blockbusting neighbourhoods 248 booming but debt-filled consumer markets 141 and capital surplus absorption 31–2 competition in labour markets 61 constraints to excessive concentration of money power 44–5 consumerism 109 conumer debt service ratio 18 cross-border leasing with Germany 142–3 debt 158, 206 debt bubble 18 fiscal crises of federal, state and local governments 261 health care 28–9 heavy losses in derivatives 261 home ownership 3 housing foreclosure crises 1–2, 4, 38, 166 industries dependent on trade seriously hit 141 interventionism in Iraq and Afghanistan 210 investment bankers rescued 261 investment failures in real estate 261 lack of belief in theory of evolution 129 land speculation scheme 187–8 oil issue 76–7, 79, 80, 121, 170, 210, 261 population growth 146 proletarianisation 60 property-led crisis (2007–10) 261 pursuit of science and technology 129 radical anti-authoritarianism 199 Reagan Recession 261 rescue of financial institutions 261 research universities 95 the reversing origins of US corporate profits (1950–2004) 22 the right to the city movement 257 ‘right to work’ states 65 savings and loan crisis (1984–92) 8 secondary mortgage market 173 ‘space race’ (1960s and 1970s) 156 suburbs 106–7, 149–50, 170 train network 28 unemployment 5, 6, 60, 168, 215, 261 unrestricted capitalist development 113 value of US stocks and homes, as a percentage of GDP 22 and Vietnam War 171 wages 13, 62 welfare provision 141 ‘urban crisis’ (1960s) 170 urban ‘heat islands’ 77 urban imagineering 193 urban social movements 180 urbanisation 74, 85, 87, 119, 131, 137, 166, 167, 172–3, 174, 240, 243 US Congress 5, 169, 187–8 US Declaration of Independence 199 US National Intelligence Council 34–5 US Senate 79 US Supreme Court 179 US Treasury and Goldman Sachs 11 rescue of Continental Illinois Bank 261 V Vanderbilt family 98 Vatican 44 Veblen, Thorstein 181–2 Venezuela 256 oil production 6 Vietnam War 32, 171 Volcker, Paul 2, 236 Volcker interest rate shock 261 W wage goods 70, 107, 112, 162 wages and living standards 89 a living wage 63 national minimum wage 63 rates 13, 14, 59–64, 66, 109 real 107 repression 12, 16, 21, 107, 110, 118, 131, 172 stagnation 15 wage bargaining 63 Wal-Mart 17, 29, 64, 89 Wall Street, New York 35, 162, 200, 219, 220 banking institutions 11 bonuses 2 ‘Party of Wall Street’ 11, 20, 200 ‘War on Terror’ 34, 92 warfare 202, 204 Wasserstein, Bruce 98 waste disposal 143 Watt, James 89 wealth accumulation by capitalist class interests 12 centralisation of 10 declining 131 flow of 35 wealth transfer 109–10 weather systems 153–4 Weather Underground 254 Weill, Sandy 98 Welch, Jack 98 Westphalia, Treaty of (1648) 91 Whitehead, Alfred North 75 Wilson, Harold 56 wind turbines 188 women domestic slavery 15 mobilisation of 59, 60 prostitution 15 rights 176, 251, 258 wages 62 workers’ collectives 234 working hours 59 World Bank 36, 51, 69, 192, 200, 251 ‘Fifty Years is Enough’ campaign 55 predicts negative growth in the global economy 6 World Bank Development Report (2009) 26 World Trade Organisation (WTO) 200, 227 agreements 69 street protests against (Seattle, 1999) 55 TRIPS agreement 245 and US agricultural subsidies 79 WorldCom 8, 100, 261 worldwide web 42 Wriston, Walter 19 X X-rays 99 Y Yugoslavia dissolution of 208 ethnic cleansings 247 Z Zapatista revolutionary movement 207, 226, 252 Zola, Émile 53 The Belly of Paris 168 The Ladies’ Paradise 168

Trade Wars Are Class Wars: How Rising Inequality Distorts the Global Economy and Threatens International Peace
by Matthew C. Klein
Published 18 May 2020

These developments radically improved the banking system’s ability to collect and channel middle-class household savings into new investment projects. By the mid-1860s, Paris was beginning to rival London as a market for new international loans.21 Financial innovation was not limited to France and the United States. Germany also saw a similar expansion of its banking system and in the creation of joint-stock corporations. So many joint-stock companies were created in 1866–73 that still exist today that the period is known in Germany as the Gründerzeit, or founders’ era. Most of the new German banks had been created in the 1850s, but in a financially backward and fragmented market, it took nearly two decades for them to develop and unify the provincial money and credit markets.

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See savings and investment Ireland: budget surpluses in, 170 external debt in, 163 German surpluses absorbed by, 4, 162, 229–30 as tax haven, 33, 35–37 U.S. corporation income in, 37 Isabella II (queen of Spain), 93 Italy: colonial territories of, 21 and European banking glut, 63 external debt in, 163 German surpluses absorbed by, 4, 162, 229–30 and global credit boom (1820s), 51 Internet access speeds in, 169 savings and investment in, 171 taxes in, 172 ITO (International Trade Organization), 21–22 Jackson, Andrew, 52, 53 Japan: colonial territories of, 18, 19, 21 corporate tax avoidance in, 33 development model in, 108 foreign exchange reserves in, 217 and global value chains, 28 and gold standard, 188 savings and investment in, 72, 74–75, 78, 180–81, 225 U.S. corporation income in, 37 in World War II, 21 Jay Cooke & Company, 55, 58 Jefferson, Thomas, 14 Johnson & Johnson, 34–35 joint-stock companies, 55–56 J. P. Morgan (bank), 63 Kennedy, James, 208 Kennedy, John F., 30–31, 192–93 Keynes, John Maynard, 22, 159, 189, 218–20 Kindleberger, Charles, 94 Kohl, Helmut, 135–43 Korea. See North Korea, savings and investment in; South Korea Krooss, Herman, 238n14 Kumhof, Michael, 81 labor unions.

The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World
by Linsey McGoey
Published 14 Sep 2019

I start with the ideas of Adam Smith, who did believe in the value of private enterprise, but who was a much stronger advocate of government regulation and progressive taxation than he is remembered for today. The reason why Smith saw an important role for government regulation is simple. He didn’t think that wealthy people should be above the law, nor permitted to manipulate the law for narrow individual gain, an attitude that links his 18th-century writing about joint-stock companies to contemporary debates over corporate impunity. Smith writes about the problem of tiered systems of justice throughout Wealth of Nations. Under feudalism, he suggests, noble lords were too powerful for the monarchy to tax fairly, and so the burden of supporting the government fell on the poor and defenceless: ‘the sovereign,’ he writes, ‘was obliged to content himself with taxing those who were too weak to refuse to pay taxes.’26 Gradually, the rule of law in European nations improved, enabling a more just system of taxation to develop, closer to Smith’s ideal of ‘perfect justice.’

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Smith extends the notion to companies such as the East India Company, criticizing them for price-gouging practices which drove up the cost of consumer goods and rendered the ‘wages of labour … much less abundant than they otherwise would be.’6 In doing so, he paved the way for fuller-blown theories of rentier exploitation emerging over the 19th century. Smith makes a case for joint-stock companies to have time-limited monopoly rights, after which he suggests that even infrastructure funded by a company should be taken ‘into the hands of government, their value to be paid to the company, and the trade to be laid open to all the subjects of the state.’7 Although Smith insisted the government should avoid ‘perpetual monopoly,’ it would be nearly another century before Britain fully abolished the East India Company’s monopoly privileges.

The World's First Railway System: Enterprise, Competition, and Regulation on the Railway Network in Victorian Britain
by Mark Casson
Published 14 Jul 2009

Furthermore, many young men of great ability chose to enter the church in search of spiritual rather than material rewards, with the entrepreneurial risk-takers opting for missionary work overseas. The principle of partnership was extended during the Victorian period through a series of reforms to company law which made it much easier for large businesses to be incorporated as joint stock companies with limited liability for their shareholders. This in turn increased liquidity in stock markets by making it easier for ordinary people to buy and sell shares in small denominations. This in turn facilitated the growth of large firms. However, little trust was placed in the law as a means of resolving business disputes.

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The exhaustion of local coal deposits led to increasing amounts of haematite ore being consigned across the Pennines by rail to the north-east, where it was processed on Teesside and exported to continental Europe. Following the onset of the Great Depression in 1873, Wnancial diYculties arose in the Whitehaven area, and so it was natural for the company to look to larger and better capitalized companies to take it over. The LNWR was a natural candidate, as one of the country’s largest joint stock companies, and the owner of two railways into the Whitehaven area: the Whitehaven Junction (see Section 5.4.5) and the Cockermouth Keswisk and Penrith. The FR, whose main line ran south from Whitehaven to Barrow and Carnforth, had much stronger links with the local business community, however, and consequently better local knowledge.

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Land was expensive, and purchasing enough line to build a railway was normally beyond the means of any single person—including an aristocrat. Even a business partnership involving a small number of individuals (a common form of organization in Victorian Britain) would be Wnancially stretched. The solution was to form a joint stock company with the power to issue shares. Furthermore, in order to secure a wide market for these shares, limited liability had to be provided. Ordinary members of the public did not have the conWdence to purchase shares in companies over which they could not exert direct control unless their liability for losses was limited to the price that they had paid for their shares.

The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism
by Joyce Appleby
Published 22 Dec 2009

Unlike the merchant companies composed of active traders, members of a joint-stock trading company subscribed to a certain number of shares in the company. For the English gentleman or woman here was a chance to become a part of a profitable venture without taking an active part in it. Dozens of such joint-stock companies, with royal charters, were pushing out the boundaries of interregional trade. Members of the English aristocracy showed a decided preference for companies that established colonies or pioneered trades that would enhance England’s status in the world. Commerce had champions in the highest circles of society, and the House of Commons included merchants among its members.

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Deaths could dissolve partnerships and pools of capital without the legal instrument of incorporation.33 Being unable to bequeath a firm’s shares often made it impossible to maintain businesses. Unlike Muslim countries, Europeans developed financial institutions especially for handling investment money. German banks began as private institutions, becoming joint-stock companies later. As so-called universal banks they offered a range of financial services from extending short-term credit to taking deposits, discounting bills, selling insurance, and handling mortgages while underwriting and trading in securities.34 Britain industrialized at the leisurely pace of a pathbreaker.

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The structure of European economies is corporate with the interests of labor and management worked on together through public and private organizations. That of the United States is more competitive than corporate, and we can characterize the Japanese economy as paternalistic. Its most prominent firms appear like an extended family with joint-stock companies running specific enterprises under the benevolent guidance of its holding company. This arrangement offered protection from hostile takeovers. Paternalism shouldn’t be confused with patriarchal, for unlike America’s hierarchical decision making, in Japanese companies, ideas percolate up from the bottom.

The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy
by Dani Rodrik
Published 23 Dec 2010

On May 2, 1670, the crown granted Prince Rupert and his partners a charter which established “the Governour and Company of Merchants-Adventurers Trading into Hudson’s Bay.” The company thereby created eventually came to be known as Hudson’s Bay Company. It survives to this day as HBC, Canada’s largest general retailer, which makes it also the world’s oldest joint stock company. The charter Charles II granted to Hudson’s Bay Company is an extraordinary document that confers enormous powers on the company. The king begins by commending his “beloved cousin” Prince Rupert and his associates for having led the expedition to Hudson’s Bay “at their own great cost” and for having discovered “considerable commodities,” which will produce “great advantage to us and our Kingdom.”

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Many have well-recognized names, such as the English East India Company and the Dutch East India Company, and many have left significant marks on history. The most famous among them, the English East India Company, or the “Governor and Company of Merchants of London Trading into the East Indies,” as it was originally called, was chartered in 1600 as a joint stock company. Its monopoly covered trade with the Indian subcontinent and China (including opium trade). As with the Hudson’s Bay Company, its powers extended considerably beyond trade. It had a standing army, could make war, enter into treaties, mint its currency, and administer justice. It expanded its control over India through a series of armed confrontations with the Mughal Empire and alliances with local rulers.

Capital Without Borders
by Brooke Harrington
Published 11 Sep 2016

The basis of wealth shifted decisively from land to capital—a more fungible source of wealth requiring a different kind of attention and maintenance than landed estates. In England, the nineteenth century saw the repeal of the Bubble Act, allowing corporations—and corporate investment—to flourish as never before.44 Suddenly trustees had tremendous amounts of cash to manage, and hundreds of joint stock companies in which to invest. Yet they did not have the right to invest in those securities unless specifically authorized to do so by the trust instrument. Most trust instruments, in the interests of protecting beneficiaries from “faithless feoffees,” gave no such powers, leaving the trustee to act simply as a passive title holder for real estate.

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Benjamin Cardozo, opinion in Meinhard v. Salmon, 164 N.E. 545 (N.Y. 1928), at 546. 41. Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1994 [1478]). 42. Langbein, “The Contractarian Basis,” 638. 43. Langbein, “Rise of the Management Trust,” 53. 44. The Bubble Act of 1720 forbade the creation of new joint-stock companies, except by royal charter. Passage of this law was intended to prevent the kind of speculation that that had led to the ruinous South Sea Bubble earlier that year. Brooke Harrington, “States and Financial Crises,” in Benedikte Brincker, ed., Introduction to Political Sociology, 267–282 (Copenhagen: Gyldendal Akademisk, 2013). 45.

The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Rise and Fall of Nations
by Jacob Soll
Published 28 Apr 2014

The relationships between corporations, the state, and professional accounting associations remained loosely defined. Sparked by financial fraud and failure, the British Parliament passed the Bankruptcy Act of 1831, which gave accountants a leading role as “Official Assignees” in managing bankruptcies, auctions, liquidations, and debt trials. In 1844, it passed the Joint Stock Companies Act, which aimed to regulate the finances of hundreds of companies. Trained accountants began trying to audit companies, but the job was arguably too big without an enormous bureaucracy of actuaries. The English baron, politician, and stockbroker Sir William Quilter testified to a parliamentary committee in 1849 that audits were based on personal judgment, not “dry arithmetical duty.”

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Matthew (art) (Caravaggio), 23 International Accounting Standards Board (IASB), 194, 206 International Accounting Standards Committee (IASC), 194 Interstate Commerce Commission, 172 Introduction to the Counting House, An (Serjeant), 150 Inventorying, 2–3 Investment banks, x, 192, 200, 202–204 Investment in stocks Dutch East India Company and, 79–84 Great Depression and, 192–193 railroads and, 169, 174 risky mortgage bundles and, 202–203, 206 South Sea Company and, 106–112 Invisible hand, 130, 135 Irwin, Timothy, 207 Islington Academy, 119 Italian city republics. See Renaissance; Republics, Italian Jacombe, Robert, 110 Jacques Savary, 96–97 Jarry, Nicolas, 97 Jefferson, Thomas, 155–156 Jesuit order, 57 Jesus Christ, 23, 26 Jews, usury and, 21 Johnson, Lyndon, 198 Johnson, Samuel, 115 Joint Stock Companies Act of 1844 (England), 173 Jones, Joseph, 159 Jones, Lewis Davies, 173 Jullien, Adolph, 169 “Just price” concept (Aquinas), 21, 62 Kantoor van de Financie van Holland, 71 Keayne, Robert, 149 Kennedy, Joseph P., 192 Kent, William, 116 Knight, Robert, 112 KPMG, x, 202 Laffitte, Jacques, 167 “Laissez faire” theory, 135, 163, 171–172 Lampe, Barent, 81 Law, John, 107, 134 Lawrence, Thomas, 123 Le Maire, Isaac, 80–81 Le Peletier, Claude, 99 Leeson, Nick, 123 Lehman Brothers Bank, x, 203 Lenin, Vladimir, 187 Leonardo da Vinci, 50 Lerma, Duke of, 68 Leviathan (Hobbes), 104 Liabilities, in accounting, 83 Liancourt, Duke de, 145 Liber abaci (Fibonacci), 10 Libro segreto, 18–19, 34, 37, 44 L’Interdiction (The Ban) (Balzac), 178–179 Little Dorrit (Dickens), 171, 178, 180–181 Little Women (Alcott), 181–182 Locke, John, 103 London (Johnson), 115 Loose-leaf notebooks, 169 Lorenzo the Magnificent.

Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Published 27 Nov 2012

DuPont, now famous for Teflon nonstick cooking pans, Corian countertops, and the durable fabric Kevlar, actually started out as an explosives company. Avon, the cosmetics company, started out in door-to-door book sales. And, the strangest of all, Oneida Silversmiths was a community religious cult but for regulatory reasons they needed to use as cover a joint stock company. THE INVERSE TURKEY PROBLEM Now some plumbing behind what I am saying—epistemology of statistical statements. The following discussion will show how the unknown, what you don’t see, can contain good news in one case and bad news in another. And in Extremistan territory, things get even more accentuated.

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Many right-wingers-in-love-with-large-corporations keep citing Adam Smith, famous patron saint of “capitalism,” a word he never uttered, without reading him, using his ideas in a self-serving selective manner—ideas that he most certainly did not endorse in the form they are presented.4 In Book IV of The Wealth of Nations, Smith was extremely chary of the idea of giving someone upside without downside and had doubts about the limited liability of joint-stock companies (the ancestor of the modern limited liability corporation). He did not get the idea of transfer of antifragility, but he came close enough. And he detected—sort of—the problem that comes with managing other people’s business, the lack of a pilot on the plane: The directors of such companies, however, being the managers rather of other people’s money than of their own, it cannot well be expected, that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which the partners in a private copartnery frequently watch over their own.

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And he detected—sort of—the problem that comes with managing other people’s business, the lack of a pilot on the plane: The directors of such companies, however, being the managers rather of other people’s money than of their own, it cannot well be expected, that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which the partners in a private copartnery frequently watch over their own. Further, Smith is even suspicious of their economic performance as he writes: “Joint-stock companies for foreign trade have seldom been able to maintain the competition against private adventurers.” Let me make the point clearer: the version of “capitalism” or whatever economic system you need to have is with the minimum number of people in the left column of the Triad. Nobody realizes that the central problem of the Soviet system was that it put everyone in charge of economic life in that nasty fragilizing left column.

Owning the Earth: The Transforming History of Land Ownership
by Andro Linklater
Published 12 Nov 2013

In 1602, the inner circle of bankers, traders, and guild masters in six of these cities used their political clout to create the United East India Company, in Dutch Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie or VOC, by amalgamating those companies trading with the Orient and especially the spice islands of modern Indonesia. The behemoth that was set up, eight times larger than the English East India Company founded in London two years earlier in 1600, transformed the financial and corporate environment. Its funding brought into existence such innovations as the public sale of shares, the concept of the joint stock company where the owners’ liability for debt was limited to their shareholding, the issue of bonds backed by future earnings, a stock exchange for trading the company’s shares, and a board of directors responsible to the shareholders for running the enterprise. The phenomenal wealth generated by the VOC—for two centuries its dividends averaged almost 20 percent—lifted the development of commercial capitalism to a new level, but the company was not designed for free enterprise.

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And deep-pocketed, publicly listed companies had bankrupted those private entrepreneurs who had only their own securities to fall back on. But these new industries, the chemical factories and advanced steel manufacturers of the second industrial revolution, were different, Wells pointed out. “Those engaged in great industrial enterprises,” he wrote, “whether they form joint-stock companies or are simply wealthy individuals, are invested with such economic powers that none of them can be easily pushed to the wall.” * * * The problem arose from the complexities of industrial production. At the end of the nineteenth century, a manufacturer of basic steel plate had to source iron ore with the right phosphorous content, coked coal with the right carbon content, alloys of copper and manganese in the right ratio, acquire land close to water and a railroad, build factories of the most efficient design, construct furnaces to withstand temperatures of 3,500 degrees fahrenheit, recruit and train scores of workers with skills ranging from accountancy to hammering, and find markets for the product.

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A term of twenty years might be needed to pay off investment on this scale but the rewards—up to 15 percent annually for rail companies in densely populated areas—were attractive. In response to the need to bring in more investment, two pieces of legislation, the 1855 Limited Liability Act and 1856 Joint Stock Companies Act, offered protection to investors by restricting their liabilities, should a company fail, to the loss of their investment. The birth of the modern financial industry may be said to have begun in that decade. Hundreds of limited liability companies were launched and financed their operation by issuing shares.

The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest
by Edward Chancellor
Published 15 Aug 2022

The French coined a new word, millionaire, to describe these lucky fellows. A speculative fever enveloped the nation and soon the whole of Europe had caught the bug. In his memoirs, the Duke of Saint-Simon described the scenes in the rue Quincampoix: there were crowds all day long … such wild excitement was never known before … Day by day, Law’s bank and his joint stock company gained in favour. People trusted both completely, rushing to turn their estates and houses into paper, with the result that everything but paper cost more … Everyone’s head was turned.14 Law himself was besieged, noted Saint-Simon, ‘by suppliants and flatterers [seeking an allocation of shares]; his door was forced, people entered by the windows from his garden, and fell down the chimney into his study.

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Members of the Paris Parlement also loathed Law, whose reforms threatened to end their venal existence. Several contemporaries, including Saint-Simon, believed that Law’s efforts were doomed from the start because he was attempting to introduce modern institutions of finance – a national bank, paper credit, a funded national debt and joint-stock companies – that were vulnerable to the whims of the autocratic French monarch.fn6 To make matters worse, Law availed himself of the monarch’s absolute powers to impose his System upon the French nation. In order to make his banknotes appear more attractive, Law, on several occasions, altered by decree the monetary value of gold and silver.

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From 1823, the Old Lady started to lend against mortgages, government securities and even its own shares. By early 1825, the yield on Consols touched 3 per cent, down from 5 per cent a few years earlier. As rates on Scottish bank loans fell to 2.5 per cent, clients withdrew deposits to invest in joint-stock companies or to lend directly to builders upon poor security. New banks popped up across the nation. The Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool, lamented that ‘any petty tradesman, any grocer or cheesemonger, however destitute of property, might set up a bank in any place.’10 These country banks flooded Britain with their banknotes.

The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor
by David S. Landes
Published 14 Sep 1999

Yet the absence of serious legal change for a century testifies to the solidity of these undertakings and the general vitality of the British economy. (I am assuming here that if a need for bank financing had existed, a society so responsive to business interests would have changed the rules.) In the nineteenth century, when things got costlier and risks greater, the most effective device for mobilizing capital was the chartered joint-stock company with limited liability—chartered because limited liability could be conferred only by the crown or Parliament. These large, semipublic enterprises never made much use of long-term bank financing, because no bank was big enough. The charter of the Bank of England provided that no other bank could have more than six partners.

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They could fairly smell profit and had built their fortunes on opportunism and variety. To this we should add a flair for profitable marital alliances, which could provide both funds and business contacts.4 Any effort to understand the Industrial Revolution in Europe before the age of public joint-stock companies and stock exchanges must take family and personal connections into account. In good times, short-term and demand loans could turn into long credit; in bad times, failure to renew such support could push a desperate company into liquidation. Much depended on the robustness and loyalty of one’s creditor, but even the most trusting and determined lender could find his hand forced as other banks began calling in their loans.

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The general impression that the brothers Pereire invented a new form comes from such studies as Plenge, Gründung und Geschichte des Credit Mobilier, as picked up by Gerschenkron in his Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective. (The title essay goes back to 1951.) 6. The Germans too, by law of 11 June 1870. The point was whether businessmen could establish a joint-stock company with limited liability without obtaining prior government permission, whether by charter from the crown or a bill of the legislature. Tsarist Russia never got around to instituting such routine registration: by a decree of 1836, in effect until the revolution of 1917 (after which nothing mattered), any such company had to be authorized by law—F.

Mongolia - Culture Smart!: The Essential Guide to Customs & Culture
by Alan Sanders
Published 1 Feb 2016

The Russian broad-gauge, single-track branch line from the Trans-Siberian Railway, built by Soviet political prisoners, reached Ulan Bator in 1949; the extension to the southern border and Beijing was completed by China in 1955. At Zamyn-Üüd there is a freight trans-shipment center where the wheels on passenger coaches are switched to China’s standard gauge. The UBR, now a Mongolian–Russian joint stock company, carries some twenty million metric tons of freight a year, mostly coal and minerals. Darkhan was founded in 1961 on the railway north of Ulan Bator and has a branch line from Sharyn Gol coalmine. Darkhan’s factories produce building materials, iron castings, woolen textiles, carpets, flour, and other foodstuffs.

How the World Works
by Noam Chomsky , Arthur Naiman and David Barsamian
Published 13 Sep 2011

Adam Smith didn’t call himself an anticapitalist because, back in the eighteenth century, he was basically precapitalist, but he had a good deal of skepticism about capitalist ideology and practice—even about what he called “joint stock companies” (what we call corporations today, which existed in quite a different form in his day). He worried about the separation of managerial control from direct participation, and he also feared that these joint stock companies might turn into “immortal persons.” This indeed happened in the nineteenth century, after Smith’s death [under current law, corporations have even more rights than individuals, and can live forever].

Alistair Cooke's America
by Alistair Cooke
Published 1 Oct 2008

The men of substance who financed the colonies were not bemused by such fictions, but they saw the prospect of a breathtaking investment in a country that, unlike their own, had unbounded virgin land. Since all newly discovered lands belonged automatically to the Crown, the men who warmed to this enterprise had first to procure from James I a charter as a trading company. This was a joint-stock company, for individuals had learned to their cost in many lone trade ventures in Europe and the East that a private purse carried no authority abroad and was ‘cold comfort to adventures.’ So the men who jointly raised the money were such as Sir John Popham, a lord chief justice; Sir Thomas Smith, director of the East India Company; and Sir Ferdinando Gorges, governor of the fort at Plymouth.

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As it happened, the forty-niners struck a remarkably docile period in the history of the Indian wars, and the Indians in the main appeared to act as guides, often to proffer mules and food and in other ways assist the survival of the white man. But the standby military organization was a godsend in other ways, providing as it did a roster for the daily chores and a firm discipline when hunger and exhaustion transformed family encampments into bear pits. Many seagoing Yankees formed joint stock companies before they left, and later improvised written constitutions for their mutual protection. The most famous and successful example of self-government was the Charlestown Company, formed in the East, which subscribed its equipment and expenses, formed a committee to study the metallurgy of mining, and drew up a remarkably farsighted constitution that held them unscathed through sore trials, provided for the pooling of such gold as they might dig, and an equal, audited distribution when the company returned East.

What Would the Great Economists Do?: How Twelve Brilliant Minds Would Solve Today's Biggest Problems
by Linda Yueh
Published 4 Jun 2018

Adam Smith may be the economist who named the ‘invisible hand’ that allowed the market to dictate what was produced and how it was priced, but he did not think highly of the services sector. A product of his time, he did not believe that services could produce output that was as valuable as that from a factory or a bakery. In fact, Smith didn’t condone much of what makes up the modern economy, for example he wasn’t in favour of joint-stock companies, which are the basis of modern-day corporations. His legacy continues to affect attitudes today. Even the way that national statistics are collected breaks down manufacturing data in great detail while aggregating much of services output. That’s probably also because it’s hard for statisticians to put a figure on what a consultant contributes while he sits at his computer or what a meeting adds to national output.

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City: Urbanism and Its End
by Douglas W. Rae
Published 15 Jan 2003

Moreover, the going pattern of economic organization made it difficult to amass capital in quantities required by large-scale factories. The standard forms of ownership were sole proprietorship and partnership, both of which typically required that the direct operators of a firm also be its equity investors.36 The coming dominance of the joint stock company in the years after 1840 would change that irrevocably. Agriculture also limited centralization. Agricultural energy could beat either of two principal paths into the economy—either as work done by animal muscle or as vegetable foodstuffs consumed by those animals whose muscle-power would perform work.

…

Even Mayor Rice was an immigrant of sorts, his family having moved from Vermont to rural Massachusetts to nearby Cheshire and thence (during his childhood) to New Haven. These immigrants—along with thousands more arriving from the American hinterlands—captured both manufacturing jobs and spin-off entrepreneurial niches created by the former. At the center of the urban economy were 143 fairly large manufacturing concerns organized as joint stock companies. These incorporated firms stood in sharp contrast to sole proprietorships and partnerships because many of them were capable of raising capital in increasing quantities and of operating large plants sending products to markets on a national and even international scale. The largest—Sargent Hardware, Winchester Repeating Arms, and New Haven Clock—operated almost as cities unto themselves.

…

Sperry & Barnes was a meat-packing firm handling about 200,000 hogs per year. The firm was, by 1910, controlled by Armour & Company of Chicago. Peck Brothers & Company manufactured plumbers’ materials and fittings for the distribution of water, steam, and gas. Like Sargent, Peck Brothers operated sales offices in Chicago, New York, and Boston. This joint stock company had reached $720,000 in capitalization by 1897. A lesser number of major manufacturing operations were in fact branches of companies grounded in other cities. These were exceptions to the New Haven pattern of 1910–16: the plants were owned by corporations with no grounded connection with the city.

Corporate Finance: Theory and Practice
by Pierre Vernimmen , Pascal Quiry , Maurizio Dallocchio , Yann le Fur and Antonio Salvi
Published 16 Oct 2017

Elsewhere, it is possible for the company resulting from the merger of two companies to hold onto the tax-loss carryforwards of the company that is acquired, provided that the merger is not being carried out solely for tax reasons. This reduces the importance of the tax issue in deciding who should take over whom. 6. Cross-border mergers in Europe Cross-border mergers between companies (joint-stock companies, limited liability companies, European companies, simplified joint-stock companies) in EU member states are made possible by a European Directive which does not, however, cover partnerships. Rules that have been harmonised at a European level apply to the cross-border merger procedure itself, which makes provision for prior checks to ensure that the merger is compliant, carried out by the registrar of the court that has jurisdiction over each company, and checks that it is legal by a notary or court registrar.

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This is the fundamental difference between shareholders and creditors: the former can lose their entire investment, but also hope for unlimited gains, while the latter will at best earn the flows programmed at the beginning of the contract. Keep this in mind as we use options to analyse corporate structure and, more importantly, the relationship between shareholders and creditors. Section 34.1 Analysing the firm in light of options theory To keep our presentation simple, we shall take the example of a joint stock company in which enterprise value EV is divided between debt (V D) and equity (V E). We shall also assume that the company has issued only one type of debt – zero-coupon bonds – redeemable upon maturity at full face value (principal and interest) for 100. 1. Equity and debt in terms of options Depending on the enterprise value when the debt matures, two outcomes are possible: The enterprise value is higher than the amount of debt to be redeemed (e.g.

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A purchase price of shares is offered to you and you want to find the implicit rate of return of this investment if the business plan is met and given your estimation of the final value of the company. You then compare it with the minimum rate of return that you estimate is justified, given the risk of the investment, in order to take your investment decision. Here we find the IRR of Chapter 17. Section 40.7 Example inspired by a real case: Example.com The simplified joint stock company Example SAS was set up eight years ago by two friends with the aim of developing a new-generation social network around the website Example.com, which offers a very powerful yet simple tool based on complex algorithms which had required years of development. The first round of financing brought together friends and business angels, who contributed €0.6m.

The Cable
by Gillian Cookson
Published 19 Sep 2012

The idea was that a British company would attract a wider pool of investors, and deal more effectively with governments and cable-makers. The focus of the enterprise thus shifted decisively to London. The new company received an enthusiastic endorsement from The Times, whose leader writer had the utmost faith both in the directors and in the engineers involved: It is not our custom to come forward as the advocates of joint-stock companies, but surely this project constitutes an exception. The interests of this nation and of the civilised world are so closely bound up with its success that we feel justified in recommending it to the notice of our readers. It seemed to The Times that the scheme could not fail: ‘The enterprise must be badly carried out indeed if the revenue … is not sufficient to pay a handsome interest upon the outlay.’

Empire: What Ruling the World Did to the British
by Jeremy Paxman
Published 6 Oct 2011

The Irish were culturally inferior to the English, and, he advised his son as he left for Ulster, the English should follow the models of Rome, Carthage and Venice. The principles of colonization in Ireland were applied in North America, too. Many of the financial mechanisms – the creation of joint-stock companies, for example – were similar. Attitudes towards the indigenous peoples also echoed: like the Irish, native Americans were considered lazy, unsophisticated and feckless – adjectives which the British used of natives in plenty of later colonies. But these settlements in the Americas were quite unlike most of the later colonies in Africa or the South Seas.

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I: The Origins of Empire, British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford and New York, 1998) ____, ‘To Establish a Common Wealthe: Captain John Smith as New World Colonist’, Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 96 (1988) Carlos, Ann M. and Stephen Nicholas, ‘ “Giants of an Earlier Capitalism”: The Chartered Trading Companies as Modern Multinationals’, Business History Review 62 (1988) ____, ‘Theory and History: Seventeenth-Century Joint-Stock Chartered Trading Companies’, Journal of Economic History 56 (1996) Cassell, John, John Frederick Smith and William Howitt, Cassell’s Illustrated History of England, 9 vols. (London, 1906) Chamberlain, Joseph, Mr Chamberlain’s Speeches, ed. Charles W. Boyd, 2 vols. (London, 1914) Chatterton, Edward Keble, Britain’s Record: What She Has Done for the World (London, 1911) Chaudhuri, K., The English East India Company: The Study of an Early Joint Stock Company, 1600–1640 (London, 1965) Chaudhuri, Sashi Bhusan, English Historical Writings on the Indian Mutiny (Calcutta, 1979) Chen, Jeng-Guo S., ‘Gendering India: Effeminacy and the Scottish Enlightenment’s Debates over Virtue and Luxury’, Eighteenth Century 51 (2010) Chesterton, G. K., The New Jerusalem (London 1920) Chitty, Susan, Playing the Game: A Biography of Sir Henry Newbolt (London, 1997) Churchill, Winston, Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat: Winston Churchill’s Famous Speeches, ed.

The Innovation Illusion: How So Little Is Created by So Many Working So Hard
by Fredrik Erixon and Bjorn Weigel
Published 3 Oct 2016

To think that companies should work for shareholders, he argued, “one must imagine that a man of vigorous, lusty and reassuringly heterosexual inclination eschews the lovely and available women by whom he is intimately surrounded in order to maximize the opportunities of other men whose existence he knows of only by hearsay.”39 Galbraith broadly got it right – even if he was ahead of his time, writing before others had coined the principal–agent theory. His flair for colorful expressions caught the imagination of people, but there were others before him who had touched upon the same type of conflict inside joint-stock companies. Adam Smith, for instance, tendered the same view in his classic tome The Wealth of Nations, where he made the point that, “being the managers rather of other people’s money than of their own, it cannot well be expected that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which the partners in a private copartnery frequently watch over their own.”40 The OECD has also offered pointed skepticism about what happens in firms with highly diffused and intermediated ownership.

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Strangelove character (i) driverless vehicles (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) drones, and regulation (i) Drucker, Peter (i), (ii) drugs see pharmaceutical sector dual class stock structures (i) Dutch disease (i) Dutch tulip mania (i) dynamism see discriminate dynamism theory; economic dynamism East Asia, trade and value chains (i) Ebenezer Scrooge character (i) eccentricity (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) see also culture of individualism; dissent economic dynamism and capitalism (i), (ii), (iii) and innovation (i), (ii), (iii) and market contestability (i) economic growth compound growth (i) and productivity (i), (ii) and regulatory complexity/uncertainty (i) see also GDP (gross domestic product) Economic Policy Institute (Washington, DC) (i) The Economist on global corporations (i) on new technology and social dislocation (i) on pensioners vs. working-age households incomes (i) “Planet of the Phones” (i) on share buybacks (i) economy “bazaar economy” (Hans-Werner Sinn) (i) data economy (i) knowledge-based economy (i) “new economy” (i) and technology (i), (ii), (iii) see also economic dynamism; economic growth; financial economy; GDP (gross domestic product) EFAMA, on asset management industry (i) Einstein, Albert (i), (ii) electronic devices (i) electronic wallets (i) embedded liberalism (i) emerging markets (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) employment protection legislation (i) see also labor; unemployment Energy Policy and Conservation Act (EPCA, US) (i) energy sector and antitrust laws (i) and innovation (i) and regulation (i), (ii) renewable/green energy: and regulation in Europe (i), (ii); and sunk costs (i) Engels, Friedrich, Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels) (i), (ii) Enlightenment (i), (ii) Enron (i) entrepreneurs vs. bureaucrats (i), (ii) vs. managerialists (i) and passion vs. market complexity (i), (ii) Schumpeter on (i) tech entrepreneurs (i) see also entrepreneurship entrepreneurship aging trend (i), (ii) and capitalism (i), (ii) and dual class stock structures (i) and equity financing (i) and globalization (i), (ii) and innovation (i), (ii) and organizational diversification (i) vs. planning machines (i), (ii) and precautionary regulations (i) and size of firms (i) and strategy (i) and uncertainty (i) see also culture of experimentation; culture of individualism; entrepreneurs; start-ups equity vs. debt funding (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii) and institutional investors (i) and retirement savings (i), (ii) Ericsson (i), (ii) Ericsson, John (i) Europe asset management industry (i) big firms’ relative importance (i) capital expenditure (capex) (i), (ii)n39 corporate renewal levels (i) corporate savings (i) debt vs. equity financing (i) energy sector and antitrust laws (i) German-Central European supply chain (i) higher- vs. lower-income countries (i) labor, and tax (i) labor markets: low rates of flexibility (i); and lower productivity (i) mergers and acquisitions (i) pensions (i) productivity (i), (ii), (iii); total factor productivity (TFP) growth (i) R&D spending (i), (ii) regulation: compliance officers and Basel III (i); deregulation trend (i); index of regulatory freedom (i), (ii); index of regulatory trade barriers (i), (ii); medical devices (i); occupational/professional standards (i); technological platforms (i) services and globalization (i) trade: and big business (i); index of regulatory trade barriers (i), (ii); and value chains (i) see also eurozone; European Union European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) (i) European Union biofuels regulations (i) cadmium exemption issue (i), (ii) capitalist ownership and dual class stocks (i) chemicals regulations (i), (ii) exports to China (i) financial regulations (i), (ii); banks and Basel III rules (i), (ii) genetically modified organisms (GMOs) regulations (i), (ii), (iii) GM potato regulations (i) Leave campaign and older generation (UK) (i) nanotechnology regulations (i), (ii) precautionary principle (i) R&D scoreboards (i), (ii) Single Market (i) see also eurozone; Europe eurozone Germany and “sick man of the euro” label (i) pensions (i) see also Europe; European Union experimentation, culture of (i), (ii) see also entrepreneurs; entrepreneurship external capital markets (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) Fabian Society (i) Facebook (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) failure failing companies and planning (i) formula of failure (i) and innovation process (i) Fairchild Semiconductor (i) FDI (foreign direct investment) (i), (ii), (iii) Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (i) Federal Express (FedEx) (i), (ii) Feldstein, Martin (i) Fernald, John (i) fiduciary duties and laws (i) financial capitalism (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) see also financial economy financial crisis (2007) and aspirations (i) and financial regulations (i), (ii), (iii) and globalist worldview (i) and rich people vs. capitalists issue (i) and sovereign wealth funds (i) and stock markets (i) and Wall Street (i), (ii) see also Great Recession financial economy and gray capitalism (i), (ii), (iii) vs. real economy (i), (ii), (iii) financial institutions and financial regulations (i), (ii) and globalization (i) SIFIs (systemically important financial institutions) (i) see also banks financial regulations (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) financial sector growth of and productivity (i) financial services, and globalization (i) financial skills, vs. business-building skills (i) Financial Times on compliance officers (i) on French ban on Mercedes-Benz cars (i) Fink, Lawrence (i) Finland dependence on larger enterprises (i) Nokia story (i) firm boundaries and competition (i), (ii) and corporate managerialism (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii) and globalization (i) and innovation (i), (ii), (iii) and market concentration (i) and multinationals (i), (ii) and pharmaceutical sector (i) and R&D (i), (ii) and specialization (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) see also firms firms entry-and-exit rates (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) high-growth firms (i) home-market firms vs. multinationals (i) interfirm vs. intrafirm trade (i) joint-stock companies (i), (ii) as logistics hubs (i), (ii) role of in the economy (i) start-ups (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) unicorns (i) see also big firms; corporate size; firm boundaries; multinational (global) companies first-mover advantage (i) Food and Drug Administration (FDA, US) (i), (ii), (iii) food retailing, and globalization (i) Ford, Henry (i), (ii) Ford, Martin, The Rise of the Robots (i), (ii) foreign direct investment (FDI) (i), (ii), (iii) Fortune 500 companies (i) Foster, George (i) Foxconn (i) France ban on Mercedes-Benz cars (i) CAC 40 index (i) corporate renewal levels (i) dependence on larger enterprises (i) dirigisme (i) exports to China (i) and globalization (i) productivity, decline in and labor market rules (i) profit margins (i) public debt (i) R&D spending (i) regulation: index of regulatory freedom (i), (ii); index of regulatory trade barriers (i), (ii); medical devices (i); taxi services (i) trade: and big business (i); index of regulatory trade barriers (i), (ii) Fraser Institute, index of regulatory freedom (i), (ii) free-market capitalism (i) free speech, and academia (i) freedom (i), (ii), (iii) see also culture of individualism; dissent; eccentricity French Mississippi finance bubble (i) Frey, Carl Benedikt (i) Friedman, Milton (i) Fukuyama, Francis, The End of History and the Last Man (i) future, the (and how to prevent it) capitalist decline and pessimism (i) from corporate globalism to global corporatism (i) rise of regulatory uncertainty (i) “silver tsunami” for cash and pensions (i) state of Western economies and future imperfect (i) suggested steps to prevent the future: agency and economic history (i); boosting market contestability (i); nurturing culture of dissent and eccentricity (i); severing gray capital–corporate ownership link (i) Future Perfect, A (Micklethwait and Wooldridge) (i) G7 (Group of Seven) countries, labour productivity (i), (ii) Galbraith, John Kenneth, The New Industrial State (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi) Gallup, job satisfaction survey (i) Galston, William (i) Gates, Bill (i) GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) (i) see also World Trade Organization (WTO) GDP (gross domestic product) and business investment (i), (ii), (iii) China’s (2014) (i), (ii) declining trend (i), (ii) and financial sector growth (i) GDP statistics issues (i) and global trade (i) and globalization (i) ICT hardware investment as share of (i), (ii) labor’s share of (i) and pensions (i) and R&D spending (i), (ii) and robots (i) Gekko character (Wall Street movie) (i) General Electric (GE) (i), (ii) generations boomer (or baby boomer) generation (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) The Clash of Generations (Kotlikoff and Burns) (i) EU Leave campaign and older generation (UK) (i) and income inequality (i) technology-frustrated generation (i) genetically modified (GM) potato, and EU regulation (i) genetically modified organisms (GMOs), and EU regulation (i), (ii), (iii) geographical zoning laws (i) Germany aging population (i) business investment declining trend (i) car industry: French ban on Mercedes-Benz cars (i); and value chains (i) corporate profit margins (1990–2014) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) corporate renewal levels (i) DAX 30 index (i) dependence on larger enterprises (i) exports to China (i) German-Central European supply chain (i), (ii) and globalization (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) income inequality and generations (i) pensions (i) productivity: decline in and labor market rules (i); and wages (i) regulation: bureaucracy brake (i); deregulated vs. regulated sectors 148–9 index of regulatory freedom 151, (i); index of regulatory trade barriers 152, (i); medical devices (i); taxi services (i) “sick man of the euro” (i) trade: index of regulatory trade barriers (i), (ii); and value chains (i) Gerschenkron, Alexander (i), (ii) Gerstner, Louis (i) Ghosh, Shikhar (i) Gilder, George (i) global firms see multinational (global) companies global trade and containerization (i) expansion phases (i) and globalization, 2nd phase of (i) growth statistics (i) and market contestability (i) and multinationals (i), (ii) regionalization of Asia’s trade growth (i) regulatory trade barriers (i), (ii), (iii) see also mercantilism; protectionism; trade “Globalise or Fossilise!”

American Kleptocracy: How the U.S. Created the World's Greatest Money Laundering Scheme in History
by Casey Michel
Published 23 Nov 2021

“As Biden-Trump, Ukraine Debate Rages, Related Court Cases Land in Delaware,” Delaware Online, 2 October 2019, https://www.delawareonline.com/story/money/business/2019/10/02/biden-trump-ukraine-debate-rages-related-court-cases-land-delaware/2374838001/. 14. Caryer, “Steal Country: The Case of Ukrainian Money Laundering in Northeast Ohio.” 15. “Vadim M. Shulman; Bracha Foundation v. Igor Valeryevich Kolomoisky; Gennadiy Borisovich Bogolyubov; Mordechai Korf; Panikos Symeou; Joint Stock Company Commercial Bank PrivatBank; Warren Steel Holdings, LLC; Optima Acquisitions, LLC; Optima Group, LLC; Optima International; CC Metals and Alloys, LLC; Felman Trading, Inc.; Optima Fixed Income, LLC; Optima Ventures, LLC; Querella Holdings, Ltd.; Optima International of Miami, Inc.; 5251 36th Street, LLC; Georgian American Alloys, Inc.; Halliwel Assets, Inc.,” https://www.scribd.com/document/456427613/Vadim-Shulman-August-2019-Delaware-Lawsuit-Against-Ihor-Kolomoisky. 16. 

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.; Halliwel Assets, Inc.,” https://www.scribd.com/document/456427613/Vadim-Shulman-August-2019-Delaware-Lawsuit-Against-Ihor-Kolomoisky. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. Caryer, “Steal Country: The Case of Ukrainian Money Laundering in Northeast Ohio.” 19. “Vadim M. Shulman; Bracha Foundation v. Igor Valeryevich Kolomoisky; Gennadiy Borisovich Bogolyubov; Mordechai Korf; Panikos Symeou; Joint Stock Company Commercial Bank PrivatBank; Warren Steel Holdings, LLC; Optima Acquisitions, LLC; Optima Group, LLC; Optima International; CC Metals and Alloys, LLC; Felman Trading, Inc.; Optima Fixed Income, LLC; Optima Ventures, LLC; Querella Holdings, Ltd.; Optima International of Miami, Inc.; 5251 36th Street, LLC; Georgian American Alloys, Inc.; Halliwel Assets, Inc.” 20. 

The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict From 1500 to 2000
by Paul Kennedy
Published 15 Jan 1989

In addition, the steady increases in European commerce, especially in essential products such as cloth and naval stores, together with the tendency for the seasonal fairs of medieval Europe to be replaced by permanent centers of exchange, led to a growing regularity and predictability of financial settlements and thus to the greater use of bills of exchange and notes of credit. In Amsterdam especially, but also in London, Lyons, Frankfurt, and other cities, there arose a whole cluster of moneylenders, commodity dealers, goldsmiths (who often dealt in loans), bill merchants, and jobbers in the shares of the growing number of joint-stock companies. Adopting banking practices which were already in evidence in Renaissance Italy, these individuals and financial houses steadily created a structure of national and international credit to underpin the early modern world economy. Nevertheless, by far the largest and most sustained boost to the “financial revolution” in Europe was given by war.

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Yet however natural all this may appear to later eyes, it is important to stress that the success of such a system depended on two critical factors: reasonably efficient machinery for raising loans, and the maintenance of a government’s “credit” in the financial markets. In both respects, the United Provinces led the way—not surprisingly, since the merchants there were part of the government and desired to see the affairs of state managed according to the same principles of financial rectitude as applied in, say, a joint-stock company. It was therefore appropriate that the States General of the Netherlands, which efficiently and regularly raised the taxes to cover governmental expenditures, was able to set interest rates very low, thus keeping down debt repayments. This system, superbly reinforced by the many financial activities of the city of Amsterdam, soon gave the United Provinces an international reputation for clearing bills, exchanging currency, and providing credit, which naturally created a structure—and an atmosphere—within which long-term funded state debt could be regarded as perfectly normal.

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See also the two general surveys by Wernham, Before the Armada: The Growth of English Foreign Policy 1485–1588 (London, 1966), and The Making of Elizabethan Foreign Policy 1588–1603 (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London, 1980). 68. For these figures, see F. C. Dietz, “The Exchequer in Elizabeth’s Reign,” Smith College Studies in History, vol. 8, no. 2 (January 1923); idem, English Public Finance 1485–1641, vol. 2, 1558–1641, chs. 2–5; W. R. Scott, The Constitution and Finance of English, Scottish and Irish Joint Stock Companies to 1720, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1912), vol. 3, pp. 485–544. 69. Loades, Politics and the Nation, pp. 301ff; R. Ashton, The Crown and the Money Market 1603–1640 (Oxford, 1960), passim, espec. chs. 2 and 7. 70. R. Ashton, The English Civil War: Conservatism and Revolution 1603–1649 (London, 1979); C.

Debt: The First 5,000 Years
by David Graeber
Published 1 Jan 2010

Some even talk about “monastic capitalism.”171 Still, the ground was only really prepared for capitalism in the familiar sense of the term when the merchants began to organize themselves into eternal bodies as a way to win monopolies, legal or de facto, and avoid the ordinary risks of trade. An excellent case in point was the Society of Merchant Adventurers, charted by King Henry IV in London in 1407, who, despite the romantic-sounding name, were mainly in the business of buying up British woolens and selling them in the Flanders fairs. They were not a modern joint-stock company, but a rather old-fashioned Medieval merchant guild, but they provided a structure whereby older, more substantial merchants could simply provide loans to younger ones, and they managed to secure enough of an exclusive control over the woolen trade that substantial profits were pretty much guaranteed.172 When such companies began to engage in armed ventures overseas, though, a new era of human history might be said to have begun.

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Its collapse was followed the next year by the collapse of John Law’s famous Banque Royale in France, another central-bank experiment—similar to the Bank of England—that grew so quickly that within a few years it had absorbed all the French colonial trading companies, and most of the French crown’s own debt, issuing its own paper money, before crashing into nothingness in 1721, sending its chief executive fleeing for his life. In each case, this was followed by legislation: in Britain, to forbid the creation of new joint-stock companies (other than for the building of turnpikes and canals), and in France, to eliminate paper money based in government debt entirely. It’s unsurprising, then, that Newtonian economics (if we may call it that)—the assumption that one cannot simply create money, or even, really, tinker with it—came to be accepted by almost everyone.

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Actually, the South Sea Company itself (which grew so large that at one point it bought up most of the national debt) was just the anchor for what happened, a giant corporation, its stock constantly ballooning in value, that seemed, to put it in contemporary terms, “too big to fail.” It soon became the model for hundreds of new start-up offerings: Innumerable joint-stock companies started up everywhere. They soon received the name Bubbles, the most appropriate imagination could devise … Some of them lasted a week or a fortnight, and were no more heard of, while others could not even live out that span of existence. Every evening produced new schemes, and every morning new projects.

The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous
by Joseph Henrich
Published 7 Sep 2020

This accelerated during the latter half of the second millennium, when the most prosperous states were those that “figured out” (consciously or not) how to foster and control healthy competition among voluntary associations. In the economic sphere, guilds slowly gave way to a variety of partnerships and eventually to joint stock companies. In most cases, the entrepreneurs and new associations were well ahead of governments and lawmakers in trying out new ways of sharing risk, transferring ownership, and limiting liability. Stock exchanges, for example, began to take shape in Amsterdam, Antwerp, and London in the 16th and 17th centuries.

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The gradual diffusion of self-control and patience seems to have spread outward from the urban middle class—the merchants, artisans, professionals, and civil officials—to the laborers and elites. This can be seen in the fact that it was the urban middle class, not the much richer aristocrats, who bought the first government bonds and invested in the early joint stock companies. In the latter half of the 18th century, for example, the stockholders of the East India Company were primarily bankers, government officials, retailers, military personnel, clergymen, and merchants.34 Be Yourself: The Origins of WEIRD Personalities The patterns and dimensions of personality observed among Americans and other WEIRD people are largely believed by psychologists to represent the human pattern.

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If it was affluence that drove a WEIRDer psychology, then it should have been Europe’s aristocrats who fueled the entrepreneurial engines of the Industrial Revolution. Instead, as we have seen, it was the urbanizing individualists, artisans, and clergy in the middle class who invested in the first joint stock companies and invented the printing press, steam engine, and spinning mule. The elites, by contrast, just got themselves repeatedly into debt by spending on personal extravagance instead of investing their wealth and saving for the long run. This is precisely the opposite of what an affluence-driven approach predicts.12 At the other end of the affluence spectrum, we again see substantial psychological variation.

Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order
by Noam Chomsky
Published 6 Sep 2011

When the corporatization of the state capitalist societies took place a century ago, in part in reaction to massive market failures, conservatives—a breed that now scarcely exists—objected to this attack on the fundamental principles of classical liberalism. And rightly so. One may recall Adam Smith’s critique of the “joint stock companies” of his day, particularly if management is granted a degree of independence; and his attitude toward the inherent corruption of private power, probably a “conspiracy against the public” when businessmen meet for lunch, in his acid view, let alone when they form collectivist legal entities and alliances among them, with extraordinary rights granted, backed, and enhanced by state power.

Blood, Iron, and Gold: How the Railways Transformed the World
by Christian Wolmar
Published 1 Mar 2010

Just as in Germany and before that in Great Britain, once the railways had reached a critical mass and began to prove their worth, a railway mania developed with a rush to build lines. There had already been much speculation in railway shares as schemes began to be promoted in the early 1840s and there were several other waves of speculation, especially as the absence of clear legislation on joint-stock companies allowed all kinds of fraudulent practices to thrive. In Lombardy, the drive to build more railways was led by the Rothschild company, which obtained the concession to build two major railway systems: the completion of the main east–west artery from Trieste across to the Piedmont border beyond Milan, and the construction of the Central Italy line heading south from Piacenza to Bologna in the Papal States and Pistoia in Tuscany, a total of more than 650 miles.

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Dalhousie’s ‘minute’ had expressed a vision for a railway that was both strategically important but also profitable, stating that once opened, these railways ‘will, as a commercial undertaking, offer a fair remunerative return on the money which has been expended in their construction’. 17 That was an ambitious aim which he realized would only be possible with initial state aid. Therefore, most Indian railways were built through an arrangement combining the public and private sectors. Conventional joint stock companies, based in the UK, would raise capital, mostly from British investors, to fund the construction but, to ensure that the money could be raised, the government of India guaranteed a healthy 5 per cent rate of return. This was essential as it took many years, sometimes decades, for the companies to achieve profitability and the government had to be the financial backstop to pick up the shortfall.

The End of Alchemy: Money, Banking and the Future of the Global Economy
by Mervyn King
Published 3 Mar 2016

The Economist magazine backed the legislation, citing the difficult position in which many innocent shareholders found themselves: ‘an examination of the share lists of most of our banks exhibits a very large – almost an incredible – number of spinsters and widows, a considerable sprinkling of Clergymen and Dissenting Ministers, professional men, and others, whose occupations do not appear likely to have enabled them to accumulate much wealth … Out of the whole number more than one third are women.’30 Admirable though such diversity might seem today, it was seen then as evidence of the vulnerability of small investors. Spinsters and widows, let alone dissenting ministers, could not be expected to monitor and control bank executives. By August 1879, with commendable speed, the Banking and Joint Stock Companies Act, covering little more than three pages, had been passed by Parliament, requiring the publication of audited accounts and permitting banks to take advantage of limited liability. It seems impossible to imagine now that unlimited liability could be restored. Yet limited liability in a bank with only a small margin of equity capital means that the owners have incentives to take risks – to ‘gamble for resurrection’ – because they receive all of the profits when the gamble pays off, whereas their downside exposure is limited.

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Morgan, 92, 95, 136–7, 161, 278 Kahn, Richard, 12, 292–3 Kahneman, Daniel, 132 Kay, John, 262 Keynes, John Maynard, 15, 20, 76, 100–1, 131, 233–4, 262; description of stock market, 152–3; on economists, 158, 289; and First World War, 193, 195–6, 198–9; The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), 78, 292, 293, 294–5, 298; and WW1 reparations, 341, 343, 345 Keynesian economics, 5, 20, 45, 292–3, 306–7, 308–9, 317–18, 325, 326; and coordination problem, 295–302, 315–16, 332; and monetary policy, 78, 181, 182, 298–302; and neoclassical economics, 293–4, 302–3; and paradox of policy, 48, 326, 328, 333, 357; and recessions, 315–16, 327; role of sentiment and expectations, 293–7, 300, 301, 309; short-term stimulus during crisis, 39, 41, 48, 118–19, 326, 328, 356; and wages, 297–8, 300; waning influence of, 12, 318 Kiyotaki, Nobuhiro, 51, 82 Knickerbocker Trust Company, 196 Knight, Frank, 126–7, 131, 135, 145, 262 Kotlikoff, Laurence, 262 Krugman, Paul, 44, 302 Kumhof, Michael, 262 labour markets, 27, 29, 38, 327, 354, 355; and currency unions, 213, 225, 237; and Keynesian policies, 297–8, 300; and ‘rational’ expectations concept, 302–3; reforms, 41, 318, 363; ‘rigidities’ in wage adjustment, 167, 304 Lambert, Paul, 120 Latin America, 30, 339, 350 Latin Monetary Union (LMU), 216, 218 Lausanne conference (1932), 341 League of Nations, 219 Leeson, Nick, 137 legal system, 17, 81 Leggett, William, 250, 270–1 Lehman Brothers, 36–7, 89, 98, 113, 279, 323 Leibniz, Gottfried, 123 Leigh Pemberton, Robin, 176 Lenin, V.I., 163–4 leverage ratios (total assets to equity capital), 24, 25, 33, 36, 95–6, 110–11, 257, 276, 280, 307, 323; as regulatory heuristic, 139–40, 259 limited liability status, 98, 107–9, 254–5 liquidity, 119, 149, 163, 202–3, 208, 259, 269–81; and bank balance sheets, 97, 255, 257–8, 259; ‘Chicago Plan’ (1933), 261–4, 268, 273, 274, 277–8; coverage ratio, 256, 259; crisis (2007-8), 35–8, 64–5, 76, 110; demand for during crises, 65–6, 76–7, 86, 106, 110, 148, 182, 187–92, 194, 201–7, 253–4, 367; illusion of, 149–55, 253–4; liquidity regulation, 163, 187–92, 208, 259, 272, 276; ‘liquidity trap’ theory, 298–302; and money, 64–6, 76, 85, 86, 106, 119, 287 Lloyd George, David, 193, 195, 197–8, 199–200, 368 Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), 120–1, 125 Lord’s cricket ground, 92 Lucas, Robert, 303 Macdonald, James, 350 Madoff, Bernie, 101 Magna Carta (1215), 286 Malthus, Thomas, 128 Mansfield, Lord, 260 market economy, 4–5, 10, 13, 17, 42–3, 50, 353–7; hypothetical grand auction, 79–81, 83, 128–9, 144, 149, 295, 297–8, 315; linking of present and future in, 11–12, 23, 46, 84–5, 325–6, 367; Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’, 79–80 ‘marking to market’ valuing, 147 Marshall, Alfred, 79 Martin, McChesney, 166 Marx, Karl, 19, 365 mathematics, 7, 12, 16, 93–4, 99–100, 121, 130, 143, 153, 293, 310 Max Planck Institute, Berlin, 123 McAdoo, William, 195, 196–7, 200, 201 McCain, John, 157 McCulloch, Hugh, 88 Meriwether, John, 121 Merkel, Angela, 224, 227 Merton, Robert, 120–1 Mesopotamia, 55–6 Mexico, 100, 367 Middle East, 56, 337 Mill, John Stuart, 214 Minsky, Hyman, 262, 306–8, 323 Mitchell, Andrea, 157 monetarism, 78 monetary policy, 45, 78, 167–72, 180–6, 247, 288, 315, 327–8, 352; and aggregate demand, 30, 41–9, 167, 184–5, 212–13, 221, 229–31, 291–2, 294–302, 319–24, 329–32, 335, 358; alternative strategies for pre-crisis period, 328–33; exhaustion of, 48, 347–8; and fiscal policy, 184, 347–8; and Great Depression (early 1930s), 76; and Great Stability, 22, 25, 30, 46–7, 315, 328–33; ‘helicopter drops’, 283, 358; intervention in asset markets, 172, 173–5, 265; and Keynes, 78, 298–302; and Diego Maradona, 176–7; and market expectations, 176–8; in post-crisis period, 48, 49, 168–9, 183–4, 291, 319–24, 335, 356, 358; short-term stimulus during crisis, 39, 41, 118–19, 182–3 monetary unions, 212–18, 238–49; see also European Monetary Union (EMU, euro area) money: acceptability criterion, 53, 54, 59–60, 61, 63, 64–6; and American colonists, 57–8, 68; central bank creation of, 65–6, 70–1, 160–1; commodities as, 55, 58, 68, 286–7; counterfeiting, 56, 57; definitions of, 53; and economists, 78–80; electronic transfers, 53, 281, 282–5; first paper banknotes, 57–8, 74; future of, 281–7; gold versus paper debate, 71–7; government monopoly on banknote issue, 62, 160; government printing of, 70, 85–6, 163–4, 358; history of, 4–5, 18–19, 54–8, 64, 67–8, 71–7, 160–1, 163–4, 187–202; history of (alternative view), 59–63; in Iraq (1991-2003), 218, 238–42; and liquidity, 64–6, 76, 85, 86, 106, 119, 287; ‘monetary base’, 291; and nation state, 211–12, 214, 215–18, 238–49; quantity theory of, 163; role and function of, 4–5, 8, 51–4, 57, 58–63, 65–6, 83–6, 281; role of precious metals, 55–7, 58, 59, 60, 62, 66, 71–7, 86, 216; and Scottish independence referendum (2014), 243–5, 248; share of bank deposits in total money, 62–3; single unit of account, 285–7; St Paul’s Epistle to Timothy, 51, 52; stability criterion, 53, 54, 60, 61, 63, 66–71, 163; standardised coinage, 56; and trust, 8, 55, 57, 66–71, 82–3, 155; UK Currency and Bank Notes Act (1914), 198 money market funds, 112–13 money supply, 62–3, 76, 77, 78, 85–7, 162, 327; and central banks, 63, 65–6, 76, 86–7, 162, 163, 180–4, 192, 196–201; ‘monetary base’, 65–6 Monti, Mario, 225 Moore, John, 51, 82 moral hazard, 192, 268, 274–5, 344 Morgan, John Pierpont (J.P.), 161, 196 Morgan Stanley, 98 mortgage-backed securities (MBS), 35, 64, 99, 113, 142, 143, 144, 150 mortgages, 32, 138, 139, 173, 174, 258, 335–6; sub-prime, 35–6, 99, 100, 143 Mundell, Robert, 212 Muth, John, 303 mutual funds, 102, 112–13 Nakamoto, Satoshi, 282 Napoleon Bonaparte, 28, 68, 159 nation states, 211–14, 215–18, 238–49; post-war expansion in numbers of, 214–15; sovereignty and economic integration, 212–13, 348–9, 351 neoclassical economics, 293, 294, 302–3, 304, 306; ‘New Keynesian’ models, 305–6; ‘optimising’ model, 129–31, 132, 134, 138, 309, 311; ‘rational’ expectations concept, 303–5, 310, 314; stability heuristic, 312–14, 319–21, 323, 331, 332 Netherlands, 49, 230 New Zealand, 92, 167, 170, 179, 348 Nixon, President Richard, 73 Norman, Montagu, 13 North Korea, 68 Northern Rock, 107, 139, 205 Obama, Barack, 334 oil market, 21, 295–6, 306, 318, 362 Olympic Games, London (2012), 227 O’Neill, Onora, 81 Overend, Gurney & Co, 189–90, 191 Panama, 246, 287 Pascal, Blaise, 123 Paulson, Hank, 37–8 pawnbroker for all seasons (PFAS) approach, 270–81, 288, 368 pension funds, 32, 103, 112, 183, 204 Pitt, William (the Younger), 75 Portugal, 221, 222, 224, 229, 363–4 Prince, Chuck, 90 prisoner’s dilemma, 25, 81, 89–90, 255, 302, 332, 333, 368; central banks and interest rates, 335; definition of, 9–10; escaping, 347–8, 352–3 privatisation, 41 probability theory, 121, 123, 302–3, 311 productivity (output per head), 17–19, 42, 318–19, 354, 359–62; see also economic growth Prudential Regulation Authority, UK, 260 quantitative easing (QE), 47–8, 182–3, 270, 275, 358 radical uncertainty, 9, 11–12, 126–31, 247, 257–9, 304–5, 306, 308; and Arrow–Debreu grand auction, 80, 83, 128–9, 144, 149, 295, 297–8, 315; and banking sector, 42–3, 106–10, 125, 136–40, 191, 257–8, 264–5, 269, 281; and central banks, 166–7, 171, 179, 180, 259; and coordination problem, 295–303, 310, 315–16, 332, 333; coping behaviour, 130–40, 150, 153–5, 170, 270–1, 288, 310–15, 316–17, 330–1, 352–3; and financial markets, 140, 143, 144–5, 149–55; heuristics, 130–1, 134–40, 170, 208, 278, 310–11, 312–14, 319–21, 323, 331, 332; illusion of certainty, 121–6; illusion of liquidity, 149–55; and Keynes, 293–302; and money, 42–3, 83–6; and narrative, 136, 137, 150, 153, 257, 310–16, 319–21, 323–4, 328, 332–3, 356, 357; narrative revision downturns, 328, 332–3, 356, 357, 358–9, 364; neoclassical rejection of, 302; as precondition of capitalist economy, 145; and ‘rational’ expectations concept, 304–5, 310, 314; and risk weights, 138–9, 258–9, 277; role of expectations, 310–17, 323, 331–3 rating agencies, 146, 224 ‘rational’ expectations concept, 302–4, 310, 314 regulation, 10, 17, 62, 112–13, 114, 137–9, 255–61, 280; Basel Committee, 255, 276; deregulation from late 1970s, 22, 23–4, 98, 174, 255; and extreme complexity, 259–61, 275–6; lax, 6, 33; PFAS approach, 270–81, 288; post-crisis reforms, 40–1, 255–6, 257–61; reintroduction of ring-fencing, 256, 264 Reinhart, Carmen M., 308 resolution mechanisms, 256, 279 Richardson, Gordon, 176 risk, 84, 121–2, 123, 124, 126–9, 143, 254; implicit taxpayer subsidy for, 191–2, 207, 254–5; maturity and risk transformation, 104–15, 117–19, 250–1, 254–5; ‘optimising’ model, 129–31, 132, 134, 138, 309, 311; risk premium, 32–3, 115, 183; risk weights, 138–9, 258–9, 277 Robinson, Joan, 12, 292–3 Rodrik, Dani, 348 Rogoff, Kenneth, 44, 308 Rome, ancient, 59, 164, 216 Roosevelt, President Franklin, 91, 316 Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), 37, 89, 118, 206, 243 Russia, 121, 159 saving, 101–2, 155, 308–17, 362–3; in emerging economies, 22–3, 27–8, 29, 30; ‘paradox of thrift’, 297, 326; ‘savings glut’, 28, 29, 30, 46, 319, 325; as source of future demand, 11, 46, 84–5, 185, 325–6, 356 Schacht, Hjalmar, 341–2, 343 Schäuble, Wolfgang, 211 Scholes, Myron, 120–1 Schumpeter, Joseph, 152 Schwartz, Anna, 192, 328 Scotland, 218, 243–7, 248 Second World War, 20, 21, 219, 242, 317, 342 secular stagnation theory, 44, 291–2, 355 Seneca, 123–4 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, 124 ‘shadow’ banking system, 107, 112–14, 256, 262, 274 Shiller, Robert, 151 Silber, William, 206 Simons, Henry, 262 Sims, Christopher, 79 Slovakia, 216 Smith, Adam, 17–18, 54–5, 79–80, 163 Smith, Ed, 124 sovereign debt (government bonds), 32, 65, 92, 138, 182–4, 196–7, 203, 258, 259, 338–40; bond yields, 29, 183–4, 224, 227, 228, 231, 299, 336; in euro area, 162, 190, 224, 226–31, 258, 338, 339–40, 342–4; framework for restructuring, 346–7; need for export surplus before payment, 339–40, 341–3; WW1 reparations, 340–2, 343, 345–6 Soviet Union, 27, 68, 216 Spain, 47, 93, 159, 216, 221, 222, 227–8, 229, 257–8, 355, 363–4 special purpose vehicles, 113–14 stock markets, 102, 125–6, 133, 151–4, 194, 195, 200, 347 Stresemann, Gustav, 219 Summers, Larry, 44 Sweden, 159, 166, 173, 179, 216–17, 279, 335 Swift, Jonathan, ‘Thoughts on Various Subjects’ (1703), 250, 290 Switzerland, 33, 70, 100, 118, 184, 216, 335 Syed, Matthew, 124 Taylor, John, 168 technological change, 83–4, 127, 129, 153–4, 281, 291, 354, 355, 365 Tequila crisis (1994), 367 Thaler, Richard, 132 Thornton, Henry, 188 Tobin, James, 262 trade surpluses and deficits, 33, 34, 46, 319, 321–2, 329, 352, 356, 364; in emerging economies, 27–8, 30, 329; in EMU, 222, 232–3, 236, 363–4; and exchange rates, 22–3; and interest rates, 23, 30, 46, 319–20; likely re-emergence of, 48–9 trading, financial, 3, 24, 64, 99–100, 257; bonuses, 99, 101, 117, 144, 147; erosion of ethical standards, 100–1, 288; ‘front-running’, 153–4, 284 Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), 361 Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), 361 Trichet, Jean-Claude, 225 trust, 10, 81–3, 106; and monetary unions, 220, 232, 237; and money, 8, 55, 57, 66–71, 82–3, 155 Tsipras, Alexis, 230, 231 Tuckett, Professor David, 133–4 Turner, Adair, 324 Tversky, Amos, 132 unemployment, 38, 292, 293, 294, 297–9, 302, 326–7, 329, 330; in euro area, 45, 226, 228, 229–30, 232, 234, 345; and inflation targeting, 168, 169; and interest rates, 169, 298–300; ‘stagflation’ (1970s), 5, 302–3, 318 United Kingdom: Acts of Union (1707), 215; alternative strategies for pre-crisis period, 328–32; Banking Act (2009), 40; Banking and Joint Stock Companies Act (1879), 109; Banking Reform Act (2013), 40; ‘Big Bang’ (1986), 23; City of Glasgow Bank failure (1878), 108–9; commercial property market, 47, 118; Currency and Bank Notes Act (1914), 198; Labour government (1964-70), 20; as monetary union, 215; need for export sector support, 357, 364; return to gold standard (1920s), 76; Scottish independence referendum (2014), 218, 243–5, 248; trade deficits, 30, 321, 322, 329, 364; tradition of national branch banking, 116; see also Bank of England United Nations, 214–15 United States: 1914 financial crisis, 192–201, 206; Aldrich-Vreeland Act (1908), 196, 206; Bureau of War Risk Insurance (1914), 200; Constitution, 286; Dodd-Frank Reform (2010), 40, 260; dollar and gold link, 73, 195, 200–1; dollar as world’s reserve currency, 25, 28, 34; ‘double liability’ (1865-1934), 107–8; ‘free banking’ era, 60–2, 77, 161; Glass-Steagall Act (1933), 23, 98, 260; gold reserves, 74, 77; Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (1999), 23, 98; history of money in, 57–8, 67, 68, 160–1, 187, 188, 212, 215; as monetary union, 212, 215, 234; need for export sector support, 357, 364; New York becomes world money centre, 194–5, 200–1; notes and coins in, 281; Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, 137, 206; trade deficits, 30, 34, 46, 49, 319, 321, 329, 364 Van Court’s Counterfeit Detector and Bank Note List, 61 Vietnam War, 5, 20, 73, 306 Viniar, David, 123 Volcker, Paul, 176, 288 Voltaire, 126 Wall Street Crash (1929), 347 Walpole, Horace, 369 Walras, Léon, 79 Washington, George, 286 Weatherstone, Sir Dennis, 136–7, 278 weights and measures, 212, 286, 287 Wheeler, Judge Thomas C., 162 wholesale funding, 97 Willetts, David, 83 Wilson, Brigadier-General Henry, 89 Wimbledon tennis championships, 142, 187–8 Wolf, Martin, 96, 262 World Bank, 21, 350 World Trade Organisation, 361 Yellen, Janet, 176, 287 Yugoslavia, break-up of, 216 Zimbabwe, 68, 69–70 ABOUT THE AUTHOR Mervyn King was Governor of the Bank of England from 2003 to 2013, and is currently Professor of Economics and Law at New York University and School Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics.

Fire and Steam: A New History of the Railways in Britain
by Christian Wolmar
Published 1 Mar 2009

They were spurred on by rivalry with each other, but despite their dominance their profitability waned as they struggled to pay for the improvements to their service. The London & North Western, for example, which for most of its thirty-year period under the chairmanship of Sir Richard Moon (who had replaced Mark Huish in 1861) had been the biggest joint stock company in the world, was now prepared to spend considerable sums to offer passengers what today would be known as a ‘more pleasant journey experience’. Moon had been a brilliant manager, developing the basic managerial concepts such as ‘executive responsibility’ first set out by Huish, but his very ethos – of providing the best possible service at minimum cost – meant that the company’s facilities were rather parsimonious.

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G., ref1 gramophone records, ref1 Grand Junction Railway, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7; amalgamation, ref8, ref9 Grangemouth, ref1, ref2 Granite City, ref1 Grantham, ref1; accident, ref2 Granville Express, ref1 Gravesend, ref1 Gravesend & Rochester Railway, ref1 Gray, Thomas, ref1, ref2 Grayling, Chris, ref1 Great Central Railway, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; creation of, ref5; and cooperation, ref6; publicity, ref7; fish services, ref8; and wartime, ref9, ref10; closure, ref11 Great Eastern Railway, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7; maps, ref8; and amalgamation, ref9, ref10; wine list, ref11 Great Exhibition, ref1, ref2 Great Heck accident, ref1 Great North of Scotland Railway, ref1 Great North Road, ref1 Great Northern Advertiser, ref1 Great Northern Cemetery, ref1 Great Northern Railway, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8; route to Scotland and railway races, ref9, ref10, ref11; costs, ref12; track length, ref13; topography, ref14; enters price war, ref15; and Midland Railway, ref16, ref17; introduces third class, ref18; locomotive confiscated, ref19; begins selling coal, ref20; and amalgamation, ref21, ref22 Great Western Magazine, ref1 Great Western Railway, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6; gauge, ref7, ref8, ref9; costs, ref10; speeds, ref11; and parliamentary trains, ref12; and royal travel, ref13; freight services, ref14; track length, ref15; time system, ref16; expansion, ref17; consolidation, ref18, ref19, ref20; and Welsh lines, ref21; and Irish services, ref22; treatment of poorer passengers, ref23; offers hunters’ tickets, ref24; financial difficulties, ref25; accidents, ref26, ref27; telegraph system, ref28; wages and bonuses, ref29, ref30; industrial relations, ref31, ref32, ref33; provident society, ref34; working hours, ref35; first corridor train, ref36; and railway races, ref37, ref38; modernization and improvements, ref39, ref40; and cooperation, ref41; publicity, ref42, ref43, ref44, ref45; loss-making services, ref46; and Helston line, ref47; compensation claim, ref48; and amalgamation, ref49, ref50, ref51; profitability, ref52, ref53, ref54; introduces warning system, ref55; livery, ref56, ref57; service improvements, ref58; hundredth anniversary, ref59; and wartime, ref60, ref61; workshops, ref62; and diesels, ref63 Greeks, ancient, ref1 Green, Chris, ref1 Greenwich, ref1 Greenwich Mean Time, ref1 Gresley, Nigel, ref1, ref2 Gretna Junction, ref1 Grey, Earl, ref1 Grimsby, ref1, ref2 ‘Grouse Traffic’, ref1 Guildford, ref1 Gunnislake, ref1 hackney cabs, ref1 Hackworth, Timothy, ref1, ref2, ref3 Halifax, ref1 Hall, Stanley, ref1 Hampshire, ref1 Hampton Court, ref1 Hardy, Thomas, ref1 Harford, Edward, ref1 Harrow, ref1; accident, ref2 Hartlepool, ref1 Harwich, ref1, ref2 Hastings, ref1, ref2, ref3 Hatfield, ref1; accident, ref2, ref3 Heath, Edward, ref1, ref2 Heathrow Express, ref1 Hedley, William, ref1 Helmsdale, ref1 Helston, ref1 Henry, Thomas, ref1 Henshaw, David, ref1, ref2, ref3 Herapath, John, ref1 Hereford, ref1, ref2 Hertfordshire, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Hetton Colliery, ref1 Hewitt, John, ref1 High Speed One, ref1, ref2 High Speed Train (HST), ref1, ref2, ref3 High Street Kensington station, ref1 High Wycombe, ref1 Highbridge, ref1 Highland Railway, ref1; wartime service, ref2, ref3 Highlands, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Hill, Rowland, ref1 Hitchin, ref1 Holborn Viaduct station, ref1 Holden, Michael, ref1 Holiday Haunts, ref1 holiday trains, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Holland, ref1, ref2 Holyhead, ref1, ref2 hooliganism, ref1 Hopton incline, ref1 Hornsey, ref1 horses, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8; on Swansea & Mumbles Railway, ref9; and railway gauge, ref10; and Stockton & Darlington Railway, ref11; and Liverpool & Manchester Railway, ref12, ref13; bolting, ref14, ref15; and trams, ref16; and railway amalgamation, ref17; under BR, ref18, ref19 hotels, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Hounslow, ref1 Household Words, ref1 housing, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Howson, Martha, ref1 Huddersfield, ref1 Hudson, George, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 Hughes, Henry, ref1 Huish, Captain Mark, ref1, ref2, ref3 Hull, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5; Royal Station Hotel, ref6; Paragon station, ref7, ref8 Hull & Barnsley Railway, ref1, ref2 Hull Trains, ref1 Hundred of Manhood & Selsey Tramway, ref1 Hunterston, ref1 Huskisson, William, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Hyde Park, ref1 Immingham, ref1 Imperial Airways, ref1 India, ref1, ref2, ref3 Ingleton, ref1 innkeepers, ref1 InterCity, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 InterCity ref1 trains, ref2 interlocking, ref1, ref2 International Exhibition, ref1, ref2 Invergarry & Fort Augustus branch line, ref1 Invergordon, ref1 Inverness, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Ireland, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6; first railways, ref7, ref8, ref9; potato famine, ref10, ref11; steamer services, ref12; railway network, ref13; railway gauge, ref14 Irish Mail, ref1, ref2, ref3 Irish Sea, ref1 Iron Times, ref1 Irwell, river, ref1, ref2 Isle of Wight, ref1, ref2 Italy, ref1 James, William, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Japan, ref1, ref2, ref3; bullet trains, ref4 Jellicoe Specials, ref1, ref2, ref3 Jessop, William, ref1, ref2 John O’Groats, ref1 joint stock companies, ref1 junctions, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; flat, ref5 Kelly, Phil, ref1 Kelvedon & Tollesbury Light Railway, ref1 Kemble, Fanny, ref1 Kent, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6; and wartime, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10 Kent & East Sussex Railway, ref1 Kentish Town accident, ref1, ref2 Kenyon & Leigh Railway, ref1 Kete, John, ref1 Kew, ref1 Killingworth Colliery, ref1 Kilsby tunnel, ref1, ref2 King’s Cross station, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7; Cambridge trains, ref8; access to, ref9; Great Northern Hotel, ref10, ref11; elegance, ref12, ref13; serves commuter lines, ref14; cemetery services, ref15; and railway races, ref16; and ‘Beer Trains’, ref17; smells, ref18; LNER services, ref19, ref20 Kinnaber Junction, ref1 Kitchener, Lord, ref1 Labour Party, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7; and rail privatization, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11 Ladbroke Grove accident, ref1, ref2 Laing, Samuel, ref1 laissez-faire, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Lake District, ref1 lamps, ref1 Lancashire, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Lancaster, ref1 Land’s End, ref1 landowners, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 Launceston, ref1 Lawson, Nigel, ref1 Lecount, Peter, ref1 Lee Navigation, ref1 Leeds, ref1, ref2; cotton industry, ref3; London services, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9; excursions, ref10; investors, ref11; railway access, ref12; station refurbishment, ref13; and electrification, ref14 Leeds & Selby Railway, ref1 Leeds Institute, ref1 Leicester, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Leigh & Bolton Railway, ref1 Letchworth Garden City, ref1 level crossings, ref1, ref2; keepers, ref3, ref4 Lewisham, ref1, ref2; accident, ref3 light railways, ref1 Light Railways Act, ref1, ref2 Lightfoot brothers, ref1 Lincoln, ref1 Lincolnshire, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 liners, ref1, ref2, ref3 liveries, ref1, ref2, ref3 Liverpool, ref1, ref2; and building of Liverpool & Manchester Railway, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6; population, ref7; ban on locomotives, ref8, ref9; tunnel approach, ref10; cable-operated approach, ref11, ref12; and opening of Liverpool & Manchester Railway, ref13; railway connections, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18; and horse-races, ref19, ref20; and postal service, ref21; suburban railways, ref22; workmen’s trains, ref23; viaduct bombed, ref24; and electrification, ref25 Liverpool & Manchester Railway, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10; double track, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14; surveys, ref15, ref16; costs, ref17, ref18; dividends and profits, ref19, ref20, ref21; gauge, ref22, ref23; choice of steam power and Rainhill trials, ref24; cable-operated section, ref25, ref26; opening, ref27, ref28, ref29; passenger services, ref30; tickets and fares, ref31; carriages, ref32; omnibus connections, ref33; goods services, ref34; mail services, ref35, ref36; track length, ref37, ref38, ref39; excursions, ref40; military transportation, ref41; amalgamation, ref42; telegraph system, ref43; working conditions, ref44; industrial relations, ref45 Liverpool Courier, ref1 Liverpool Mercury, ref1, ref2 Liverpool Overhead Railway, ref1 Liverpool Street station, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; Cambridge trains, ref5; building and cost, ref6, ref7; and electrification, ref8; collaboration with private sector, ref9; and Crossrail scheme, ref10 Liverpool Times, ref1 Llanelli, ref1 Llangynog-Llanrhaeadrym-Mochnant branch line, ref1 Lloyd George, David, ref1, ref2 Locke, Joseph, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; and Grand Junction Railway, ref5, ref6 Locomotion, ref1 Locomotion No. ref1, ref2 Locomotive Act (Red Flag Act), ref1 Locomotive Exchanges, ref1 locomotives: Duchess class, ref1; coal-burning, ref2; Crampton, ref3; captured by other companies, ref4; builders, ref5; care of, ref6; speed records, ref7, ref8; impact of war, ref9, ref10, ref11; Royal Scots class, ref12; Star and Saint classes, ref13; King and Castle classes, ref14, ref15; Southern, ref16; streamlining, ref17; Pacific class, ref18; investment in, ref19; post-war, ref20; private, ref21; diesel, ref22, ref23, ref24, ref25; survival of steam, ref26, ref27, ref28; electric, ref29, ref30, ref31; Deltic diesels, ref32 London: first railway, ref1; first railway connections, ref2, ref3, ref4; suburbs, ref5, ref6, ref7; termini, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13; growth in railway connections, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19, ref20; suburban and commuter railways, ref21, ref22, ref23, ref24, ref25, ref26, ref27, ref28, ref29, ref30, ref31, ref32, ref33; and postal service, ref34; time in, ref35; exhibition traffic, ref36, ref37, ref38; Midland Railway gains access, ref39; impact of railways, ref40, ref41; workmen’s trains, ref42; population growth, ref43; railway accidents, ref44; and Great Central connections, ref45; tramways, ref46; and wartime, ref47, ref48, ref49, ref50, ref51; and amalgamation, ref52, ref53; integrated transport system, ref54, ref55; wartime evacuation, ref56; and electrification, ref57 London & Birmingham Railway, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6; surveys, ref7; stagecoach connections, ref8; fares, ref9; investors, ref10; and royal travel, ref11; freight services, ref12; amalgamation, ref13, ref14; departure times, ref15; railway cottages, ref16 London & Chatham Railway, ref1, ref2 London & Croydon Railway, ref1 London & Greenwich Railway, ref1; right-hand running, ref2 London & North Eastern Railway (LNER), ref1, ref2, ref3; network, ref4; hotels, ref5; livery, ref6, ref7; accidents, ref8; rugby specials, ref9; food and drink, ref10; service improvements, ref11; publicity, ref12, ref13; profitability, ref14, ref15; split at nationalization, ref16; electrification, ref17 London & North Western Railway (LNWR), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7; dominant position, ref8; value and profitability, ref9; enters price war, ref10; and Midland Railway, ref11; and Welsh lines, ref12; and Irish services, ref13; sells coal, ref14; working hours, ref15; and route to Scotland, ref16; and railway races, ref17; braking system, ref18; Preston accident, ref19; modernization and improvements, ref20; Sunny South Special service, ref21; electrification, ref22; publicity, ref23; compensation claim, ref24; and amalgamation, ref25, ref26; livery, ref27 London & South Western Railway, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; and railway races, ref5, ref6; reputation, ref7; electrification, ref8, ref9; consolidation, ref10; wartime service, ref11; and amalgamation, ref12, ref13 London & Southampton Railway, ref1 London Bridge station, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 London, Brighton & South Coast Railway, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; collapse, ref5; Clayton tunnel accident, ref6; strike, ref7; Southern Belle service, ref8; electrification, ref9, ref10; and amalgamation, ref11, ref12 London, Chatham & Dover Railway, ref1, ref2, ref3 London Electric Railway, ref1, ref2 London, Midland & Scottish Railway (LMS), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5; network and inventory, ref6; livery, ref7; service improvements, ref8, ref9; publicity, ref10; workforce and repair facilities, ref11; profitability, ref12, ref13; and wartime, ref14, ref15 London Midland Region, ref1, ref2 London Necropolis Railway, ref1 London Passenger Transport Board, see London Transport London Post Office, ref1 London, Tilbury & Southend Railway, ref1 London Transport, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; headquarters, ref5 London Underground, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6; Metropolitan Line, ref7, ref8; District Line, ref9, ref10; Circle Line, ref11, ref12; impact on shopping habits, ref13; and electrification, ref14; public relations, ref15; and wartime, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19, ref20; women on, ref21; Bakerloo Line, ref22; Piccadilly Line, ref23; increase in passengers, ref24; overcrowding, ref25; rails, ref26; see also Metropolitan District Railway; Metropolitan Railway London–York Direct Railway, ref1 Londonderry, ref1 looms, steam-powered, ref1 Lord’s cricket ground, ref1 lorries, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Lossiemouth, ref1 Loughborough, ref1 Louis Philippe, King, ref1 Louis XIV, ref1 Ludgate Hill station, ref1 Luton, ref1 Lutterworth, ref1 Macadam, John, ref1, ref2 Macclesfield, ref1 MacDonald, Ramsay, ref1 McGrath, Thomas, ref1 MacGregor, John, ref1, ref2 Macmillan, Harold, ref1 Maglev trains, ref1 Maiden Lane station, ref1 Maidenhead, ref1 Maidenhead Bridge, ref1 Maidstone, ref1 mail order goods, ref1 mail services, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Major, John, ref1, ref2, ref3 Mallaig, ref1 Mallard, ref1 Manchester, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6; steam-powered looms, ref7; and building of Liverpool & Manchester Railway, ref8, ref9; population, ref10; indifference to railway, ref11; weavers, ref12; railway connections, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19, ref20, ref21, ref22; investment in railways, ref23; and excursions, ref24, ref25; railway access, ref26; workmen’s trains, ref27; and railway races, ref28; Great Central connections, ref29, ref30; and electrification, ref31 Manchester & Birmingham Railway, ref1 Manchester & Leeds Railway, ref1, ref2 Manchester & Sheffield Railway, ref1 Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Marlborough, ref1 Marly, gardens of, ref1 Marples, Ernest, ref1, ref2, ref3 Marsh, Richard, ref1, ref2 marshalling yards, ref1, ref2 Marylebone Cricket Club, ref1 Marylebone station, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Mayhew, Henry, ref1 Meakin, George, ref1 Mechanics’ Institutes, ref1 Mendips, ref1 Merchant Navy, ref1 Mercury, ref1 Merstham, ref1 Merthyr Tydfil, ref1 Metroland, ref1 Metropolitan District Railway, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Metropolitan Railway, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6; introduces Pullman service, ref7; profitability, ref8; and Great Central Railway, ref9; and amalgamation, ref10 middle classes, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Middlesbrough, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Middlesex, ref1, ref2, ref3 Middleton Colliery, ref1 Mid-Kent Railway, ref1 Midland Counties Railway, ref1, ref2 Midland Railway, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6; enters price war, ref7; access to London, ref8; promotes third class, ref9, ref10; and Irish services, ref11; Pullman service, ref12; industrial relations, ref13; and Settle & Carlisle line, ref14, ref15, ref16; braking system, ref17; coal trains, ref18; and wartime, ref19, ref20; and amalgamation, ref21, ref22, ref23, ref24 Milford Haven, ref1 military trains, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 milk, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Milne, Sir James, ref1 Milton Keynes, ref1 mines, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Molesworth, Sir William, ref1 Monmouthshire, ref1 Monmouthshire Railway and Canal Company, ref1 monopolies, ref1; Huish and, ref2, ref3; Victorian fear of, ref4, ref5; privatization and, ref6 monorails, ref1, ref2 ‘monster trains’, ref1 Moon, Sir Richard, ref1, ref2 Morecambe Bay, ref1 Moretonhampstead, ref1 Moreton-in-the-Marsh, ref1 Morning Post, ref1 Morrison, Herbert, ref1 Morton, Sir Alastair, ref1 Motherwell, ref1 motorways, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Mumbles, ref1 munitions trains, ref1, ref2, ref3 Myers Flat swamp, ref1, ref2 Napoleon Bonaparte, ref1 narrow gauge railways, ref1, ref2, ref3 National Rail Enquiry Service, ref1, ref2 National Union of Railwaymen (NUR), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 National Wages Board, ref1 nationalization, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6; opposition to, ref7, ref8, ref9; and amalgamation, ref10, ref11, ref12; and industrial relations, ref13 navvies, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; deaths of, ref5, ref6, ref7; shipped to Crimea, ref8 Nesham’s Colliery, ref1 Network Rail, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Network SouthEast, ref1, ref2, ref3 New Southgate, ref1 New Zealand, ref1 Newbury, ref1, ref2 Newcastle, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; London services, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10; Tyne bridges, ref11; wartime evacuation, ref12 Newcastle & Carlisle Railway, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; freight services, ref5 Newcastle & Darlington Railway, ref1 Newcastle Courant, ref1 ‘Newcastle Roads’, ref1 Newcomen, John, ref1 Newington Green, ref1 Newport, ref1 newspaper specials, ref1 newspapers (press), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; and railway advertising, ref5, ref6; and railway races, ref7; and rail strike, ref8; Southern Railway campaign, ref9; opposition to nationalization, ref10; switch to road haulage, ref11; opposition to privatization, ref12 Newton, ref1, ref2 Newton Abbot, ref1, ref2 Newtown, ref1 night traffic, ref1 Nightall, Jim, ref1 Nock, O.

The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time
by Karl Polanyi
Published 27 Mar 2001

His Industry-Houses, on the Panopticon plan—five stories in twelve sectors—for the exploitation of the labor of the assisted poor were to be ruled by a central board set up in the capital and modelled on the Bank of England’s board, all members with shares worth five or ten pounds having a vote. A text published a few years later ran: “(1) The management of the concerns of the poor throughout South Britain to be vested in one authority, and the expense to be charged upon one fund. (2) This Authority, that of a Joint-Stock Company under some such name as that of the National Charity Company.”* No less than 250 Industry-Houses were to be erected, with approximately 500,000 inmates. The plan was accompanied by a detailed analysis of the various categories of unemployed, in which Bentham anticipated by more than a century the results of other investigators in this field.

…

He sponsored proposals as different as an improved system for patents; limited liability companies; a decennial census of population; the establishment of a Ministry of Health; interest-bearing notes to make savings general; a frigidarium for vegetables and fruit; armament factories on new technical principles, eventually run by convict labor, or alternatively, by the assisted poor; a Chrestomathic Day School to teach utilitarianism to the upper middle classes; a general register of real property; a system of public account keeping; reforms of public instruction; uniform registration; freedom from usury; the relinquishment of colonies; the use of contraceptives to keep the poor rate down; the junction of the Atlantic and the Pacific by means of a joint stock company; and others. Some of these projects harbored literally shoals of minor improvements as, for instance, that on Industry-Houses which were a congeries of innovations for the betterment and the exploitation of man based on the achievements of associationist psychology. While Townsend and Burke linked laissezfaire with legislative quietism, Bentham saw in it no obstacle to broadsides of reform.

McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld
by Misha Glenny
Published 7 Apr 2008

The Bulgarian state security service had no such illusions about the system it policed. Experienced observers of the Soviet scene, the DS’s leadership calculated that Communism did not have long to last. Under pressure from Gorbachev, the Bulgarian Communist Party had passed Decree 56, which overnight allowed the creation of private enterprises in Bulgaria, known as joint-stock companies. Many in the party, still hard-liners, were shocked by this development, as it looked like the thin end of a capitalist wedge. But the state security services, which habitually subordinated ideology to the love of power, took it in their stride. “When I looked at the trade register for 1986, it struck me,” explained Stanimir Vaglenov, a Bulgarian journalist who specializes in corruption and organized crime, “the security services founded the first company a week after Decree 56 came into effect.

…

“When I looked at the trade register for 1986, it struck me,” explained Stanimir Vaglenov, a Bulgarian journalist who specializes in corruption and organized crime, “the security services founded the first company a week after Decree 56 came into effect. And within the first year, members of the DS had founded 90 percent of the new joint-stock companies!” While the bulk of Bulgaria’s long-suffering population was still being force-fed the rhetoric about socialism’s bright and eternal future, the regime’s most senior representatives were teaching themselves how to make money. Big money. Having spent forty-five years expounding the theoretical evils of capitalism to ordinary Bulgarians, the secret police were now keen to demonstrate those evils in practice.

Civilization: The West and the Rest
by Niall Ferguson
Published 28 Feb 2011

Measured in terms of grams of silver per head, the rulers of England and France were able to collect far more in taxation than their Chinese counterpart throughout the period from 1520 to 1630.28 Beginning in thirteenth-century Italy, Europeans also began to experiment with unprecedented methods of government borrowing, planting the seeds of modern bond markets. Public debt was an institution wholly unknown in Ming China and only introduced under European influence in the late nineteenth century. Another fiscal innovation of world-changing significance was the Dutch idea of granting monopoly trading rights to joint-stock companies in return for a share of their profits and an understanding that the companies would act as naval subcontractors against rival powers. The Dutch East India Company, founded in 1602, and its eponymous English imitator were the first true capitalist corporations, with their equity capital divided into tradable shares paying cash dividends at the discretion of their directors.

…

In Bleak House (1852–3) Charles Dickens portrayed the Court of Chancery as a grotesquely inefficient hindrance to the resolution of property disputes, while in Little Dorrit (1855–7) the target of his satire was the ‘Circumlocution Office’, a government department dedicated to obstructing economic progress. Joint-stock companies remained illegal until the 1720 Bubble Act was repealed in 1824, while debtors’ prisons like the Marshalsea – so vividly depicted in Little Dorrit – continued to operate until the passage of the 1869 Bankruptcy Act. It is also worth remembering that much of the legislation passed by Victorian parliaments in connection with the textile industry was designed to limit the economic freedom of factory-owners, notably with respect to child labour.

The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community
by David C. Korten
Published 1 Jan 2001

Armed skirmishes with the rival North West Company were common until the British government forced their merger in 1821 into a single company with a monopoly over the fur trade in much of North America, including the Northwest Territories. The British South Sea Company, which was chartered primarily to sell African slaves to Spanish colonies in America, became the centerpiece of the “South Sea Bubble,” one of history’s most famous financial scams.13 The new corporate form, the joint stock company created to fulfill the above functions, combined two ideas from the Middle Ages: the sale of shares in public markets and the protection of owners from personal liability for the corporation’s obligations. These two features made it possible to amass virtually unlimited financial capital within a single firm, assured the continuity of the firm beyond the death of its founders, and absolved owners of personal liability for the firm’s losses or misdeeds beyond the amount of their holdings in the company.

…

PLUTOCRACY Foreshadowing the corporate rule of our own day, the colonial settlements were created more as economic than political jurisdictions — essentially company estates established by corporate charters issued by the Crown to be managed for the profit of their owners. Beginning in 1584, with the permission of Elizabeth I, Walter Raleigh made several unsuccessful attempts to establish the first English colony in America as a private investment on Roanoke Island off the North Carolina coast.1 Private entrepreneurs and joint stock companies established a dozen permanent English colonies on other sites along the coast of America during the reigns of James I (1603–25) and Charles I (1625–49). The technology of the time limited communication to letters or word of mouth via small sailing ships, which meant that administration and finance were necessarily in the hands of the individuals who held the charters, with virtually no governmental oversight.

The Power of Gold: The History of an Obsession
by Peter L. Bernstein
Published 1 Jan 2000

The result of the shortfall was the establishment of the Bank of England, an unusual deal between the government and the men of "quality" who were shareholders of the Bank (that uppercase letter B for ever after identified that bank as the Bank). Under this arrangement, the Bank would lend the government f 1.2 million at the moderate interest rate of 8 percent, in return for which the institution would be established as the first private company to do business as a limited-liability corporation, or so-called joint stock company-in the rapidly growing field of banking just like the institutions of our own time.'" The founding of the Bank would turn out to be a momentous step in the history of Britain, as the institution over time would steadily increase its influence-even its power-over the banking system and the general economy, the gold stock, and Britain's financial relations with the rest of the world.

…

*The English Commonwealth was the government headed by Oliver Cromwell that assumed the rule of Britain after Charles I was beheaded at Whitehall on January 30, 1649. The monarchy, under Charles's son Charles II, was restored in 1660. *The Dutch East India Company, founded in 1602, was the first permanent joint stock company. Commercial banking firms with limited liability developed much more rapidly in the United States than in Britain during the first half of the nineteenth century. tSee Bernstein (1996), Chapter 5, for an extended discussion of English economic and financial development in the 1600s, including the establishment of Lloyd's insurance.

Them And Us: Politics, Greed And Inequality - Why We Need A Fair Society
by Will Hutton
Published 30 Sep 2010

Without this GPT, there would have been no circumnavigation of the globe; no discovery of the Americas, leading to new centres of power and productive capacity; no European colonisation; no long-distance sea trade; no rich European merchant class; no consequent financial innovations, such as joint stock companies and marine insurance, to deal with the risk and uncertainty of long voyages; and less possibility of the principles of magnetism being understood. Similarly, in the nineteenth century, the railway was much more than just a transport technology. It transformed companies, creating both mass consumption and mass production.

…

The greatest scandal had occurred in 1720, when shares in a slave-trading monopoly – the South Sea Company – had departed far from economic reality. The result was the so-called South Sea Bubble. Even the Chancellor of the Exchequer speculated on it. Then the bubble popped. The losses and devastation were unprecedented. However, Parliament learned its lesson: in future it would be more circumspect to which joint stock companies it granted a monopoly – and whether they should have monopolies at all. After 1750, the pace of reform accelerated. The parliamentary system was relatively open, and the ‘Old Corruption’, for which the remedy was more and better parliament, was blamed for the traumatising loss of the thirteen American colonies.

Energy: A Human History
by Richard Rhodes
Published 28 May 2018

Unfortunately for Newcomen, Thomas Savery had written his 1698 patent so broadly that it covered all engines that raised water by fire, and Parliament in 1699 had extended the Savery patent for an additional twenty-one years beyond the original fourteen, to 1733. Having no other choice, Newcomen partnered with Savery, an arrangement that continued after Savery died in 1715 with a joint-stock company formed to exploit the Savery patent, the Proprietors of the Invention for Raising Water by Fire.21 The proprietors issued eighty shares, of which Newcomen was awarded twenty. Newcomen built his first full-scale commercial engine within sight of Dudley Castle, near Birmingham, in 1712. This Dudley Castle engine’s cylinder, made of cast brass, was 21 inches in diameter and almost 8 feet long; it raised water from within a coal mine 153 feet below, and because it was built above the mine, at ground level, it risked no mine fires.22 Other Newcomen engines followed across Britain.

…

Evidently disbelieving the promise of oil riches under his property, McClintock agreed. Back in Titusville, Albert Crosby negotiated an agreement with Brewer and his sawmill partners, who owned the farm where the original oil spring was located. (Bissell had preauthorized Crosby to do so if he liked what he saw.) The young attorney proposed to organize a joint-stock company capitalized at $250,000 ($7 million today), dividing among the parties the shares to be sold to investors. With that capital, the enterprise, to be called the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company, would buy the hundred-acre Hibbard farm outright for $5,000. The company’s public offering would include the oil rights to several thousand more acres that the sawmill partners owned in the area.

Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry
by Peter Warren Singer
Published 1 Jan 2003

Like the rest of European rulers, however, he was unwilling to risk the redistribution of political power that conscription 34 THE RISE would force. THE CORPORATE FREE HAND: MILITARY BUSINESS VENTURES OUTSIDE THE STATE SYSTEM Private businesses also began to take on military roles outside of governments through the charter company system. In this arrangement, joint-stock companies were licensed to have monopoly power over all trade within a designated area, typically lands newly discovered by the Europeans. Such preference was given not only for political reasons (for rulers to reward domestic supporters or to give national ventures an advantage over foreign competitors) but also because a prior monopoly advantage was thought necessary to counter the uncertainties of engaging in risky, large-scale activity in distant lands.

…

See also Brown & Root Services (BRsV Hart Group, 11 Hessc-Kassel, 33 Hoare, Mike. 37. 40. 42 Humanitarian operations, 82. 85 Huntington, Samuel, 8, 191, 201-202. 204 Ibis Air, 105 equipment of, 106 ICI Oregon, 183 I-Defense, 100 IMF, 67, 182, 234 Information warfare (I\V), 62-3. 175 International Charter Inc. (ICI). 1 l International Defense and Security (IDAS), 9 International law, 220-221, 238-242 International War Crimes Tribunal, 122, 126 Internet, 84, 99 International Peace Operations Association (IPOA), viii, xi Israel FMFs in 13, 14, spearhead, 220, 223 Johnson, Lyndon. 139. 140 Joint-stock companies, 34 Kabbah. Ahmed Tejan. 1 14-1 15, 201 Kabila. I aurent, 10, 94. 226 Kosovo, 6, 44, 144, 145, 147 KFOR, 16,98 Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). 11, 12, !7>43> 13^219,223,225 Kursk, 15 L-3 Communications. 85. 133. 134. 135 Landsknechts, 27, 28 I.es Affreux, 37, 44 Lewis. Vernon. 120 Lifeguard, I 1, 158 Light weapons. .So?

Animal Spirits: The American Pursuit of Vitality From Camp Meeting to Wall Street
by Jackson Lears

Yet despite being inspired by these characteristically Protestant virtues, when it came to finance Defoe was an undisciplined young rogue whose affairs were falling apart before he was thirty. He came of age at a time, the late 1600s, when wars with Spain and France obstructed English merchants’ access to European and American markets, and left them with idle capital. They began to put it into a flurry of joint-stock companies that were floated to buy some commercial privilege from the Crown, or into simple wagers, often on the outcomes of military operations. As Defoe recalled: “there was not less gaged [wagered] on the second siege of Limerick [August–October 1691] than two hundred thousand pound.” Defoe himself had an incurable propensity for speculative projects, which involved everything from diving bells to civet cats (for perfume) to a ship he bought from pirates that turned out to be “weake and Leakey.”

…

“It is, and I hail the fact,” Frank replies, launching another paean to progress: “Nothing better attests the advance of the humanitarian spirit. In former and less humanitarian ages—the ages of amphitheatres and gladiators—geniality was mostly confined to the fireside and table. But in our age—the age of joint-stock companies and free-and-easies—it is with this precious quality as with precious gold in old Peru, which Pizarro found making up the scullion’s sauce-pot as the Inca’s crown. Yes, we golden boys, the moderns, have geniality everywhere—a bounty broadcast like noonlight.” All of this celebratory patter is a prelude to Frank’s hitting up Charlie for money, which Charlie refuses.

The Second Curve: Thoughts on Reinventing Society
by Charles Handy
Published 12 Mar 2015

His lament is echoed by the protesters around the world, angered by the growing gap between the 1 per cent and the 99 per cent. We have to ask, has capitalism overreached itself? Can we put it back in its box without losing its vigour and creativity? Is it already too late? Capitalism was given its huge boost by two creative social inventions back in the mid-19th century, when the twin ideas of the joint-stock company and limited liability were first widely applied in Britain. Their combination fuelled the Industrial Revolution by sharing and limiting the risk of investment. But down the centuries those good ideas have had some very unintended consequences, as good ideas often do. For a visible sign of the outcome of those social inventions one has only to look at the changing skylines of our cities, how the castles and cathedrals of the Middle Ages have been replaced, first by the parliaments of the people but now by the shining glass towers of the corporate world.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century
by Thomas Piketty
Published 10 Mar 2014

Flows: More Difficult to Estimate Than Stocks Another important caveat concerns the income of nonwage workers, which may include remuneration of capital that is difficult to distinguish from other income. To be sure, this problem is less important now than in the past because most private economic activity today is organized around corporations or, more generally, joint-stock companies, so a firm’s accounts are clearly separate from the accounts of the individuals who supply the capital (who risk only the capital they have invested and not their personal fortunes, thanks to the revolutionary concept of the “limited liability corporation,” which was adopted almost everywhere in the latter half of the nineteenth century).

…

The dividing line between public capital and private capital is by no means as clear as some have believed since the fall of the Berlin Wall. As noted, there are already many areas, such as education, health, culture, and the media, in which the dominant forms of organization and ownership have little to do with the polar paradigms of purely private capital (modeled on the joint-stock company entirely owned by its shareholders) and purely public capital (based on a similar top-down logic in which the sovereign government decides on all investments). There are obviously many intermediate forms of organization capable of mobilizing the talent of different individuals and the information at their disposal.

…

See IMF (International Monetary Fund) Internet bubble, 172 Investments: in­e­qual­ity of, 430–­432, 452–­455; wealth rankings and, 432–­443; university endowments and, 447–­452; alternative, 449–­450, 454, 456; petroleum and, 455–­460, 462; sovereign wealth funds and, 455–­460 Iraq, 537–­538 Italy: growth rate of, 174, 445; savings in, 177–­178, 185; public wealth in, 184–­185; wealth tax in, 528–­529, 533 Ivanishvili, Bidzina, 625n22 James, Henry, fiction of, 152, 414 Jantt, Markus, 631n28 Japan: national income and, 63–­64, 66, 68; growth in, 86, 93, 95, 174–­176, 588n10; savings in, 177–­178; foreign assets in, 192–­194; capital/income ratio in, 195; in­e­qual­ity in, 322, 445; taxation and, 490, 498, 637n31 Japa­nese bubble, 172, 597n30 Jeanne, Olivier, 645n41 Jefferson, Thomas, 158, 363 Jobs, Steve, 440–­441 Joint stock companies, 203 Jones, Alice Hanson, 159, 347 Jones, Charles I., 586n35 Judet de la Combe, P., 644n30 Judicial conservatism, 566, 653n49 Justification of in­e­qual­ity, 264 Kaldor, Nicholas, 231, 601n36, 634n1, 638n35 Kaplan, Steven N., 607n41 Katz, Lawrence, 306, 314–­315, 608n12, 640n53 Kennickell, Arthur, 347 Kesztenbaum, Lionel, 612n4 Keynes, John Maynard, 135, 220, 231–­232, 600n22, 652n44 King, Gregory, 56, 180, 590n1, 637n28 King, Willford, 348, 506, 613n13 Knowledge and skill diffusion, 21, 71, 313 Kopczuk, Wojciech, 607n38 Kotlikoff-­Summers thesis, 428, 622n63 Krueger, Alan, 313, 608n10 Krugman, Paul, 294 Kubrick, Stanley, 620n40 Kuczynski, Jürgen, 219–­220, 599n20 Kumhof, Michael, 606n32 Kuwait, 537 Kuznets, Simon, 11–­17, 20, 23, 580nn9,11,14, 581nn15–­16, 582n36, 603n4 Kuznets Curve, 13–­15, 237, 274, 336, 580n14 Labor.

A Pipeline Runs Through It: The Story of Oil From Ancient Times to the First World War
by Keith Fisher
Published 3 Aug 2022

The oil business was in confusion and daily growing worse … It was the battle of the new idea of cooperation against competition.’ However, ‘to buy in the many refineries that were a source of overproduction and confusion we needed a great deal of money.’15 The money was found, in January 1870, by incorporating the allied partnerships and selling shares in the new joint-stock company: the Standard Oil Company of Ohio. This tighter legal structure also gave Rockefeller, as president of the company, stronger administrative control over the cartel’s extensive operations, covering many refineries in Cleveland, New York and elsewhere, accounting for 10 per cent of national refinery output, a giant leap for the new conglomerate.

…

At the end of that year the oil-bearing properties were sold off by sealed bids to the highest bidder, in small plots to encourage competition between many small capitalists. However, the Armenian production monopolist Mirzoyev and the Kokorev and Gubonin partners – now with a 7.5 million rouble joint-stock company, the Baku Oil Co. – had the capital to dominate the auction, outbidding others for the most prized leases on the Balakhani oilfield, where Mirzoyev had just sunk Baku’s first commercially successful mechanically drilled well.83 On the Apsheron Peninsula was now replayed the familiar script of the Pennsylvanian oil rushes, as producers competed to maximize output from their plots.

…

After a year of successful operation, the transit fee of 5 kopeks per pood had paid for the pipeline’s £10,000 construction and security costs, spurring the construction of other pipelines: by the Baku Oil Co., by Mirzoyev, by the major crude producer G.M. Lianozov, and by the Caspian Petroleum and Trade Co.94 In 1878 the Nobels sought to raise more investment capital by incorporating as a joint-stock company, with the aims of moving upstream into crude production, expanding and upgrading their refining operations and, crucially, increasing their capacity to distribute kerosene, fuel oil and other petroleum products across Russia. In their successful application to the Ministry of Finance for permission to form the Nobel Brothers Petroleum Co., they explained, One of the most important reasons for the slow development of the Russian petroleum business in the Baku region … is the lack of suitable means to transport crude oil from the wells to the refineries and refined products from Baku to the Russian market … [W]e were forced to focus special attention on the construction of rational methods of handling our goods, which require many complex technical installations.

The Great Crash 1929
by John Kenneth Galbraith
Published 15 Dec 2009

While the number of speculators was almost certainly small compared with the subsequent participation in the stock market, nearly every community contained a man who was known to have taken "quite a beating" in Florida. For a century after the collapse of the South Sea Bubble, Englishmen regarded the most reputable joint stock companies with some suspicion. Even as the Florida boom collapsed, the faith of Americans in quick, effortless enrichment in the stock market was becoming every day more evident. III It is hard to say when the stock market boom of the nineteen-twenties began. There were sound reasons why, during these years, the prices of common stocks should rise.

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty
by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson
Published 20 Mar 2012

By 1330 the population had again increased by another 50 percent, to 110,000; Venice was then as big as Paris, and probably three times the size of London. One of the key bases for the economic expansion of Venice was a series of contractual innovations making economic institutions much more inclusive. The most famous was the commenda, a rudimentary type of joint stock company, which formed only for the duration of a single trading mission. A commenda involved two partners, a “sedentary” one who stayed in Venice and one who traveled. The sedentary partner put capital into the venture, while the traveling partner accompanied the cargo. Typically, the sedentary partner put in the lion’s share of the capital.

…

With the founding of the Dutch East India Company in 1602, the Dutch attempts to capture the entire spice trade and eliminate their competitors, by hook or by crook, took a turn for the better for the Dutch and for the worse for Southeast Asia. The Dutch East India Company was the second European joint stock company, following the English East India Company, major landmarks in the development of the modern corporation, which would subsequently play a major role in European industrial growth. It was also the second company that had its own army and the power to wage war and colonize foreign lands. With the military power of the company now brought to bear, the Dutch proceeded to eliminate all potential interlopers to enforce their treaty with the ruler of Ambon.

Why Stock Markets Crash: Critical Events in Complex Financial Systems
by Didier Sornette
Published 18 Nov 2002

It is really a collection of thousands of stories, tracing the personal fortunes of countless individuals who rode the wave of stock speculation for a furious six months in 1720. The “bubble year,” as it is called, actually 10 chapter 1 involves several individual bubbles, as all kinds of fraudulent joint-stock companies sought to take advantage of the mania for speculation. The following account borrows from “The Bubble Project” [60]. In 1711, the South Sea Company was given a monopoly of all trade to the South Sea ports. The real prize was the anticipated trade that would open up with the rich Spanish colonies in South America.

…

He was philosophical enough to be contented with his venture, and set off the same evening for the Continent. He was never heard of again. Such scams were bad for the speculation business and so, largely through the pressure of the South Sea directors, the so-called “Bubble Act” was passed on June 11, 1720 requiring all joint-stock companies to have a royal charter. For a moment, the confidence of the people was given an extra boost, and they responded accordingly. South Sea stock had been at £175 at the end of February, 380 at the end of March, and around 520 by May 29. It peaked at the end of June at over £1,000 (a psychological barrier in that four-digit number).

The Bankers' New Clothes: What's Wrong With Banking and What to Do About It
by Anat Admati and Martin Hellwig
Published 15 Feb 2013

Note that Kate’s equity, which will be the equivalent of “capital” in the banking context, is always invested in the house; it is tied up there but is not idle and is not a cash reserve. Chapter 6 discusses again the pervasive confusion about the term bank capital, already mentioned in Chapter 1. 10. There are many forms of limited-liability companies, with legal details varying across countries and even across companies. For joint-stock companies, that is, corporations whose shares are publicly traded, many features of governance and control, such as public reporting obligations, are specified by law or regulation; this provides investors with the means to acquire the information they need for their purchasing decisions. In companies whose shares are not publicly traded there is much less need for investor protection, so there is great flexibility to determine the company’s governance in the corporate charter.

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See International Swaps and Derivatives Association Israel, indexed debt in, 276n6 Italy, banks as source of government funding in, 321n30, 322n32 It’s a Wonderful Life (movie), 46–47, 49, 52, 67, 159, 160, 211, 247n1 Ivry, Bob, 288n14 Jackson, Thomas H., 236n35, 300n54, 301n55, 317n88 Jaffe, Adam B., 321n25 Jagtiani, Julapa A., 291n31 Japan: Kobe earthquake of 1995 in, 55; lobbying by banks of, 231n10; monopoly power of banks in, 249n12, 275n4; nuclear disaster of 2011 in, xi, 206–7; opposition to banking reform in, 193, 231n12 Japanese crisis of 1990s: insolvency of many banks in, 333n41; international impact of, 61, 65, 258n25; Principle of Unripe Time in, 171; resolution issues in, 264n70; versus subprime mortgage crisis in United States, 60, 61 Jenkins, Antony, 283n17 Jenkins, Patrick, 230n6, 280n1, 335n52 Jenkins, Robert, 311n53 Jensen, Michael C., 242n17, 305n22 Jimmy Stewart Is Dead (Kotlikoff), 247n1 Jöeveer, Karin, 290n29 Johnson, Simon, 248n3, 269nn27–28, 270n33, 311n54, 319n9, 325nn49–51, 325n54, 326n58, 332n30, 333n40 joint-stock companies, 240n10 Jordà, Oscar, 233nn18–19 JPmorgan Chase: actual balance sheet of, 84–87, 84f, 266n11, 266n14, 267nn15–16, 317n88; in Bear Stearns bailout, 72, 74, 219, 326n58; on capital requirements, 265n5; and costs of resolution, 78; “fortress balance sheet” of, 83–87, 266n6; large trading losses of, 78, 260n39, 328n6; lending as fraction of activities of, 86, 267n18; market value versus book value of equity of, 86–87, 113–14; mistakes admitted by, 232n17; off-balance-sheet commitments of, 83, 84, 266n7; payouts to shareholders by, 182, 312n57; potential damage caused by default of, 10–11; regulatory capture by, 205, 326n58; risk management at, 285n38; scandals involving, 328n6; stock price of, 86, 87; versus UBS, 267n18; on “unintended consequences,” 231n10; value of debt of, 12, 85; vulnerability of, 83, 86, 87.

The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind
by Raghuram Rajan
Published 26 Feb 2019

Indeed, the initial loans that were available to the new government were still short-term, and the first attempt at issuing long-term debt in 1693 ended in abject failure, raising just over one tenth of the desired amount.34 Subsequent attempts were more successful but the greatest share of early borrowing was not from the public but from government debt issued to an entirely more traditional source, three monopoly joint-stock companies, the East India Company, the Bank of England, and the South Sea Company. The Revolution’s effects did manifest themselves over time. The Crown’s borrowing was no longer on the personal account of the monarch, but was the responsibility of a permanent sovereign entity, the state. Future governments would continue to bear responsibility for repayment so debt could be issued for a longer term and repayment smoothed out.

…

Lenders had more confidence in such “funded” debt for they knew that the tax revenues that were earmarked could not be diverted elsewhere without the Parliament’s notice. These “tripwires” were backed by an elaborate mechanism of monitoring. Many of those with savings to invest, as well as the stockholders in the three joint-stock companies, came from the landowning or business class, with a presence or influence in Parliament. So investors in government debt, through Parliamentary reports and committees, had information about government finances, and could vote to curtail or repurpose government spending if it impaired the chances of them recovering their investments.

A History of the World in 6 Glasses
by Tom Standage
Published 1 Jan 2005

But this name did not last long, as the Gentlemen s Magazine reported: "New Jonathan's came to the resolution that instead of its being called New Jonathan's, it should be called The Stock Exchange, which is to be wrote over the door." This establishment was the forerunner of the London Stock Exchange. This period of rapid innovation in public and private finance, with the floating of joint-stock companies, the buying and selling of shares, the development of insurance schemes, and the public financing of government debt, all of which culminated in London's eventual displacement of Amsterdam as the world's financial center, is known today as the Financial Revolution. The need to fund expensive colonial wars made it necessary, and the fertile intellectual environment and speculative spirit of the coffeehouses made it possible.

Britain's 100 Best Railway Stations
by Simon Jenkins
Published 28 Jul 2017

Soon the industry was again straining at the leash, as if readying itself for a new burst of expansion. The Mania At the start of 1843, money suddenly surged back into railway shares, leading to a stock market boom on a scale not seen since the South Sea Bubble of 1720. It was spurred on its way by William Gladstone’s 1844 bill instituting the joint stock company, which allowed companies to be formed by shareholders without needing a full act of parliament as previously. They did, however, need an act to compel landowners to surrender rights of way. This was followed by the introduction of limited liability, liberating company directors from ruin if they went bankrupt.

Imagining India
by Nandan Nilekani
Published 25 Nov 2008

The tiny island of Britain emerged as the major European power in the eighteenth century with innovations in public finance and an embryonic stock market. These institutions created richly funded, powerful companies that quickly dominated global trade—our old acquaintance the East India Company was in fact the very first “joint-stock” company of Britain. And of course, the technological prowess of the Industrial Revolution enabled Britain and Europe to dominate world economic growth for more than a hundred years. In this context, India has been fortunate even in its barriers. In the 1970s and 1980s, IT was literally the only option for a start-up entrepreneur to begin a business without political access or capital.

…

Jallianwala Bagh attack (1919) Jammu Janaagraha Janata Dal Jan Sangh Japan jatropha jaundice Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) Jayakar Commission (1927) Jejeebhoy, Lady Avia Jharkhand Jiang Zemin Jindal Steel Jinnah, Mohammed Ali job creation job retraining job security Johnson, Lyndon B. “joint-stock” companies Joshi, Murli Manohar Joshi, Rajendra jugaad vehicle jute Kabir, Humayun Kahn, E. J. Kamaraj, K. Kamath, H. V. Kannada language Kapoor, Anil Karat, Prakash Karnataka Kashmir Katara, Neelam Katara, Nitish Kaur, Rajkumari Amrit Kaviraj, Sudipta Kelkar, Vijay Keniston, Kenneth Kerala kerosene Khan, Ajit Khan, Kushboo Khan, Mehboob Khanna, Parag Kheny, Ashok Khilnani, Sunil Khosla, Vinod King, Robert Kishwar, Madhu Koenigsberger, Otto Kohli, Atul Kohli, K.

White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America
by Nancy Isenberg
Published 20 Jun 2016

In the garden paradise of early Virginia that never was, war and suffering, greed and colonial conquest are conveniently missing. Class and cultural dissonance magically fade from view in order to remake American origins into a utopian love story.13 • • • Can we handle the truth? In the early days of settlement, in the profit-driven minds of well-connected men in charge of a few prominent joint-stock companies, America was conceived of in paradoxical terms: at once a land of fertility and possibility and a place of outstanding wastes, “ranke” and weedy backwaters, dank and sorry swamps. Here was England’s opportunity to thin out its prisons and siphon off thousands; here was an outlet for the unwanted, a way to remove vagrants and beggars, to be rid of London’s eyesore population.

…

The southern journalist Charles Morrow Wilson described these folks as “American peasants,” but they are perhaps better described as the heirs of James Oglethorpe’s eighteenth-century Georgia colonists. One such group from Tulsa established a community in the Ozark hills. They founded a corporation, much like the older joint-stock companies, and adopted a set of bylaws, in which each member was a shareholder and had a vote. They sold timber, raised hogs and chickens, repaired the lumbering shanties on the property, and set up a school.17 Unlike Arkansas tenant farmers and sharecroppers, the Tulsa colonists owned the land, albeit land of little value, which lowered them to the level of subsistence farmers.

Virus of the Mind
by Richard Brodie
Published 4 Jun 2009

But long before anyone came up with that Machiavellian notion, viruses of the mind evolved on their own into powerful cultural fixtures. I call the institutions that evolved on their own to become self-perpetuating cultural viruses. ttt 146 C hapter nine C ultur al Viruses “Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson From the children’s game of “telephone,” we know that it’s difficult to copy memes with 100 percent fidelity even if we want to.

After the New Economy: The Binge . . . And the Hangover That Won't Go Away
by Doug Henwood
Published 9 May 2005

To Burbach and Robinson, the present is capitaHsm's fourth era. First was mercantiHsm and the early stages of European colonization—^primi- tive accumulation. Then came the era of industrial capitalism, with the development of the big bourgeoisie and the nation-state. Then came corporate or monopoly capitalism—the emergence of the joint-stock company as the dominant form. And now we have globalized capitalism, born in the early 1970s. Epochs aren't what they used to be; unUke humans, they seem to have shortening Ufespans.They date their first epoch, Marx's "rosy dawn of the era of capitaHst production," from 1492 to 1789, 357 years. The second, the day of the industrial capitalist, from 1789 to 1900, 111 years.

Does Capitalism Have a Future?
by Immanuel Wallerstein , Randall Collins , Michael Mann , Georgi Derluguian , Craig Calhoun , Stephen Hoye and Audible Studios
Published 15 Nov 2013

The city of Moscow had a legal and institutional status in the Soviet Union and a not completely dissimilar one in the successor Russian federation and republic. Gazprom changed more. Its creation in 1989 restructured the legal status and operating organization of the preexisting Russian gas industry. After the dissolution of the U.S.S.R., Gazprom was privatized in 1992 and has since operated as a joint-stock company. It was subjected to asset-stripping in the 1990s, then partially reintegrated and brought under state control in the first decade of the 2000s. In similar fashion one could trace a long list of partial continuities and partial transformations. Nonetheless, Derluguian’s account of how the U.S.S.R. could be treated as stable and obviously enduring almost to the moment it reached its end is instructive.

Broken Markets: A User's Guide to the Post-Finance Economy
by Kevin Mellyn
Published 18 Jun 2012

Subsidized green energy is but an extreme example, since the Eisenhower national highway system, subsidies for home ownership, and student loans are all examples of using the financial system for essentially nonmarket, noneconomic ends. This kind of thing goes back to the day when royal monopolies Broken Markets were given to joint stock companies to build out the British Empire for broke British monarchs, and it is not going away any time soon. It is all a matter of degree and balance. In the Victorian Era, the markets became free and global for several generations, but that was an anomaly backed by British wealth and sea power along with an almost mystical British belief in free trade.

The Nature of Technology
by W. Brian Arthur
Published 6 Aug 2009

If you woke some morning and found that by some odd magic the technologies that have appeared in the last six hundred years had suddenly vanished: if you found that your toilet and stove and computer and automobile had disappeared, and along with these, steel and concrete buildings, mass production, public hygiene, the steam engine, modern agriculture, the joint stock company, and the printing press, you would find that our modern world had also disappeared. You—or we, if this strange happening befell all of us—would still be left with our ideas and culture, and with our children and spouses. And we would still have technologies. We would have water mills, and foundries, and oxcarts; and coarse linens, and hooded cloaks, and sophisticated techniques for building cathedrals.

The Long Good Buy: Analysing Cycles in Markets
by Peter Oppenheimer
Published 3 May 2020

In the railway boom of the early 19th century in Great Britain, for example, the repeal of the Bubble Act in 1825, introduced after the collapse of the South Sea bubble in 1720, was an important development. Aimed at controlling the formation of new companies, it limited the number of investors in joint stock companies to just five. In rescinding the act, the government made it easier to register, and set up, companies. It also made it much easier for large numbers of an increasingly enthralled public to invest in the new companies. Meanwhile, as noted previously, the financial innovation of new insurance companies allowed for a more conducive environment for risk-taking.

Night Trains: The Rise and Fall of the Sleeper
by Andrew Martin
Published 9 Feb 2017

One Swedish expert on the route sent me an email saying, ‘There were probably other cars [carriages] on the Drottning Victoria but for some unknown reason, Lenin’s car remained in Sassnitz, and he took another train from Trelleborg.’ In both wars, the train ferry was operated by our old friend MITROPA. After the Second World War, MITROPA survived as one of the few joint stock companies in East Germany, where it provided the railway catering. It then served reunified Germany until 2002. (Lars von Trier’s black-and-white expressionist film of 1991, Europa, concerns a young American lured into a pro-Nazi conspiracy hatched by a sinister railway company called Zentropa, a deliberate echo of MITROPA.

China's Superbank
by Henry Sanderson and Michael Forsythe
Published 26 Sep 2012

In return, CDB got a 100 billion yuan ten-year bond on its balance sheet that paid interest amounting to 2.25 percent per year tax free with payment of the principal guaranteed by the Ministry of Finance.58 We don’t know what loans these were, but the Cinda bonds made up 10 percent of the bank’s assets as of 2002. When CDB was formed into a joint stock company in 2008, with shares issued to the Ministry of Finance and Huijin, which holds the state’s share of financial institutions, the bond interest CDB had received was set against the principal of the bonds.59 The Ministry of Finance took the remaining amount of money in the form of a receivable to CDB yielding 3 percent a year.

The Gun
by C. J. Chivers
Published 12 Oct 2010

It seemed unlikely to shut down entirely, though its security rested not in its performance as a private enterprise but in a political fact: For the Russian military, the plants that produced the rifles remained a strategic enterprise. Similar problems manifested themselves throughout the firearms sector. Another Russian Kalashnikov manufacturer, the Molot joint stock company in Kirov, which complemented the production at Izhevsk, was so cash-strapped that in late 2008 it stopped paying wages to many employees. By 2009 it compensated workers not with rubles, but with food. This was, literally, subsistence labor.78 As the workers struggled, Mikhail Kalashnikov’s stature spared him from both material suffering and idleness.

…

D., 36, 420n Minié balls, 33–34 Minin, Leonid, 369–71, 411 Misr, 16, 349 mitrailleur, 43–46, 51, 421n ammunition of, 43 design of, 43–44 Fosbery on, 44–45, 55–56 in Franco-Prussian War, 45–46 production of, 43 secrecy of, 43–44 tactical uses of, 45–46 Model 1873, 60 Model 1895, 108, 111, 145 Modern Traveler, The (Belloc), 103 Molot joint stock company, 400 Molotov, Vyacheslav, 212n, 219n, 221 Molotov cocktails, 219 Montigny, Joseph, 43, 46, 55 Moore, Harold G., Jr., 294–95 Morning Post, 97 mortars, 11, 216, 246, 253, 367 of LRA, 379 in Vietnam, 264, 311, 313, 317 in World War I, 121, 123, 132, 267 Morton, A. C., 103 Morton, Oliver P., 29–30 Mosin-Nagant rifle: ammunition of, 169 in Hungarian revolution, 219 production and distribution of, 155, 169, 216–17, 219, 357 Mozambique flag, 15, 384 MP-5 (Maschinenpistole 5), 384n MP-18 (Maschinenpistole 18), 139–40, 163–64, 228 MP-43 (Maschinenpistole 43), 164 MPiK (Maschinen Pistole Kalashnikov), 16, 247 mujahideen, 10, 13, 361–62 Mukhabarat, 349 Muller, Mark, 15 Mumbai, terrorist raid in, 340 Munich Olympics, terrorism at, 337–40, 350–52, 443n Museveni, Yoweri, 374, 379 musket balls, 27, 33 muzzle velocity, 167, 198, 252–53, 284, 291, 293, 383 My Life (Maxim), 135 Nadezhda, 1–2 Nagasaki, 1, 144 Nagorno-Karabakh, war for, 408 Nagy, Imre, 237–39 arrest and execution of, 239, 437n Hungarian revolution and, 222–24, 226, 238 and Hungary’s attempt to withdraw from Warsaw Pact, 237 Napoleon III, Emperor of France, 43–45 Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 216, 349, 358 Nasution, Abdul Haris, 258 National Firearms Act, 18, 236 National Rifle Association (NRA), 298 National Security Council, 237 Native Americans, see Indian wars NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), 6, 169, 214, 249–50, 255–58, 352 automatic rifles used by, 256–58, 296, 364 FAL rifle distribution and, 364 M-16 and, 296 standardizing ammunition and arms of, 255–57, 275, 296, 436n, 444n Nature, 54 Navy, Union, 30 Navy, U.S., 88, 110, 272, 314–16 Gatling gun and, 40, 52–54 Vietnam and, 264, 315–16 Ndebele, 86–87, 103 needle gun (zundnadelgewehr), 42 Netherlands, 40, 246, 400 and AK-47 production and distribution, 250, 257–59 New York Times: on Civil War draft protests, 31–32 on Gatling gun, 47 Maxim’s article in, 135, 423n New York Tribune, 32 New York University, 230 Nez Percé, 61–62 Nicholas II, Czar of Russia, 113, 165, 170 Nickelson, Alfred J., 263–64, 267, 316–18, 324 Nikitin, Grigory I., 243 NIPSMVO (Research and Proving Grounds for Firearms and Mortars), 143–48, 256 AK-47 testing at, 199–201, 205 and AK and AK-type rifle design and development, 144, 146–48, 159–60, 187, 189–91, 202, 205, 345 closure of, 345–46 Kalashnikov at, 143–48, 183–87 NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs), 156, 158, 166 Nobel, Alfred, 390 Gatling’s quarrels with, 51–52, 55, 74 Maxim’s quarrels with, 74 Nonte, George, 297 Nordenfelt, Thorsten, 86 Nordenfelt gun, 75 automatic, 109 competition of, 53, 83–84, 86 tests and demonstrations of, 53, 84 Norinco, 399 North Atlantic Treaty Organization, see NATO North Korea, see Korea, Democratic People’s Republic of NRA (National Rifle Association), 298 nuclear programs: of Soviet Union, 1–5, 148, 203, 359–60, 407–8 of U.S., 1, 4–5, 144, 272 nuclear war, 4, 271 Nugent, Edward, 35, 420n Ocira, Walter, 337 October Revolution, 156, 167, 170, 193, 351 Okwera, Jimmy, 372–73 Okwera, Patrick, 372–73 Okwonga, Dennis, 379 Olivier, Alfred G., 285–88 Omar, Mullah Mohammed, 386–87 Omdurman: casualties in, 98–102 fighting at, 97–102, 107–9, 119, 124, 129–30, 165, 252, 255 Maxim guns at, 97–102, 107–8, 124, 165, 252 “On the Personality Cult and Its Consequences” (Khrushchev), 244 Operations Research Office, 254 Ottoman Empire, 42 Owen, J.

The Social Life of Money
by Nigel Dodd
Published 14 May 2014

This taking defines financial capitalism, wherein the logic of primitive accumulation connects to later theories of imperialism and finance capital (Harvey 2006: xvii). According to Harvey, it is the role of the state in this process (accumulation by dispossession) that presents the greatest analytical challenge for Marxism. The basic ingredients of such an analysis can be found in Marx’s own treatment of the centralization of capital, as joint stock companies and monopolies and cartels develop to curtail capital’s anarchic qualities. Engels provides further insight, arguing that the state eventually becomes the official representative of capitalist society. This notion is subsequently elaborated by Hilferding and Lenin as finance capital, i.e., a unification of banking and productive capital (Harvey 2006: 137).

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Proudhon described the Bank of the People as the translation into economic language of the principles that had underwritten modern democracy and the French Revolution: liberty, equality, and fraternity (Proudhon 1927: 94). The Bank of the People promised to be a realization of the financial formula of the principle of reciprocity itself. Although Proudhon intended that the Bank of the People would eventually be turned into a joint-stock company, in the first instance it had to operate as a partnership, with a general manager, a supervising council consisting of thirty delegates, and a general assembly with one thousand members. Should the Bank of the People fail, assets would be divided “among those who are entitled to them” (Proudhon 1927: 112).

What Went Wrong: How the 1% Hijacked the American Middle Class . . . And What Other Countries Got Right
by George R. Tyler
Published 15 Jul 2013

We are now looking at one of the greatest real estate busts of all time.”8 History teaches that such deregulation invariably creates speculative bubbles that just as inevitably burst—whether in medieval Barcelona, eighteenth-century Paris and Scotland, or Wall Street in 1932 or 2008, destroying the savings of thousands or millions. The American Tradition: Don’t Trust Corporations The danger posed by regulatory capture was a great concern of our Founding Fathers and influenced their attitude toward corporations. Continental Europe was the site of all three pivotal elements comprising modern financial economics: joint stock companies, banks conducting fractional reserve lending, and stock exchanges. Each was essentially in place around the time settlers reached Jamestown. That allowed greedy sovereigns and schemers during the Colonial era to profit on a mass scale from the opportunities offered by credit. Perhaps the most famous bubble was the 1636 Tulip Mania that caused the Dutch to wildly bid up prices—some writers suggest even so high that the value of one bulb could feed a merchant ship’s crew for one year; woe the unfortunate sailor who munched one, mistaking it for an onion.9 In the eighteenth century, the Mississippi Scheme in France and the South Sea Bubble in England caused 1720 to be a particularly bad year for deregulation—worse even than the Great Depression.

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Here is how The Times of London lamented its disappearance in 1874: “It accomplished a work such as in the whole history of the human race no other company every attempted and as such is likely to attempt in the years to come.”14 Informed by this flagrant example of corporate excess, the historical record suggests that distrust of joint stock companies is why founding documents excluded the concept. Indeed, it was Thomas Jefferson’s hope that the collective wisdom and power of representative government would prove able to eliminate “the excesses of the monied interests.”15 His hope was dashed as early as 1816. With the corrupting influence on the young Republic of joint stock firms already evident, Jefferson declared, “I hope we shall … crush in its birth the aristocracy of monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”16 The Founders were so distrustful of corporations that the only notion of collective risk they endorsed was that of public entities pursuing purely public goals, as explained by Baruch College historian Brian Murphy: “Americans inherited the legal form of the corporation from Britain, where it was bestowed as a royal privilege on certain institutions, or more often, used to organize municipal governments.

Branded Beauty
by Mark Tungate
Published 11 Feb 2012

This resulted in a new Art Deco logo in the shape of a camellia, and a range of fragrances in packaging with distinctive arabesque graphics. The company established a reputation for supporting budding artists: in 1919 it opened a gallery at its headquarters; this still exists, having hosted more than 3,000 exhibitions and displayed the works of over 5,000 artists. Shiseido was incorporated as a joint stock company in 1927, with Shizo as its first president. Over the coming years, it followed five management principles. They were: 1) quality above all – absolute excellence is pursued in everything created; 2) coexistence and co-prosperity – everyone associated with Shiseido must benefit in a consequent way; 3) respect for consumers; 4) corporate stability – respect for the company’s past achievements and choice of intelligent goals for the future; and 5) sincerity – loyalty and honesty are the fundamental principles of business.

Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States
by James C. Scott
Published 21 Aug 2017

“Booty capitalism” simply means, in the case of war, a military campaign the purpose of which is profit. In one form, a group of warlords might hatch a plan to invade another small realm, with both eyes fixed on the loot in, say, gold, silver, livestock, and prisoners to be seized. It was a “joint-stock company,” the business of which was plunder. Depending on the soldiers, horses, and arms that each of the conspirators contributes to the enterprise, the prospective proceeds might be divided proportionally to each participant’s investment. The enterprise is, of course, fraught, inasmuch as the plotters (unless they are merely financial backers) potentially risk their lives.

The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being
by William Davies
Published 11 May 2015

There is no reason why administration of this nature should be handled by the state directly, as so many neoliberal regimes have more recently discovered. Anticipating Thatcherism and workfare nearly two centuries beforehand, one of Bentham’s policy recommendations was for the state to establish a National Charity Company (a joint stock company, modelled on the East India Company), which would alleviate poverty by employing hundreds of thousands of people in privately managed ‘industry houses’.21 His proposal for the Panopticon also included a recommendation for private firms to build and run the prisons, with a license provided by the state.

CultureShock! Egypt: A Survival Guide to Customs and Etiquette (4th Edition)
by Susan L. Wilson
Published 20 Dec 2011

SETTING UP A BUSINESS Several types of business organisations exist in Egypt, generally in the form of incorporated companies, partnerships and sole proprietorships. Foreigners are rarely interested in the unincorporated forms used by Egyptian traders. Most foreign investors choose the Limited Liability Company, known as a WLL (with limited liability). The Joint Stock Company (Shareholder Company) is the most commonly used form of corporate business entity in Egypt. Foreign investors may carry on business in Egypt through a branch office. However, this provides no tax advantage. Companies whose sole interest is the exportation of goods to Egypt must generally appoint a local agent who must be an Egyptian national or company.

The New Rules of War: Victory in the Age of Durable Disorder
by Sean McFate
Published 22 Jan 2019

When the super-rich become superpowers, what will it look like? The British East India Company may prove instructive. For all the power wielded today by the world’s largest corporations—whether ExxonMobil, Walmart, or Google—they are tame beasts compared with the British East India Company. Founded in 1600 as a joint stock company, it became the greatest corporation in history and the original corporate raider. One of the very first Indian words to enter the English language was the Hindustani slang for plunder: “loot.” In its 275-year run, the company conquered India for the British crown, although at times it was hard to distinguish who served whom.

About Time: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks
by David Rooney
Published 16 Aug 2021

Antwerp and London had had exchanges since the sixteenth century where goods and money were traded, but Amsterdam was the first of a new kind of exchange: what became the modern securities exchange. As well as being a place to trade in commodities like salt or hides, people could also buy and sell financial assets. It started out as a place to buy and sell shares in the Dutch East India Company, an early joint-stock company and the first with freely tradable shares, but soon was used to trade other company shares, futures contracts and insurance policies as well as becoming the place to go for information about the state of the markets. The financial market had arrived, but its products, and the prices paid for them, were time-dependent.

The Enablers: How the West Supports Kleptocrats and Corruption - Endangering Our Democracy
by Frank Vogl
Published 14 Jul 2021

According to the Oxford English Dictionary this word was rarely heard outside the plains of north India until the late eighteenth century, when it suddenly became a common term across Britain.” The British, challenged by the French, set about the mass looting of India. The vehicle used was the first major multinational publicly listed joint stock company, whose shares were widely held: The British East India Company. Its purpose was to plunder India to enrich wealthy Englishman. For many years, it succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of its shareholders. Ethics never entered the minds of the financiers. Their goal was profit. The company formed a powerful militia that killed thousands of people and whose commanders would return to Britain with vast wealth.

Stealth of Nations
by Robert Neuwirth
Published 18 Oct 2011

It’s a great economic fantasy: the master unwittingly shares everything equally with his slaves; lords and ladies with their servants; royalty with the plebes; bosses with their workers; and capitalism is really communism. But Smith must have known that it wasn’t true. Even in his time, the rich didn’t restrict their consumption to little more than the poor (King George II received an annual allotment of almost £900,000 from the national treasury to support his retinue, while the average clerk at a joint stock company earned perhaps £200 a year and the average laborer more likely on the order of £50) and, left to their own devices, didn’t ensure that the necessities of life were apportioned equally among all (otherwise there would have been no need for the aristocracy to pass the Poor Laws, which treated unemployment and poverty as crimes rather than as consequences of other people’s economic decisions).

Let them eat junk: how capitalism creates hunger and obesity
by Robert Albritton
Published 31 Mar 2009

Second, the mobilization and concentration of social savings through institutions, such as banks and stock markets, that grant credit to capital, also facilitate concentration into larger units. 44 L E T T H E M E AT J U N K In order to understand something like the “merger movement” of the late nineteenth century, however, we need to move to midrange theory and historical analysis, because many of the causal factors are phase-specific and cannot therefore be derived from capital in the abstract and in general. In England, for example, the leading capitalist power in the world until the late nineteenth century, the corporate form had been legally constrained since the burst of the South Sea Bubble in 1720, which nearly bankrupted the country.39 Giving the limited-liability joint stock company the legal go-ahead was a prerequisite for the merger movement of the late nineteenth century. Other causal factors or conditions of existence of the merger movement would include: • • • • • • • • • the development of financial institutions, like banks and stock markets the increasing movement of capital into resource extraction and heavy industry where economies of scale are important protective tariffs and dumping government spending on infrastructure and military build-ups the need to control a more militant work force the need for corporations to influence government policy better transportation and communication technologies the increasing importance of having a global reach in many industries for the cheapest resource extraction inter-imperialist rivalry.

Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World
by Steven Johnson
Published 15 Nov 2016

(A doorway stuck in the middle of the painting would break the spell.) He was granted a patent in 1787 for “an entire new Contrivance of Apparatus . . . for the Purpose of displaying Views of Nature at large.” After successful prototype exhibitions in Edinburgh, Barker relocated to London, where he formed a joint-stock company, backed by a handful of wealthy investors, and began scouting for a site in the West End where he could produce his immersive spectacle to full effect. He sent his son to the roof of the Albion mills near Blackfriars Bridge to sketch the skyline of London, the way the two of them had captured Edinburgh from Calton Hill.

World Economy Since the Wars: A Personal View
by John Kenneth Galbraith
Published 14 May 1994

The thousands who have devoted their attention to demonstrating his errors would have turned their attention elsewhere. But on much he was notably right, especially in relation to his time. The latter point is worth emphasizing. Most economic philosophers needed only to be right as regards their own time. No one defends Adam Smith in his conviction that corporations—joint stock companies—had no future. But Marxists required that Marx, with some adjustment, be right not only for his own time but for all time. This was a truly formidable test. And it was because Marx was so manifestly right on some things that few could suppress the insistent question: Might he not be right on other things—including the prospect for capitalism itself?

Grave New World: The End of Globalization, the Return of History
by Stephen D. King
Published 22 May 2017

Up the mountain, life for the sufferers is oddly pleasurable: ‘Viewed from up here, life in the flatlands below seemed strange and perverse.’ Few are willing to question the sanatorium’s business model: Director Behrens was neither the owner nor the proprietor of the sanatorium … above and beyond him stood invisible forces, made manifest only to a certain degree in the management office: a board of directors, a joint-stock company – and the stock would not be a bad thing to have because … juicy dividends were distributed annually to the shareholders, despite the high salaries paid the doctors and some very liberal business practices. And, in the guise of Ludovico Settembrini, an Italian who attempts to offer an optimistic voice of reason, Mann laughs at the Enlightenment values that persuaded many to believe that war in the twentieth century was impossible: As technology brought nature increasingly under its control by creating new lines of communication – developing networks of roads and telegraph lines – and by triumphing over climatic conditions, it was also proving to be the most dependable means by which to bring nations closer together, furthering their knowledge of one another, paving the way for people-to-people exchanges, destroying prejudices, and leading at last to the universal brotherhood of nations.

I Never Knew That About London
by Christopher Winn
Published 3 Oct 2007

Ratcliffe, meaning ‘red cliff’, was a natural landing place and harbour from where, in 1553, SIR HUGH WILLOUGHBY led an expedition to try and discover the north-east passage to China, round the north of Russia. He perished in Lapland, but one of his company, STEPHEN BOROUGH, reached Russia and returned to England having helped establish THE WORLD’S FIRST JOINT STOCK COMPANY, THE MUSCOVY COMPANY, to facilitate trade between Britain and Russia. His younger brother, WILLIAM BOROUGH, became a hero in the defeat of the Spanish Armada. The fourth explorer was SIR MARTIN FROBISHER, who led three expeditions to find the North West Passage and duly discovered Baffin Island.

When the Money Runs Out: The End of Western Affluence
by Stephen D. King
Published 17 Jun 2013

This difficulty must fall somewhere and must necessarily be severely felt by a large portion of mankind.2 As it turned out, Malthus wrote his Essay at just the wrong time. The nineteenth century witnessed the arrival of the Industrial Revolution, an extraordinary leap forward in economic and financial affairs. New steam-related technologies emerged to deliver enormous productivity gains. Financial innovations – the growth of the joint-stock company, the development of banks and other financial institutions – allowed savings to be channelled more effectively into the new investment opportunities. Back-breaking work slowly disappeared, the children of labourers – on the land and in the factories – became the aspirational middle classes and per capita incomes went through the roof: between 1820 and 1900, the incomes of British citizens rose 167 per cent.

The Big Oyster
by Mark Kurlansky
Published 20 Dec 2006

Scribner’s noted with irony that the only really good market building was at the Manhattan Market, which was about to close. The market building’s nine spires made of colorful slate and ground glass M a k i n g Yo u r O w n B e d • 197 stood over the Hudson—the only ornament on the Hudson waterfront. The market had been built by a joint stock company that by the 1870s was collapsing and most of the 767 stands were empty. It would all vanish in time. Bridges would put an end to the allnight street traffic of the ferries, and larger steamships would dock in the deeper water of the Hudson, abandoning the East River as a working waterfront.

More From Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources – and What Happens Next
by Andrew McAfee
Published 30 Sep 2019

The Watt steam engine and its descendants added to that list a set of machines that drew on fossil fuels such as coal and profoundly changed our relationship with our planet. The new power-generating machines didn’t create the Industrial Revolution entirely on their own—this also required many other kinds of innovations including joint-stock companies, patents and other types of intellectual property, and the diffusion throughout society of scientific and technical knowledge that had previously largely been reserved for elites—but without them there would have been nothing that merited the term revolution. The title of William Rosen’s book about the history of steam power is apt; it was The Most Powerful Idea in the World.

Deep Value
by Tobias E. Carlisle
Published 19 Aug 2014

Contents Preface ix Acknowledgments xv About the Author xvii CHAPTER 1 The Icahn Manifesto 1 CHAPTER 2 Contrarians at the Gate 19 CHAPTER 3 Warren Buffett: Liquidator to Operator 35 CHAPTER 4 The Acquirer’s Multiple 53 CHAPTER 5 A Clockwork Market 77 CHAPTER 6 Trading in Glamour: The Conglomerate Era 99 CHAPTER 7 Catch a Falling Knife 119 CHAPTER 8 The Art of the Corporate Raid 151 CHAPTER 9 How Hannibal Profits From His Victories 169 vii viii CONTENTS CHAPTER 10 Applied Deep Value 187 Index 217 Preface “The directors of such [joint-stock] companies, however, being the managers rather of other people’s money than of their own, it cannot well be expected, that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which the partners in a private copartnery frequently watch over their own.” —Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776) D eep value is investment triumph disguised as business disaster.

Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World
by Gaia Vince
Published 22 Aug 2022

Sawiris compiled a list of twenty-three private Greek islands, owned by investors willing to sell to him, and took it to Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR. His proposal was that the refugees would help build temporary developments, which would eventually be used for tourism once the Syrian conflict was over. Sawiris planned a joint stock company with US$100 million in capital that would receive public donations. To date, nothing has happened with this project, but as a temporary response to extreme events that generate sudden waves of migration, a combination of private investors and public support could be used to create refuges on private islands.

Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism
by Ha-Joon Chang
Published 26 Dec 2007

His main backer was the Duc d’Orléans, Louis XIV’s nephew and the then regent for the child king, Louis XV, the great-grandson of Louis XIV. In 1718, Banque Générale became Banque Royale, with its notes guaranteed by the king. In the meantime, Law bought the Compagnie du Mississippi (the Mississippi Company) in 1717 and floated it as a joint-stock company. The company absorbed other rival trading companies and, in 1719, became Compagnie Perpetuelle des Indes, although it was still commonly called Compagnie du Mississippi. The company had a royal monopoly on all overseas trading.With Law launching high-profile settlement schemes in Louisiana (French North America) and generating rumours vastly exaggerating their prospects, a speculative frenzy on the company’s stocks started in the summer of 1719.

The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters
by Rose George
Published 13 Oct 2008

A great rough sort of business Throughout the late nineteenth century, plenty of sewage farming systems were proposed to the Metropolitan Board of London. In fact, wrote the anonymous author of one report, “Had the application of sewage to agricultural purposes been as easy and as profitable as some loud-talking and fluently-writing people pretend, it would long since have formed the foundation of more than one joint-stock company.” The Agricultural Value of the Sewage of London Examined in Reference to the Principle Systems Admitted to the Metropolitan Board of Works (London: Edward Stanford & Co., 1865), pp. 17–18, 38. Stench On July 11, 2007, a Mogden resident called Fullalove sent the following complaint to Thames Water: “FOUL YUK STINK STENCH I CANNOT BREATHE IT IS YOUR FAULT.”

Bad Samaritans: The Guilty Secrets of Rich Nations and the Threat to Global Prosperity
by Ha-Joon Chang
Published 4 Jul 2007

His main backer was the Duc d’Orléans, Louis XIV’s nephew and the then regent for the child king, Louis XV, the great-grandson of Louis XIV. In 1718, Banque Générale became Banque Royale, with its notes guaranteed by the king. In the meantime, Law bought the Compagnie du Mississippi (the Mississippi Company) in 1717 and floated it as a joint-stock company. The company absorbed other rival trading companies and, in 1719, became Compagnie Perpetuelle des Indes, although it was still commonly called Compagnie du Mississippi. The company had a royal monopoly on all overseas trading. With Law launching high-profile settlement schemes in Louisiana (French North America) and generating rumours vastly exaggerating their prospects, a speculative frenzy on the company’s stocks started in the summer of 1719.

The Basque History of the World
by Mark Kurlansky
Published 4 Jul 2010

Basqueland was no longer to be a rugged enclave of isolated valleys. The Basques were not only the leading industrialists but also the first modern bankers in Spain, providing the capital for growing industry. First came insurance companies in Bilbao, which underwrote shipping. In the 1850s, new laws allowed joint stock companies to finance banking and railroads. In 1857, the Banco de Bilbao was founded by the leading industrial and commercial families of the city to finance industry and infrastructure. Though hailed as a great success when it opened in 1863, the Bilbao-Tudela train line was bankrupt three years later, and the intervention by the newly formed Banco de Bilbao averted a severe economic crisis.

The Last Kings of Shanghai: The Rival Jewish Dynasties That Helped Create Modern China
by Jonathan Kaufman
Published 14 Sep 2020

The day before Christmas 1901, they staged a business coup, changing the financial structure of the company to effectively squeeze out Flora. David Sassoon and Co. announced it was changing management of the firm from a private partnership of the Sassoon brothers and their sister-in-law Flora to a joint stock company—with all the stock in the new company held by the Sassoon brothers. One brother would become chairman; three others would become directors. The new head of the Bombay office would be a longtime male family aide who had been advising Flora in recent years. Flora was cut out completely. Rumors flew around Bombay that Flora would form her own company now that she’d been forced out of the family business.

How to Own the World: A Plain English Guide to Thinking Globally and Investing Wisely
by Andrew Craig
Published 6 Sep 2015

It is not an exaggeration to say that without their invention, the Industrial Revolution and the enormous technological and social developments of the last few centuries, which have made us all substantially wealthier, would have been impossible. But why? Well, because their creation enabled large groups of people to pool resources and spread risk like never before. The “joint-stock company” was brought into existence in the Netherlands and Britain in the early seventeenth century in order to fund the exploration and exploitation of the East Indies. People in Europe had acquired a taste for all things Eastern, but getting there and back was extremely dangerous. A voyage could take years and there was always the risk that an entire fleet of ships might be lost on the way.

The Trains Now Departed: Sixteen Excursions Into the Lost Delights of Britain's Railways
by Michael Williams
Published 6 May 2015

Aubrey Beardsley was even more ecstatic when he wrote in 1920, ‘I can never understand why people should seek Egypt in search of the Sphinx and the Pyramids when they can visit Euston station and survey the wonders of the stone arch.’ But that was not all. The railway’s slogan, ‘The Premier Line’, was no hyperbole, since by mid-century the London & Birmingham had become, through its various amalgamations, the London & North Western Railway and the largest joint-stock company in the world. In 1846, by way of celebration, Philip Hardwick, with the aid of his son Philip C. Hardwick, was commissioned to design the Great Hall of Euston station. This magnificent chamber was built in the Italian Renaissance style, and influenced by the Berlin Opera House and the Palazzo Massimi in Rome.

The Emperor's New Road: How China's New Silk Road Is Remaking the World
by Jonathan Hillman
Published 28 Sep 2020

David Michael Gould, Critical Connections: Promoting Economic Growth and Resilience in Europe and Central Asia (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2018), 203, https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/30245/9781464811579.pdf?sequence=6&isAllowed=y. 19. KTZ-Freight Transportation Joint Stock Company, “The Volume of Rail Traffic between Kazakhstan and China Grew by 33%” (in Russian), May 16, 2018, https://www.ktzh-gp.kz/ru/media/news/news_main_section_ru/11560/. 20. Vitaly Lobyrev, Andrey Tikhomirov, Taras Tsukarev, and Evgeny Vinokurov, Belt and Road Transport Corridors: Barriers and Investments (Saint Petersburg, Russia: Eurasian Development Bank, 2018), 22, https://eabr.org/upload/iblock/245/EDB-Centre_2018_Report-50_Transport-Corridors_Barriers-and-Investments_ENG.pdf. 21.

Why the Dutch Are Different: A Journey Into the Hidden Heart of the Netherlands: From Amsterdam to Zwarte Piet, the Acclaimed Guide to Travel in Holland
by Ben Coates
Published 23 Sep 2015

The new company’s geographical focus would be reflected in its name: the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, or Dutch East India Company. Formally established in 1602, it quickly became known by its more easily pronounceable initials: the VOC. It was, according to modern business school textbooks, the world’s first major joint-stock company and first multinational corporation. The Company even had what its modern equivalent might call an in-house thinktank or intelligence unit, collecting reams of information from outposts around the world and analysing it to produce new maps, charts and trading schedules. Given a free hand to fight wars, dispense justice, establish forts and agree treaties in the countries where it traded, the VOC was almost as powerful as a sovereign state.

Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire
by Rebecca Henderson
Published 27 Apr 2020

In others, the potential for political inclusion to stimulate economic growth and to drive trade led governments to share power as a way of increasing their ability to thrive in the face of military threats.21 For example, in medieval Venice, a contractual institution called the colleganza—a precursor to joint stock companies—enabled wealthy financiers to provide capital to traveling merchants for long-distance trade. Profits from the challenging journey were shared, providing traders, who were chosen on the basis of merit rather than social standing, with the potential to accumulate significant wealth. In time, this economic inclusion drove political inclusion, as the growing merchant class placed constraints on Venice’s ruler (the Doge) by eliminating hereditary rule and creating a parliament.

Inheritance
by Leo Hollis

Trading at £128, it made the claim that there were big profits on the horizon with its South American routes. By the next month, the stock price had risen to £175. The following month, the government accepted a proposal for the Company to take on more of the national debt and the price rocketed up to £555 in May. In June, an Act of Parliament made it law that all joint stock companies had to gain a royal charter, knocking out any potential competition. At the same time, a new market emerged to take advantage of this investor boom. London became consumed with financial speculation. That summer, the price reached a peak of £1,050. But just as stocks rocket up, they can plummet with similar velocity.

Dear Chairman: Boardroom Battles and the Rise of Shareholder Activism
by Jeff Gramm
Published 23 Feb 2016

UNLIMITED VIABILITY American Express stock fell by more than 50% in the months following Allied’s collapse. Investors’ concerns about the company’s exposure to Tino’s swindle were exacerbated because shareholders did not have limited liability. American Express was the last major public company to be organized as a joint-stock company, meaning anyone who owned shares could be liable for the company’s debts and obligations. Warren Buffett explained this dynamic to The Snowball author, Alice Schroeder: So every trust department in the United States panicked. I remember the Continental Bank held over five percent of the company, and all of a sudden not only do they see that the trust accounts were going to have stock worth zero, but they could get assessed.

Who Owns This Sentence?: A History of Copyrights and Wrongs
by David Bellos and Alexandre Montagu
Published 23 Jan 2024

Constitution that empowers Congress to pass laws “to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries”. Authors and inventors are people, whereas “employers” may be entities – joint stock companies, partnerships and corporations of different kinds. To this day, there has been no challenge to the constitutionality of U.S. copyright laws, all of which build on the wording of paragraph 62 of the 1909 act. The consequences of the formal change in the meaning of the word author – which admittedly began long before and is implied even by the Berne Convention of 1886 – have been far-reaching: it has simply become “a term of the art for the proprietor of statutory rights”.145 Today, the vast majority of commercially viable copyrights belong not to people, but to large, impersonal empires in the book, film, music and software fields – and in the mangled language of copyright law, these entities are now the authors of the works they distribute, in exactly the same way that members of the Stationers Company were the owners of their copies in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England.

The Railways: Nation, Network and People
by Simon Bradley
Published 23 Sep 2015

There he set about developing a structure of clearly defined responsibilities under salaried junior managers, with firm rules, disciplinary structures and systems of fines and rewards for the men. When the Grand Junction was merged with other lines to form the new London & North Western company, he retained his senior role. The LNWR was the largest joint-stock company of its time, with a capitalisation of over £29 million in 1851. There were no business schools to teach the difference between management and direction (or, to put it in military language, between tactics and strategy), and the captain’s time at the Grand Junction showed that even the ablest minds within the railway world had yet to determine where that boundary should be drawn.

…

In that sense, the systems of external auditing now generally in place owe their genesis to the railways’ custom. One instance is the requirement under the Regulation of Railways Act (1868) to publish a standardised set of annual accounts. Having established a legal procedure, the same rules were later extended to other big joint-stock companies. Leading figures in the new profession did much of their most demanding work in the railways’ service. Victorian accountants were like barristers or surgeons, dependent on personal reputation and individual appointments. Deloitte (1818–98) was one such man; among the younger generation, the rising star of accountancy was Edwin Waterhouse (1841–1917).

The Great Race: The Global Quest for the Car of the Future
by Levi Tillemann
Published 20 Jan 2015

However, again and again the company’s business model returned to subsidies offered by the Japanese military for domestic production of trucks.18 By the late 1920s, its cars were no longer called DAT, but “son of DAT”—Datsun. (The word “sun” was swapped for “son” in order to avoid using the Japanese homophone for “loss.”) Then in 1934, Kaishinsha was acquired by the Nippon Industries Joint Stock Company zaibatsu (Nippon Sangyo Kabushiki Kaisha), and it became simply Nissan.19 Zaibatsus were massive conglomerates that provided the backbone of Japan’s industrial growth during the interwar period, but capital requirements of the auto industry were such that soon Nissan too was in severe financial straits.

Paper Promises
by Philip Coggan
Published 1 Dec 2011

Had the scheme been kept on a modest scale, with bank notes backed by gold and silver, French economic growth might indeed have been boosted over the long run. Trade would have increased, and so would the monarch’s tax revenues, making the debts easier to service. But the regent wanted, and Law had promised, quicker results. The aim was to repay the monarch’s debt. This involved creating a joint-stock company, the Compagnie d’Occident, to exploit France’s colonial possessions in the Mississippi basin. At the time, the Dutch and British were having success in exploiting the ‘spice islands’ through their East Indies companies. France aimed to do the same thing in America. Again, given enough time, the Compagnie d’Occident (or the Mississippi Company, as it became known) might have been successful.

The Meritocracy Myth
by Stephen J. McNamee
Published 17 Jul 2013

We now turn our attention to the flip side of declining self-employment: the growth of corporate production and employment. Swimming with the Sharks: The Ascent of the Modern Corporation At the time of the American Revolution, corporations did not exist. During colonial times, a handful of joint stock companies, such as the East India Company, the Massachusetts Bay Company, and the Hudson Bay Company, were chartered by the British Crown to reap the bounty of the New World (Derber 1998). With the establishment of American independence, a few establishments were granted corporate charters by states and sometimes the federal government to provide specific public services, such as roads, bridges, colleges, or canals.

A Pelican Introduction Economics: A User's Guide
by Ha-Joon Chang
Published 26 May 2014

Marx was the first economist to pay attention to the differences between the two key institutions of capitalism – the hierarchical, planned order of the firm and the (formally) free, spontaneous order of the market. He described capitalist firms as islands of rational planning in an anarchic sea of the market. Moreover, he foresaw that large-scale enterprises owned by multitudes of shareholders with limited liability – which were called ‘joint stock companies’ in his time – would become the leading actors of capitalism, at a time when most free-market economists were still against the very idea of limited liability. Unlike most other economists, Marx and some of his followers have paid attention to work for its own sake, rather than as a disutility that people have to put up with in order to earn money to pay for their consumption.

Railways & the Raj: How the Age of Steam Transformed India
by Christian Wolmar
Published 3 Oct 2018

It would not only be the elite who would benefit: ‘The Eurasian and European clerks and mechanics who worked on the plains could settle their families in the hills and visit them frequently with the aid of cheap second and third class return tickets.’16 (Eurasian referred to people of mixed descent, usually an English father and an Indian mother, but over time came to mean any person with some European blood.) By moving away from the plains, where the debilitating climate thwarted British attempts to impose their way of life on the subcontinent, Clarke argued that ‘in the hill stations everything from joint-stock companies, appropriate domestic influences and Christianity to a militia to defend India from internal and external attack, would flourish’.17 From these hilltop enclaves, whose likeness to a medieval castle towering above the lands of the local peasantry was not coincidental, Britain would rule India.

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century
by Rodrigo Aguilera
Published 10 Mar 2020

Finally, for those readers who still remain concerned about the potential disruption involved in moving towards an economy where employees rather than capitalists or the state control the means of production, it is worth recalling the extent to which many of the features that we now consider essential to a modern, capitalist economy were once heavily criticized. By capitalists. For example, Adam Smith was no fan of the joint-stock company, foreseeing the conflicts of interest between absentee ownership and management that would obsess a generation of business theorists two centuries after The Wealth of Nations was published. As with much of his work, statements like this have been conveniently forgotten by economic liberals, and especially libertarians, who would prefer to paint him as an absolutist defender of free markets and free enterprise.: The directors of such companies, however, being the managers rather of other people’s money than of their own, it cannot well be expected, that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which the partners in a private copartnery frequently watch over their own.

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World
by Malcolm Harris
Published 14 Feb 2023

Agricultural profits lay in added value, not in growing stuff to eat per se, which made California’s planter-processor-bank-university associations the model for making money off of food. But there was something missing from their groups. Their problem was labor. The Age of Expropriation At least as much as Leland Stanford was, Herbert Hoover was a creation of the joint-stock company. These associations put capital to work without robbing investors of liquidity, which allowed owners to leverage enough money to accomplish epic feats on the state’s behalf, like the transcontinental railroad and the Hoover Dam. Despite his misspent years of stock jobbery, the Chief worked hard to structure real long-term outlets for investment capital during his Roaring Twenties, succeeding epically in Southern California, where his relationships were strong and the region remained comparatively undeveloped.

…

It was a convenient cover for what he was really up to: Operation Tipped Kettle, a deal with the Israelis to ship over $15 million in Soviet-made weapons confiscated in Lebanon to the contras in Nicaragua via a private channel.67 In 1983, Hakim hired Secord at STC, and they cofounded the Stanford Technology Trading Group International subsidiary as, of course, a joint-stock company. They split the shares 50-50.68 STTGI—continually confused with STC, for many good reasons—broadened the firm’s covert Third World small-arms distribution activities with Secord’s help. Serving in Vietnam, Secord was part of a CIA apparatus that flew planeloads of gold into Laos and bribed tribal groups to join America’s efforts.

The Mark Inside: A Perfect Swindle, a Cunning Revenge, and a Small History of the Big Con
by Amy Reading
Published 6 Mar 2012

Moffat, Chaffee, Tabor, and Smith could simply sit in their downtown lairs, receive a steady stream of prospectors and engineers from the mountains who spieled about the invisible richness of their properties, and decide whom to buy out and enfold into their ongoing mining operations. But most entrepreneurs looking to finance the exploration and extraction of gold or silver formed joint-stock companies, hired promoters, and sent them to New York and Boston to chase down the money where it lived. The promoter would arrive in an eastern city with a prospectus carefully worded to appeal directly to the heart of the second-tier businessman, someone who admired the market manipulations of Jay Gould and Cornelius Vanderbilt in the newspapers but could not himself command enough capital to replicate those feats of enterprise and greed.

The Blockchain Alternative: Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy and Economic Theory
by Kariappa Bheemaiah
Published 26 Feb 2017

The reason for highlighting this distinction is because the central banks of most countries are independent enterprises and their monetary policy decisions do not have to be approved by a president or anyone else in the executive or legislative branches of government6 . The working model, which is identical for more advanced countries, is based on the model of the Bank of England, which was established in 1694 as a joint stock company to purchase government debt.7 Under this model, when a government needs money for carrying out its functions, they exchange bonds with the central bank. The central bank then creates and issues the money in exchange for the government bonds (T-Bills included) and interest. In this way the central bank works in unanimity with the government but still retains a relatively independent status.

Commuter City: How the Railways Shaped London
by David Wragg
Published 14 Apr 2010

The railways played an important part in the development of the British financial system, and it was their insatiable thirst for finance that placed great strains on the banking system, itself still to reach maturity, and which acted as a stimulus to the development of the stock market and the concept of the joint stock company and businesses that limited the liability of shareholders. The railways had an impact on London in other ways as well, for they had to be regulated and, strange as it may seem today when massive public subsidies are poured into the railways, they had to be taxed. Having a railway land on its doorstep was as big a godsend to a hard-pressed local authority in the nineteenth century as having a major airport would be today, but in the case of the railways, central government also saw its opportunity to raise revenue, and took it just as surely as in recent years it has begun to tax travellers by air.

Crude Volatility: The History and the Future of Boom-Bust Oil Prices
by Robert McNally
Published 17 Jan 2017

Williamson and Daum, American Petroleum Industry, 14–17. 10. Ibid., 74. 11. Nevins, Rockefeller, vol. I, 162. 12. This figure from Nevins, Rockefeller, vol. I, 147. 13. Nevins, Rockefeller, vol. I., 165. 14. Nevins, Rockefeller, vol. I, 166–68. Speculators traded in drilling leases, equities of joint-stock companies formed to hold leases, and eventually forerunners of today’s oil futures price contracts (Williamson and Daum, American Petroleum Industry, 121–27). 15. The first catastrophic explosion and fire at an oil well, in Rouseville, Pennsylvania, which claimed more than twenty drillers and onlookers, burned for three days before being extinguished (Derrick’s, vol.

The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge
by Matt Ridley

In 1776 Smith published his second book, The Wealth of Nations. In it he set out to champion a different evolutionary idea from that which he had set out in his Theory of Moral Sentiments. If God was not the cause of morality, was government the cause of prosperity? In Smith’s day, commerce was a tightly regulated business, with joint-stock companies chartered specifically and exclusively by the state to have monopolies, and mercantilist trade policies designed to promote certain kinds of foreign exports, not to mention professions strictly licensed by the government. In the cracks between the paving stones of regulation and dirigisme individuals could buy and sell, but pretty well nobody thought this was the source of prosperity.

Moneyland: Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule the World and How to Take It Back
by Oliver Bullough
Published 5 Sep 2018

According to Felipe Turover, a Spanish banker who advised Russia’s government on debt deals and provided many of the documents used by Skuratov and the Swiss investigators, Putin himself did particularly well from equivalent scams, thanks to a role he held in the Kremlin running Russia’s property portfolio. ‘In 1997, all possible kinds of front companies, joint-stock companies and limited companies were created. The majority of the most expensive property and other foreign assets was registered to these structures. That means foreign property arrived in the state’s hands in a thoroughly plucked form. And it was the current premier who did the plucking,’ Turover told a journalist from the respected Russian investigative publication Novaya Gazeta in late 1999, while Putin was still prime minister.

A Concise History of Modern India (Cambridge Concise Histories)
by Barbara D. Metcalf and Thomas R. Metcalf
Published 27 Sep 2006

Effective rule required not only resolving competition but also judgment about the conflicts with which to engage. During the first half of the eighteenth century Mughal power contracted, while those who had once been subordinate to the Mughals flourished. Among the new regional powers was a joint stock company of English traders, which, by century’s end, was poised to claim the mantle of the Mughals as ruler of the subcontinent. t h e ‘ fau lt l i n e s ’ o f m u g h a l c o n t ro l A cogent perspective on Aurangzeb as ruler comes from one Bhimsen, a Hindu Kayastha memoirist, who, in his final decades of service, acted as auditor and inspector for a Rajput noble.

The Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today
by Linda Yueh
Published 15 Mar 2018

Adam Smith may be the economist who named the ‘invisible hand’ that allowed the market to dictate what was produced and how it was priced, but he did not think highly of the services sector. A product of his time, he did not believe that services could produce output that was as valuable as that from a factory or a bakery. In fact, Smith didn’t condone much of what makes up the modern economy, for example he wasn’t in favour of joint-stock companies, which are the basis of modern-day corporations. His legacy continues to affect attitudes today. Even the way that national statistics are collected breaks down manufacturing data in great detail while aggregating much of services output. That’s probably also because it’s hard for statisticians to put a figure on what a consultant contributes while he sits at his computer or what a meeting adds to national output.

Seasteading: How Floating Nations Will Restore the Environment, Enrich the Poor, Cure the Sick, and Liberate Humanity From Politicians
by Joe Quirk and Patri Friedman
Published 21 Mar 2017

Here we see a microcosm of Renaissance Italy itself: Venice was rich, urban, and intensely aquatic, a center for commerce with no center of political power. This was the birthplace of modern business practices. By the early fourteenth century, Venetians had developed equity and mortgage instruments, bankruptcy laws, double-entry accounting, the first business schools, and risk management through limited liability joint stock companies that allowed poorer merchants to gain access to international trade, fostering a great deal of income mobility. A grandson of a slave established a dynasty of ruling elites, and a pirate became Pope. Little of this involved saintly behavior. Wealthy families engaged in conspiracies, bribes, and assassinations just as royal families did, but with no ultimate summit in the pyramid of state power, commerce was often more profitable than conquest.

Making It Happen: Fred Goodwin, RBS and the Men Who Blew Up the British Economy
by Iain Martin
Published 11 Sep 2013

After killing his opponent in a duel he escaped from prison in London, established the Banque de France, introduced paper money and created an enormous bubble that gulled French investors. His purchase, on behalf of the French government, of the Mississippi Company in Louisiana was designed to boost trade. It was inspired in part by the Company of Scotland and the mania for joint stock companies and trading in shares. Law fled France once his bubble burst. In Scotland too, periodically, restraint would also vanish in a miasma of financial innovation and greed. The Ayr Bank had liabilities of more than £1m and crashed spectacularly in 1772, stalling the Scottish economy for a while and ruining many farmers and merchants.

Green Philosophy: How to Think Seriously About the Planet
by Roger Scruton
Published 30 Apr 2014

When businesses are big enough they can cushion themselves against the negative side effects of their activity, and proceed as if all objections could be overcome by a consultant in ‘Corporate Social Responsibility’, without any change in the way things are done.192 The problem is as much one of institutional structure as one of size. No institutions have contributed more to the expansion of markets than limited liability and the joint stock company. Those two remarkable seventeenth-century inventions secured the preeminence of the Dutch and the British in international trade. They have done more to encourage free enterprise than virtually any other legal instruments by enabling small and vulnerable investors to risk their savings in business, without risking everything else.

Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism
by Harsha Walia
Published 9 Feb 2021

Walia exposes this story for what it is: a lie. The US, Canada, and Australia were not the creation of hardworking, plucky pioneers seeking a better, more democratic life for all but, rather, the product of the violence of capitalist expansion and racial ideology, armed settlers backed by joint stock companies, a colonial state apparatus, and capital in the form of kidnapped labor. Walia attends to the history of settler colonialism and its racist, patriarchal, and nationalist foundations, but she also understands the moment we’re in now and where we might be headed if we don’t fight back. The resurgence of right-wing nationalism, whether under Trump, Bolsonaro, Modi, Orbán, or Duterte, is not history repeating itself.

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life
by Adam Greenfield
Published 29 May 2017

In the DAO, we see the same pattern that we did in Bitcoin’s provisions for privacy: a technology brilliantly designed to be disruptive falters at its point of interface with everyday practice. Just like an “anonymous” Bitcoin user finding their privacy compromised the moment they try to turn their BTC into dollars or pounds, the investors in a DAO will have to reckon with the way power works in the world. Historically, the joint-stock company emerged as a technology to distribute risk. The earliest joint-stock enterprises, such as the Dutch East India Company, the Virginia Company and the South Sea Company, were set up to underwrite transoceanic colonization projects, ventures that by their nature both required heavy capitalization and involved an unpredictable (but certainly high) risk of failure.

The Rough Guide to Toronto
by Helen Lovekin and Phil Lee
Published 29 Apr 2006

After a mammoth voyage, the Nonsuch returned with a fantastic cargo of furs and this led to the incorporation of the Hudson’s Bay Company by Charles II on May 2, 1670. The Company was granted wide powers, including exclusive trading rights to the entire Hudson Bay watershed – to be called Rupert’s Land. The HBC was a joint-stock company, the shareholders annually electing a governor and committee to hire men, order trade goods and arrange fur auctions and shipping. By 1760, trading posts had been built at the mouths of all the major rivers flowing into the bay; these were commanded by factors, who took their policy orders from London.

The Dawn of Innovation: The First American Industrial Revolution
by Charles R. Morris
Published 1 Jan 2012

When Lowell returned to Boston, he set about organizing his Boston Manufacturing Company. Everything about it was bold. The War of 1812 was just underway, and Massachusetts mercantile houses were staring at economic disaster. (Lowell’s return ship, in fact, was taken by a British frigate, and he was briefly held in Nova Scotia.) It was created as a joint-stock company, an unusual form for the time, which preferred partnerships. The initial financing goal was enormous: $400,000, forty times more than the start-up investment in the first Brown-Almy-Slater spinning mill. But Lowell wanted to be absolutely sure of enough capital to carry the business through any reasonable early setbacks.

From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia
by Pankaj Mishra
Published 3 Sep 2012

‘The spirit of the military organization,’ Tokutomi Soh marvelled about Europe in 1887, ‘does not stop with just the military.’ Its influence was ‘extended to all corners of society’.55 As more than one Asian observer noted, European forms of political and military mobilization (conscript armies, efficient taxation, codified laws), financial innovations (capital-raising joint-stock companies) and information-rich public cultures of enquiry and debate fed upon each other to create a formidable and decisive advantage as Europe penetrated Asia. Individually, Europeans might be no more brave, innovative, sensitive or loyal than Asians, but as members of corporate groups, churches or governments, and as efficient users of scientific knowledge, they mustered more power than the wealthiest empires of Asia.

Extreme Economies: Survival, Failure, Future – Lessons From the World’s Limits
by Richard Davies
Published 4 Sep 2019

Buccaneer histories and tales: Henry Morgan, William Dampier and Lionel Wafer The first account that set out the life of the British buccaneer Henry Morgan was Exquemelin (1684); the accounts that influenced public opinion in Scotland were Dampier (1697) and Wafer (1699). Versions of all can be found online. Of the three, Wafer’s account is the most exciting and he gives lots of detail, including maps of Darien. The Company of Scotland and the Darien Plan The Company of Scotland was one of the world’s first ‘joint-stock’ companies (a public company in which individuals can invest) and was later known as the Darien Company. An excellent account of its formation, investors and goals is set out in Watt (2007). The Darien disaster The tragedy of the Darien expedition is set out in detail in the classic modern account by Prebble (1968).

Liars and Outliers: How Security Holds Society Together
by Bruce Schneier
Published 14 Feb 2012

Some people consider their morality to be central to their self-identity, while others consider it to be more peripheral. René Girard uses the term “spiritual geniuses” to describe the most moral of people. We also describe many of them as martyrs; being differently moral can be dangerous.5 Society, of course, wants the group interest to prevail. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs. Henry David Thoreau talks about how he went along with the group norm, despite what his morals told him: The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior.

Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business
by Rana Foroohar
Published 16 May 2016

That’s a direct result of the shift to limited liability banking, which began in the nineteenth century and continued well into the twentieth. Rich countries, hungry for capital to finance investment in railways, factories, and homes, decided to unleash the banking sector, by lifting regulation and allowing firms to operate not just as partnerships or joint stock companies in which each owner held ultimate responsibility for risk, but as limited liability entities in which no individual owner had to take responsibility if things went south. Instead, that duty fell to the government—and, ultimately, the taxpayers. At first banks themselves were skeptical about limited liability status.

Dr. Johnson's London: Coffee-Houses and Climbing Boys, Medicine, Toothpaste and Gin, Poverty and Press-Gangs, Freakshows and Female Education
by Liza Picard
Published 1 Jan 2000

After all, ‘the poor are a large as well as useful part of the community … they have a just claim to the protection of the rich … If affluence and independence could universally prevail, the benevolent would not experience the inexpressible pleasure of relieving the distressed.’1 The state did not yet concern itself with welfare. At parish level, the administration of the Poor Law left much to be desired. It was unlikely that an individual would ever again have the money and the inclination to found a charity on his own. So, despite the shadow over joint-stock companies since the South Sea Bubble had burst in 1720, the answer had to be a joint exercise of concerned individuals. By mid-century an Englishman could pride himself on ‘the many noble Foundations for the relief of the miserable and the friendless, [and] the large annual supplies from voluntary charities to these Foundations’.2 Foundlings Think of a pregnant girl without resources, employed in a job – almost certainly domestic service – which she will lose if she bears a child.

Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World
by Niall Ferguson
Published 1 Jan 2002

But Dutch merchants had been trading with India via the Cape of Good Hope since 1595. By 1596 they had firmly established themselves at Bantam, on the island of Java, from where the first consignments of Chinese tea destined for the European market were shipped in 1606. Moreover, their company was a permanent joint stock company, unlike the English company, which did not become permanent until 1650. Despite being founded two years after the English one, the Dutch company was swiftly able to dominate the lucrative spice trade with the Moluccan islands of Indonesia, once a Portuguese monopoly. The Dutch scale of business was simply bigger: they were able to send out nearly five times as many ships to Asia as the Portuguese and twice as many as the English.

The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street
by Justin Fox
Published 29 May 2009

The South Sea Company collapsed in such a bubble of speculation in 1720 that the British parliament banned the creation of such entities—characterized by dispersed shareholders whose liability for the company’s debt was limited to the value of their shares. In 1776, Adam Smith argued that the “joint-stock company,” as the corporation was then known, had proved an unmitigated disaster. “The directors of such companies,…being the managers of other people’s money than of their own, it cannot well be expected, that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which the partners in a private copartnery frequently watch over their own,” he wrote in the Wealth of Nations.

Stocks for the Long Run, 4th Edition: The Definitive Guide to Financial Market Returns & Long Term Investment Strategies
by Jeremy J. Siegel
Published 18 Dec 2007

As of October 2007, its market value has soared to $438 billion, second in the world to Exxon Mobil. 2. OAO Gazprom (Russia) Gazprom, Russia’s largest company, is an oil and gas giant that controls 25 percent of the world oil reserves. Its revenues account for 25 percent of the Russian government’s tax revenues. Initially a state-owned natural gas monopoly, Gazprom was converted into a joint-stock company in CHAPTER 10 Global Investing and the Rise of China, India, and the Emerging Markets 183 1993. The state first had a 40 percent share, which was boosted to 51 percent in 2003. Gazprom offered 1 percent of its stock to foreigners in 1996. 3. Royal Dutch Shell (the Netherlands) The company known today as Royal Dutch Shell was formed from the merger of two global oil conglomerates in 2003—Royal Dutch Petroleum (founded by a Dutchman in 1890) and Shell Transport and Trading (founded by an Englishman in 1897)—that have been in a close relationship for over a century.

Stocks for the Long Run 5/E: the Definitive Guide to Financial Market Returns & Long-Term Investment Strategies
by Jeremy Siegel
Published 7 Jan 2014

The oldest banks with active markets for their shares are the First National Bank of Pennsylvania, founded in 1782 (now owned by Wells Fargo), and the Bank of New York Corp. (now BNY-Mellon), founded in 1784. 21. Werner and Smith, Wall Street, p. 82. 22. Two other canals, the Chesapeake and Delaware and the Schuylkill, were both joint-stock companies, and both had sold over $1 million in stock by 1825. I owe this observation to Stephen Skye, president of the Neversink Valley Museum of History and Innovation. Chapter 6 1. Irving Fisher, et al., How to Invest When Prices Are Rising, Scranton, PA: G. Lynn Sumner & Co., 1912, p. 6. 2. R.

Water: A Biography
by Giulio Boccaletti
Published 13 Sep 2021

Madrid was about thirteen hundred kilometers, while the Po Valley in northern Italy was fifteen hundred kilometers away, because ships had to circumnavigate the Italian peninsula (land transport would have been unsafe and prohibitive). Further out still were Turkey, Egypt, and Palestine. For the most part, wealthy freedmen orchestrated the supply, providing capital and contracting agents. There is even evidence that some of these merchants were organized in companies, similar to the joint stock companies of the seventeenth century CE. This trading system was so efficient that the local price of wheat at point of origin was inversely proportional to distance from Rome: the further away, the more of a discount it had to sell at to arrive in Rome at a competitive price. The market for grain was not just efficient.

God Is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the World
by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge
Published 31 Mar 2009

This is our second book with our British editor, Stuart Proffitt; we defy anyone to find a more precise editor. However, the main burden of book writing has fallen on our families. If our wives fail to reach heaven, then that will be because we have turned them against God in much the same way as we previously poisoned their minds against American conservatives, management gurus and joint-stock companies. Having studied the tricks of the pulpit, we have repeatedly promised Fev and Amelia that salvation is just around the corner, that the book will eventually be finished, that we will eventually be helpful in some unspecified way. They, strangely, have taken the distinctly worldly attitude that instant gratification would be somewhat preferable.

Masters of Management: How the Business Gurus and Their Ideas Have Changed the World—for Better and for Worse
by Adrian Wooldridge
Published 29 Nov 2011

Many journalists would have been keener on puncturing the movement’s pretensions if they weren’t invited to so many CSR conferences in exotic places. What explains CSR’s extraordinary success? Why has an idea that was once associated with a few eccentrics become mainstream? The simplest answer is reputation management. Joint-stock companies have always provoked profound suspicion, on the grounds that they have all the legal rights of individuals without any of the responsibilities. Sir Edward Coke complained in the seventeenth century that “they cannot commit treason, nor be outlawed or excommunicated, for they have no souls.”

Open: The Story of Human Progress
by Johan Norberg
Published 14 Sep 2020

Internal controls of movement were relaxed to create the largest integrated market in the world. Since the Chinese had recently lost access to the Silk Road, naval commerce grew in importance, and the merchant fleet was second to none. Financial innovation kept them afloat with the arrival of joint stock companies that separated owners and managers. Leaders proclaimed: ‘Profits from maritime commerce are very great. If properly managed, they can amount to millions. Is this not better than taxing people?’6 An impressive system of roads was built that got crops, fruits, vegetables, timber and paper to harbours, where they were loaded onto large ships based on Persian, Arab and South East Asian designs.

Visions of Inequality: From the French Revolution to the End of the Cold War
by Branko Milanovic
Published 9 Oct 2023

There is a difference between concentration and centralization of capital. Concentration is increased inequality in the process of expanded reproduction and accumulation of capital; centralization is increased inequality under the given total income or wealth. Thus, Marx writes, it is thanks to centralization of capital through joint-stock companies that large enough capital was created to build railroads: “the world would still be without railways if it had had to wait until accumulation had got a few individual capitals far enough to be adequate for the construction of a railway.” Marx, Capital, vol. I, ch. 25, 780. 100 . Marx, Capital, vol.

Investing Amid Low Expected Returns: Making the Most When Markets Offer the Least
by Antti Ilmanen
Published 24 Feb 2022

History of Institutional Asset Allocation Pre-WWII History5 Individual saving and investing have taken place for thousands of years, and the idea of diversification was recognized already in the Bible (Ecclesiastes 11:2) and the Talmud, but delegated and pooled investing through institutions has a much shorter history. In the 1600s and 1700s, financial innovations like the joint stock company, the mutual fund, and the insurance company were developed in Holland and Great Britain to make risk pooling and diversification easier for wealthy individuals. Life insurance companies were the dominant institutional investors in Britain in the 1800s and held this status beyond WWII. Pension companies came later: The first US corporate pension plan was by American Express in 1875, while Bismarck's Germany led the way with national old-age pensions in 1889.

The Pursuit of Power: Europe, 1815-1914
by Richard J. Evans
Published 31 Aug 2016

In Russia the redemption payments that aristocratic landowners received for the ending of serfdom provided ready funds with which to do so. By the 1870s, as Friedrich Engels remarked in one of his writings on Germany, the aristocracy had ‘left the old and respectable days behind and now swell the lists of directors of all sorts of sound and unsound joint-stock companies’. From the point of view of industrialists, including a titled aristocrat on the board of a company could lend it a touch of class, while the financial rewards were eagerly sought after by those noblemen who did not regard such activities as beneath them. By 1905 the boards of Hungarian financial and industrial companies counted among their number eighty-eight counts and sixty-six barons; in 1902 noblemen made up 30 per cent of the directors of railway companies, and 23 per cent of large steel and banking companies.

…

Business boomed, and by 1900 the BASF factory, in the company town of Ludwigshafen, across the Rhine from Mannheim, was devoting 80 per cent of its production to dyestuffs. The pharmaceutical company Bayer, in Wuppertal, founded in 1863 by two men involved in the dyestuffs business, built on the discoveries of the French chemist Charles Gerhardt (1816–56), becoming a joint-stock company in 1881. He was a student of the great German chemist Justus von Liebig, whose discovery of the value of nitrogen as a plant nutrient effectively founded the chemical fertilizer industry. Liebig had studied and worked in Paris, and in 1865 founded a company to produce and market meat extract according to a process he had discovered with a Belgian colleague: in 1899 the product was labelled ‘Oxo’.

Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making
by David Rothkopf
Published 18 Mar 2008

The early days of the oil business were full of start-ups and small operations, the costs of entry were low, and Rockefeller saw an opportunity to step in and dominate. Within four years, with his like-minded partner Henry Flagler, he began to build a company that could subdue any competition. In 1870, the two established Standard Oil, a joint-stock company that would enable them to raise the kind of capital they needed to expand, increase efficiency, and thus enhance profits. The company got its name from the commitment that Rockefeller made to produce a standardized and consistent product, an important development in a day and age when inconsistent production of kerosene resulted in five to six thousand fatal accidents a year.

A Voyage Long and Strange: On the Trail of Vikings, Conquistadors, Lost Colonists, and Other Adventurers in Early America
by Tony Horwitz
Published 1 Jan 2008

At home, however, much had changed since Raleigh’s failed venture in the 1580s. The defeat of the Spanish Armada boosted England’s confidence and sea power, and in 1604, King James concluded an uneasy peace with Spain. England’s colonial philosophy had also matured. In place of the Raleigh model, reliant on piracy and the purse of a rich knight, merchants formed joint-stock companies to raise capital and to pool the risk and profit. The Virginia Company, chartered in 1606, had branches in London and Plymouth, the former focused on the Chesapeake and the latter on “North Virginia”—roughly, the coast from New York to Maine. Despite this corporate footing, and support from the Crown, the company’s Chesapeake venture went badly from the start.

Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All
by Costas Lapavitsas
Published 14 Aug 2013

Industrial sectors that have large volumes of capital sank into fixed investment find it difficult to raise the rate of profit. Hence capitalists in these sectors are led to merge and to acquire each other’s enterprises, thereby eliminating competition, cyclical fluctuations and commercial middlemen. In short, the centralization of capital is exacerbated, thus raising profitability. Joint-stock companies are particularly suitable for the centralization of capital since they facilitate control of enterprises via relatively small shareholdings. Crucially, centralization also spreads to banks. The emergence of huge joint-stock banks encourages further reduction of industrial competition in order precisely to protect bank profits.

On the Wrong Line: How Ideology and Incompetence Wrecked Britain's Railways
by Christian Wolmar
Published 29 May 2005

While for the first time closures began to outnumber openings, of which there were very few as the days of railway expansion were over, little effort went into achieving basic economies - such as the abandonment of duplicated routes or closure of unprofitable branch lines which had been one of the intentions behind the 1921 Act. The companies were reluctant to retrench, despite the growth of road transport, and no one, least of all the government, which feared increasing unemployment, was taking a strategic view of the railways. Even the largest of the Big Four, the LMS, which was described as the biggest joint-stock company in the world in the 1920s, with a capital of almost £400m, did little to improve its productivity because government was reluctant to endorse the socially unacceptable policy of reducing capacity. It was certainly not a commercial decision, for example, that left the company, twenty years after the grouping, still owning three major rolling-stock manufacturing and repair factories with a combined workforce of 100,000.

Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World
by Joshua B. Freeman
Published 27 Feb 2018

At the time, few British firms spun and wove in the same plant and no power loom had ever been used in the United States, because of Britain’s technology embargo. On returning home, Lowell hired a skilled mechanic, Paul Moody, to help him build machinery modeled after what he had seen in England. By 1814, they had a power loom successfully operating and a dressing machine to prepare the warp.9 Meanwhile, Lowell formed a joint-stock company, the Boston Manufacturing Company, with other Boston merchants to build and operate a mill. The investors realized that with the full-scale resumption of British trade after the War of 1812, their opportunities for profits in international commerce would be reduced. Manufacturing promised to be a rewarding alternative, even as they continued to be active in trade and real estate speculation.

Money: 5,000 Years of Debt and Power
by Michel Aglietta
Published 23 Oct 2018

The 1873 crisis was the opportunity to put Bagehot’s doctrine into practice. But this was not the crisis of a usual business cycle. Rather, it introduced a long phase of deflation that extended across capitalist economies as a whole. Not only did credit become rarer, but new types of branched commercial banks appeared, thanks to the new status of joint stock companies. Because these banks were branched, they were also more creditworthy. They confined the Bank of England to a marginal part of the credit market. On the other hand, the sterling bill of exchange had become the universal financial instrument for financing international commerce. Short-term capital movements thus became highly sensitive to the monetary rate in the City.

Triumph of the Optimists: 101 Years of Global Investment Returns
by Elroy Dimson , Paul Marsh and Mike Staunton
Published 3 Feb 2002

Michie (1992) points out that some forms of stock trading occurred in Roman times. Organized trading, however, did not take place until transferable securities appeared in the seventeenth century. These were mostly either government debt, frequently issued to fund wars, or the stocks of large joint stock companies, often issued to pioneer long-distance trade between Europe and India. The Amsterdam market dates back to 1611, and Frankfurt to 1685, with the latter tracing its origins back a further 400 years to the medieval Frankfurt fairs. Amsterdam was the world’s main center of stock trading in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but while it was the oldest exchange, it lacked official organization until 1787.

The end of history and the last man
by Francis Fukuyama
Published 28 Feb 2006

For if Americans did not struggle, sacrifice, and endure hardship for their country or great international causes, they frequently did so for the sake of their children. But families don’t really work if they are based on liberal principles, that is, if their members regard them as they would a joint stock company, formed for their utility rather than being based on ties of duty and love. Raising children or making a marriage work through a lifetime requires personal sacrifices that are irrational, if looked at from a cost-benefit calculus. For the true benefits of strong family life frequently do not accrue to those bearing the heaviest obligations, but are transmitted across generations.

How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It
by Arthur Herman
Published 27 Nov 2001

And like Law, whose ambitions would eventually push the French financial system into ruin, Paterson was something of a dreamer who never let details stand in the way of a good plan. With the help of an East Lothian landowner and member of Parliament named Andrew Fletcher, who will become a key figure in our story later on, Paterson urged his fellow Scots to get in on the public joint stock company sweepstakes that was bringing in such wealth for England, such as the East India Company and Royal Africa Company, the latter of which dominated the slave trade. Parliament agreed and, on May 26, 1695, duly granted Paterson’s company a permanent monopoly for Scottish trade with Asia and Africa, and a thirty-one-year monopoly with America.

The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World
by Adrian Wooldridge
Published 2 Jun 2021

But in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries Venice gradually detached itself from Byzantium; the dux became the doge; and a protectorate became a trading superpower and the richest city in Italy. Venice became a centre of commercial dynamism and innovation – as well as one of the world’s most breathtaking cities. Venetian sailors – some 36,000 of them in the fourteenth century – popped up as far away as China. Venetian merchants invented the prototype of today’s joint-stock companies in the commenda.8 It also pioneered a new form of self-government, checking the tendency of the doge’s office to become hereditary and handing power to a collection of interlocking executive councils. This was far from a proto-democracy: Venice was ruled by an oligarchy of merchant families, but this was an oligarchy that tried both to think in terms of the city-state’s long-term interests and to incorporate new men into decision-making.9 From the late twelfth century onwards, a hundred new members were added every year to the Ducal Council, which in turn kept the doge under tighter control.

A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Century
by Witold Rybczynski
Published 1 Jan 1999

These commissions were a useful small source of income—and they kept Miller busy—but Olmsted was still not pursuing a career in landscape architecture. He saw business opportunities everywhere. Following Silliman’s advice, he invested in several oil properties. He secured the financial backing of the sympathetic Bank of California and formed his own company to explore for oil. Ralston, the bank’s cashier, was helping to launch a joint-stock company that owned vineyards in the Sonoma Valley. He invited Olmsted to join him. Olmsted’s responsibility was to prepare the prospectus. “I was called upon to advise about the executive organization of a new corporation last week,” he wrote to Godkin, “and sat down and in an hour drew up a complete scheme—wholly original—and did it so easily & satisfactorily to myself & had so much confidence that it would be better than anything else that had been talked about, that the idea has impressed itself upon me that this is my true business.”

Europe: A History
by Norman Davies
Published 1 Jan 1996

Private firms reinvested growing profits; governments invested a growing proportion of rising taxation. A bottomless demand for capital exhausted the possibilities of private borrowing, and revived the potential for joint-stock companies (which in England and France, though not Scotland, had been curtailed since the Bubble disaster of 1720). From the 1820s the limited joint-stock company became familiar all over Europe. These sociétés anonymes (SA) or Aktiengesellschaft (AG) or ‘Company Limited’, with their shareholders and their AGMs, paid dividends to their investors whilst owing only limited liability to their creditors.

…

New sources of power: coal, steam, gas, oil, electricity 4. Power-driven machinery 5. Heavy industry: mining and metallurgy 6. Factories and factory towns 7. Improved transport: canals, roads, railways, flight 8. Communications: post, telegraph, telephone, radio 9. Capital investment: joint-stock companies, trusts, cartels 10. Expanding domestic markets: new industries, internal trade 11. Foreign trade: import and export, colonies 12. Government policy 13. Demography: rapid population growth and its consequences 14. The money economy: wages, prices, taxes, paper money 15. Marketing skills: advertising, stores, sales distribution 16.

Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk
by Satyajit Das
Published 14 Oct 2011

In 1696, concerned about the exploitation of credulous investors, England’s Commissioners of Trade wrote that shares were being sold “to ignorant men, drawn in by the reputation, falsely raised and artfully spread, concerning the state of [the company].”3 Formed in 1710 to carry on trade with Spain’s colonies in South America, the South Sea Company promised investors great profits. The stock increased by more than 900 percent. But in 1720, the stock price collapsed as shareholders tried to sell their shares, realizing that the company was worthless. The English Parliament enacted the 1720 Bubble Act, outlawing the creation of all joint stock companies not authorized by royal charter. In 1825, the need to raise capital to finance industry led to the Act’s repeal. A Brilliant Daring Speculation Originally, companies were floated to raise funds for speculative projects—railways, canals, new inventions, and mining ventures (usually the latest “gold rush”).

Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown
by Philip Mirowski
Published 24 Jun 2013

This particular neoliberal precept dictates that the widely noted exacerbation of income inequality in the United States since 1980 cannot possibly have played a role in precipitating the crisis in any way.101 Indeed, attempts by the state to offset or ameliorate the trend toward inequality of wealth—especially through attempts to expand home ownership and consumer credit—become themselves, for neoliberals, major root causes of the crisis.102 This then gets translated into the preferred neoliberal story of the crisis, which attributes culpability to the Democrats by lodging blame for the housing bubble via securitization with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (see chapter 5). [10] Corporations can do no wrong, or at least they are not to be blamed if they do. This is one of the stronger areas of divergence from classical liberalism, with its ingrained suspicion of power concentrated in joint stock companies and monopoly stretching from Adam Smith to Henry Simons. The MPS set out in the 1950s entertaining suspicions of corporate power, with the ordoliberals especially concerned with the promotion of strong antitrust capacity on the part of the state. But starting with the Chicago law and economics movement, and then progressively spreading to treatments of entrepreneurs and the “markets for innovation,” neoliberals began to argue consistently that not only was monopoly not harmful to the operation of the market, but an epiphenomenon attributable to the misguided activities of the state and powerful interest groups.103 The twentieth-century socialist contention that capitalism bore within itself the seeds of its own arteriosclerosis (if not self-destruction) was baldly denied.

Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society
by Nicholas A. Christakis
Published 26 Mar 2019

Hawthorne did not relish the job.”22 Among the farm’s early investors and residents was the writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, who apparently quickly regretted the one thousand dollars he contributed. He would later happily leave Brook Farm behind. Still, although everyone performed manual labor, Brook Farm had the feel of a middle-class undertaking in its conception and realization. It was founded as a joint-stock company rather than a communal society, and it had a written constitution at its founding (these articles of agreement had sixteen sections, including a preamble stating that the founders sought “to substitute a system of brotherly cooperation for one of selfish competition”).23 The Farmers (as they were called) had a good time despite the heavy labor, and many residents and visitors noted their playfulness.

The Life and Death of Ancient Cities: A Natural History
by Greg Woolf
Published 14 May 2020

From our longer perspective it is easy to see precedents for the rise of giant cities in the last centuries b.c.e.7 Athens and Syracuse, Corinth and Carthage, and Rome were already much larger than the Mediterranean norm in the fourth century b.c.e. Their great size was in each case sustained by a mixture of political influence and commercial power.8 By commercial power I do not mean that those city-states ran huge centralized enterprises, or even that they licensed companies comparable to the joint-stock companies that dominated European mercantile expansion from the seventeenth century onwards. Simply, large cities located on or near the sea became hubs that offered opportunities to domestic producers and overseas merchants alike; military power also offered opportunities. Athenian kleruchs based in allied cities, Carthaginian exploitation of the mines at Cartagena, the Roman use of public contracts to supply armies abroad and manage the building programmes paid for by booty and indemnities all provide examples of the ancient nexus between war, commerce, and urbanization.

Flight of the WASP
by Michael Gross

The difficulties were many, but not invincible.”13 With courage and idealism more remarkable in those times than their fierce intolerance and prejudice, the dissidents considered and rejected moving to Guiana on South America’s northern Atlantic coast and instead hoped “to live as a distinct body by themselves under the general Government of Virginia.” They sent representatives to the London Virginia Company, the joint stock company that was one of about ten groups of English export merchants who were the venture capitalists of their day, created to exploit colonization. The Scrooby group hoped to negotiate a patent and passage and to convince “His Majesty that he would be pleased to grant them freedom of religion.”14 The export merchants had their own priorities, including profit, colonization, and competition with Spain, as well as the propagation of their religious faith.

When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Rise of the Middle Kingdom
by Martin Jacques
Published 12 Nov 2009

HMS Victory, commanded by Admiral Nelson during the Battle of Trafal gar in 1805, cost five times as much as Abraham Crowley’s steelworks, one of the flagship investments of Britain’s Industrial Revolution.19 Colonial trade also provided fertile ground for innovations in both company organization and systems of financing, with the Dutch, for example, inventing the joint-stock company for this purpose. Without the slave trade and colonization, Europe could never have made the kind of breakthrough it did. It is true that China also had colonies - newly acquired territories achieved by a process of imperial expansion from 1644 until the late eighteenth century - but these were in the interior of the Eurasian continent, bereft of either large arable lands or dense populations, and were unable to provide raw materials on anything like the scale of the New World.20 South-East Asia, which was abundant in resources, would have been a more likely candidate to play the role of China’s New World.

The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy
by David Hoffman
Published 1 Jan 2009

Arzamas-16 was among the shareholders of Chetek. Dmitri Bogdanovich, Vlast, No. 102, Jan. 13, 1992. 28 The United States carried out 27 such explosions between 1961 and 1973. The Soviet Union carried out 124 between 1965 and 1988. 29 "Press Release, Ministry of Atomic Power and Industry, USSR, and International Joint Stock Company 'CHETEK,'" Dec. 11, 1991, in NRDC, "Report of the Third International Workshop," appendix F. 30 Mark Hibbs, "Soviet Firm to Offer Nuclear Explosives to Destroy Wastes," Nucleonics Week, Oct. 24, 1991, vol. 32, no. 43, p. 1. Fred Hiatt, "Russian Nuclear Scientists Seek Business, Food," Washington Post, Jan. 18, 1992, p.

After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405
by John Darwin
Published 5 Feb 2008

The high costs of long-distance trade, as well as large armed ships (the ‘East Indiamen’), shore establishments (with their garrisons to guard against attack by other Europeans or disorderly locals) and the diplomatic apparatus required for dealings with regional rulers and the Mughal court, had long made it necessary for European traders to be organized as joint-stock companies. These were forerunners of the modern corporation (with shareholders, a board and a management structure), and enjoyed a monopoly in the direct trade between their country and India. But their superficial modernity did not, of course, mean that European merchants were heralds of the open economy or the rule of the market.

Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol
by Iain Gately
Published 30 Jun 2008

Founded in 1718 by Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, New Orleans was intended to be the principal port and first city of the French province of Louisiana. Some forty-odd years after this territory had been explored and claimed for France, it was decided to establish a colony there to exploit the gold mines and pearl fisheries it certainly must possess. A joint stock company was formed, colonists were collected from the houses of correction in Paris, and a small fleet was sent to settle an area several times larger than France itself. While Parisian financiers sat back and waited for their investments to bear fruit, their colonists ran into trouble. There was no gold, the pearls were bad, and the local Indians were belligerent, had acquired immunity to many European diseases, and had learned to use guns.

A Terrible Glory: Custer and the Little Bighorn - the Last Great Battle of the American West
by James Donovan
Published 24 Mar 2008

(They also taught the whites how to cultivate a cash crop called tobacco, which would enable the foundation and rapid rise of several more southern colonies.) Their generosity was not repaid in kind. The settlers were soon told by their superiors — who were, after all, directors of a for-profit joint-stock company — to do whatever it took to acquire all the land they could. Indian tempers grew short after a series of humiliations and attacks (no doubt aided and abetted by the Spaniards to the south), and fifteen years later they mounted a large-scale surprise assault on the colony that resulted in 347 English deaths in a matter of a few hours.

The Enlightened Capitalists
by James O'Toole
Published 29 Dec 2018

As late as the fourteenth century, the only organizations employing more than a dozen or so individuals were armies, navies, churches, and states. Before that time, there is no history of business enterprises as we know them today for the simple reason that such organizations (companies) did not yet exist. And corporations—originally called joint-stock companies—did not come into being until the seventeenth century, although the seeds of modern enterprises were first sown in Europe at the dawn of the Renaissance. It was then that traders like the Italian Francesco Datini began to engage in what we would recognize as proto-capitalist activities. The Merchant of Prato and the Dominant Mode of Business Thought THROUGHOUT RECORDED HISTORY THERE have been markets, traders, craftsmen, and moneylenders, but not until the end of the medieval era did businesspeople, with an eye toward personal gain, begin to systematically organize their activities and hire paid workers.

Empire of Guns
by Priya Satia
Published 10 Apr 2018

The end of the Crimean War and the government’s declaration that it would no longer accept noninterchangeable arms forced the gun trade to adapt. In 1860, the London Armoury Company used machine-production techniques to make guns that were fully interchangeable with Enfield’s. That year, fifteen of the largest contractors in the Birmingham Small Arms Trade Association formed the Birmingham Small Arms Company (BSA). This joint-stock company erected a factory along the canal at Small Heath for machine manufacture of rifles. Much of the machinery came from Leeds. Its first gun was an Enfield rifle for Turkey, in 1865. It could produce a thousand per week. It still depended on the workshop sector, contracting out to smaller firms for many parts.

The Transhumanist Reader
by Max More and Natasha Vita-More
Published 4 Mar 2013

In reality markets are not complete, and various sorts of “market failure” are traced to this fact. Incompleteness is usually (Hirshleifer 1971) explained as due to judging difficulties, finite transaction costs, and market thinness. In fact, these authors are often unaware that such markets are almost universally prohibited by anti-gambling laws, as joint-stock companies, life insurance, and commodity futures (Rose 1986) were prohibited before special interests managed to obtain exemptions. Though unevenly enforced, such laws prohibit public science bets between strangers in all of the US and in most of the world. Only Great Britain, to my knowledge, allows such bets, and then only for the last three decades.

The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty
by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson
Published 23 Sep 2019

One was the commenda, a temporary partnership between two people, one who provided the capital for a trading mission and another who undertook the mission. When the mission was over, the two partners split the proceeds. The commenda was another way in which usury laws could be evaded. Italians also invented long-lived organizational forms that were precursors to the joint stock company, allowing people who were not actively involved in the actual business to put up capital and earn returns in the form of dividends. Also important was a new emphasis on written legal documents defining property rights and the use of notaries. In the 1280s, in cities like Milan or Bologna, there were twenty-five notaries for every thousand inhabitants.

Escape From Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity
by Walter Scheidel
Published 14 Oct 2019

Without an assembly that could routinely and expeditiously deal with competing interests and was able to tackle a substantial workload with the help of fixed procedures and an expanding bureaucratic apparatus, such broad-based support, durability, and predictability might well not have materialized.98 The seventeenth century was thus a period of decisive change. The first patent laws encouraged innovation, joint-stock companies flourished, coffeehouses served as precursors of organized insurance, commodity and securities markets and deposit banking appeared, and a central bank, the privately held Bank of England, extended loans not only to the government to support war but also and at low interest to manufacturers.

The Story of Work: A New History of Humankind
by Jan Lucassen
Published 26 Jul 2021

That is a law that is not made in The Hague, where the gentlemen who make the country’s laws meet, but one that says the industrious and the careful fare better than the lazy and those who do not want to fit in. That is the law of our Lord and that is why this law is good! Each country has a number of such examples, albeit in varying degrees. Almost without exception, employers like Stork, running family enterprises rather than joint stock companies, might pay better wages and provide clean working places, as well as schools, housing and parks. These employers not only tried to avoid and prevent social conflict; they also carved out a role for themselves in the wider society – not only by hoping that colleagues would follow their example but even by setting a standard for government.

Empire of Cotton: A Global History
by Sven Beckert
Published 2 Dec 2014

Europeans began establishing formal trade relations on the Indian subcontinent when da Gama obtained permission from local rulers to trade in Calicut in 1498. By the early sixteenth century, the Portuguese had established a series of trading outposts on India’s west coast, most enduringly in Goa. At the end of the sixteenth century, the Netherlands and Great Britain began to challenge Portugal’s monopoly on trade with Asia by chartering joint-stock companies, hoping to catch a share of the highly profitable spice trade. After a series of Anglo-Dutch wars, the Dutch and the British agreed to divide their spheres of interest in Asia, with the Indian textile trade falling mostly into British hands. That expansion into South Asia, at first, was the most momentous intervention of European merchants and statesmen into the networks of the global cotton industry.

Basic Economics
by Thomas Sowell
Published 1 Jan 2000

These were expressed more than a century ago by John Stuart Mill: Every function superadded to those already exercised by the government, causes its influence over hopes and fears to be more widely diffused, and converts, more and more, the active and ambitious part of the public into hangers-on of the government, or of some party which aims at becoming the government. If the roads, the railways, the banks, the insurance offices, the great joint-stock companies, the universities, and the public charities, were all of them branches of government; if, in addition, the municipal corporations and local boards, with all that now devolves on them, became departments of the central administration; if the employés of all these different enterprises were appointed and paid by the government, and looked to the government for every rise in life; not all the freedom of the press and popular constitution of the legislature would make this or any other country free otherwise than in name.{666} Chapter 19 GOVERNMENT FINANCE The willingness of government to levy taxes fell distinctly short of its propensity to spend.

Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds - the Original Classic Edition
by Charles MacKay
Published 14 Jun 2012

Such was the frantic eagerness of 13/10/2008 17:33 Printable format for Mackay, Charles, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular ... 5 of 21 http://www.econlib.org/cgi-bin/printarticle.pl people of every class to speculate in these funds, that in the course of a few hours no less than a million and a half was subscribed at that rate. 2.15 2.16 2.17 In the mean time, innumerable joint-stock companies started up everywhere. They soon received the name of Bubbles, the most appropriate that imagination could devise. The populace are often most happy in the nicknames they employ. None could be more apt than that of Bubbles. Some of them lasted for a week, or a fortnight, and were no more heard of, while others could not even live out that short span of existence.

A History of Zionism
by Walter Laqueur
Published 1 Jan 1972

Herzl envisaged the establishment of two agencies to initiate and supervise the building up of the country: the ‘Society of Jews’, which would provide a scientific plan and political guidance, and the ‘Jewish Company’, modelled on the lines of the great trading associations, which would carry them out, wind up the affairs of the emigrants, and organise trade and commerce in the new country. The Jewish Company would be a joint stock company, framed according to English law, with its principal centre in London and a capital of approximately £50 million. At the very beginning of his book Herzl stated that he did not intend to depict another agreeable Utopia, but that he was interested in the central idea of a Jewish state which he wanted to submit to discussion.

The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean
by David Abulafia
Published 4 May 2011

Rulers such as Robert the Wise, the Angevin king of Naples, had long been raising crusade taxes and even equipping crusade fleets, which then magically turned in the other direction, being put to use in the king’s wars against the Genoese Ghibellines or the Aragonese of Sicily. The instability of this region was enhanced by the strengthening of the Genoese presence, following the conquest of Chios by a Genoese joint-stock company in 1346; the island was shared out among the Genoese investors and administered by the company or Mahona. Their main sources of profit were alum, mastic and dried fruits, and they were not keen on further adventurism by western fleets; even the Hospitallers gradually lost their crusading fervour and capitalized on the superb position of Rhodes on the trade routes.

The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin
by H. W. Brands
Published 1 Jan 2000

Wealthy older women and attractive younger ones were particularly susceptible to the spells of the handsome Austrian—a fact not lost on their husbands and fathers. Mesmer’s success infuriated the French medical establishment, which denied him a license and sought means to banish him. The government stayed out of the doctors’ spat until Mesmer created a joint stock company to promote his teachings, and raised a subscription of more than 300,000 livres. This moved the animal magnetism debate from the court of science to that of fraud. In March 1784 King Louis appointed a committee of the Paris faculty of medicine to investigate; the distinguished members included Joseph Ignace Guillotin, who would add a word to several languages by his advocacy of the use of a swift and thereby comparatively humane decapitation machine.

Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion
by Gareth Stedman Jones
Published 24 Aug 2016

He had been careful to ensure that the political constitution of the Empire left all the essential mechanisms of absolutism in place, including crown control of the army and bureaucracy, the absence of ministerial responsibility to the Reichstag, the retention of the three-class suffrage in Prussia, and Prussian domination of the federal system through the Bundestag. But he also incorporated into its economic foundations all the leading demands of the liberals: above all free trade together with freedom of movement, the end of the usury laws, and the abolition of guild regulation and of state regulation of joint-stock companies. Liberals were opposed to universal suffrage, but their identification with Bismarck’s Kulturkampf (the legislative attack on German Catholics) found support among many Social Democrats. In particular, Social Democrats could identify with the promotion of secular education, centralization and rationalism over clericalism, particularism, ultramontanism and ‘medieval’ superstition.

The First Tycoon
by T.J. Stiles
Published 14 Aug 2009

Pacific Mail, which originated in a federal plan to guarantee mail service to the Pacific coast, offered a perfect example of their ideals; more than that, the elite status of its incorporators appealed to social prejudices that lingered among old New York Whigs. Raymond even depicted corporations as fragile creations. In “Your Money or Your Line,” he made the argument that “no joint-stock company… can ever be a match for a single man” who possessed a large sum of money. Raymond gave voice to a certain strand of Whig thinking that had always condemned the destructive tendency of free competition, casting it as piracy that annihilated capital. “The idea of depicting Vanderbilt as a corsair because he establishes rival lines to successful steamboat companies is not consistent with experience or common sense,” argued Harper's Weekly, in a direct counterblast to the Times's famous editorial.

From Peoples into Nations
by John Connelly
Published 11 Nov 2019

As society grew urban and modern, it became relatively more efficient and profitable to communicate with one large group of people than with another. That people was a modern nation. As urban populations grew that spoke a Slavic language on an everyday basis, institutions like schools, credit institutions, joint stock companies, and legal offices emerged to serve them and facilitate all sorts of transactions, from cultural and business and political to strictly social. Pressures to remove language as a barrier to communication also produced Czech pubs and restaurants, advertisements, shop windows, and street signs—in short, a Czech world.53 But this was not the whole story.

The system of the world
by Neal Stephenson
Published 21 Sep 2004

The mines shall remain inundated. Neither copper nor tin shall come out of them, and this Court shall lose standing, and have no business to transact. On the other hand, if there is some interest among you Gentlemen of Devon—to speak plainly, if a few of you would care to purchase shares in the joint stock company known as the Proprietors of the Engine for Raising Water by Fire—why, then, the bleak situation I have just described is overturned, you shall have purchased a Revolution, and this Court will be a busy one indeed, with little choice but to adjourn to that merry Inn down the road—where, by the way, the first two rounds of drinks will be paid for by your humble and obedient servant.”

Quicksilver
by Neal Stephenson
Published 9 Sep 2004

In a strange way it reminded him of the ‘Change in London, except that where the ‘Change was a daytime place, all a-sparkle with Thomas Gresham’s golden grasshoppers and vaulting Mercurys, and crowded with lusty shouting traders, this place was Gothickal in the extreme, faintly dusted with the blue light of a half-moon, sparsely populated by robed and/or big-wigged men skulking about the paths and huddling in doorways in groups of two or three. And whereas the ‘Change-men made common cause to buy shares in sailing-ships or joint stock companies, and traded Jamaica sugar for Spanish silver, these men were transacting diverse small conspiracies or trading snatches of courtly data. The coming of Court to Cambridge was like Stourbridge Fair—an occasional opportunity for certain types of business, most of which was in some sense occult.

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life
by Alice Schroeder
Published 1 Sep 2008

Maidenberg, “Big Board Ends Ban on Williston, Walston and Merrill Lynch Are Instrumental in the Broker’s Reinstatement, Haupt Remains Shut, Effect of Move Is Swept Aside by Assassination of President Kennedy,” November 24, 1963. The soybean-oil drama, including the American Express role, peaked during a period of about a week following the assassination. 45. American Express at the time was the only major U.S. public company to be capitalized as a joint stock company rather than a limited liability corporation. This meant its shareholders could be assessed for deficiencies in capital. “So every trust department in the United States panicked,” recalls Buffett. “I remember the Continental Bank held over 5 percent of the company, and all of a sudden not only do they see that the trust accounts were going to have stock worth zero, but they could get assessed.

The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power
by Daniel Yergin
Published 23 Dec 2008

The costs of overcapacity were obvious to Rockefeller, and it was in these circumstances, with most refiners losing money, that he launched his effort to consolidate the industry in his own grasp. He and Flagler wanted to bring in more capital, but without jeopardizing control. The technique they used was to turn their partnership into a joint stock company. On January 10, 1870, five men, led by Rockefeller and Flagler, established the Standard Oil Company. The name was chosen to indicate a "standard quality of product" on which the consumer could depend. At the time, kerosene of widely varying quality was sold. If the kerosene contained too much flammable gasoline or naphtha, as sometimes happened, the purchaser's attempt to light it could be his last act on this earth.

The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans
by David Abulafia
Published 2 Oct 2019

Whereas the other companies were, in essence, umbrella bodies facilitating and licensing trade by syndicates of members, the East India Company traded as a single operation, ‘one body corporate and politick’, to cite Queen Elizabeth’s charter of 1600. The board made the decision when and where to trade, and investors were not permitted to fit out their own expeditions in parallel with official ones.36 Over time, and following a number of crises, it evolved into a joint-stock company, much strengthened after 1657 by a generous new charter granted by Oliver Cromwell that attracted record investments, exceeding £700,000.37 IV The most remarkable success achieved by the Dutch was not their series of victories over the Portuguese, for the Portuguese trading empire was already under severe strain by 1600, or their victories against the English, but their installation in Japan.