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The corporation has taken on a
commanding presence in today's world. In power, wealth, and geographic reach, the only rivals of the largest corporations are national
governments--and then only the largest of them. But we know surprisingly little about the history of the corporation
-- least of all about how corporations once governed themselves or about variations
in corporate governance across countries.
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credit: Southside Railroad Company, Special Collections
Department, University Libraries, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg,
Virginia (permission requested). |
To encourage research on the history of the corporation, as well as to inform the interested browser, this page
will provide a gateway into the history of the corporation.
Its centerpiece will be a database of nearly 10,000 corporate charters granted by the American states, Britain, France, and the German states between 1825 and 1870.
This research provides the basis for a book that I am writing, entitled Shareholder
Democracy: The Forgotten History. The database will be
available for public use as soon as I have finished the book manuscript
and can get the database up and running on the Web. In the meantime, feel free
to click the links above for more information about it.
Special thanks go to the Alfred
P. Sloan Foundation for funding that made possible the bulk of this research.
For additional acknowledgments, click on Funding and Thanks above (or below).
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