Today, the corporation plays a dominant role in economics, politics, and societies across the globe. Understanding the corporation means understanding its legal framework but until recently, the origins and evolution of corporate law have received relatively little attention. This Handbook sheds new light on the historical development of both the corporation and business organization law.
This extensive collection brings together contributions from an array of international academics to provide the first wide-ranging history of the laws of corporations and business organizations from ancient to modern times. The contributors offer a global exploration of the development of corporation and company law, moving beyond the United States and Western Europe to present studies in Mexico, India and China, as well as addressing the trajectory of scholarly debate. Not only do the contributions examine the growth of the law of public corporation, they also address the development of laws governing other business forms.
This Handbook will prove an invaluable resource for corporation law and business scholars, as well as business and legal historians and economists.
Author(s): Harwell Wells
Series: Research Handbooks in Corporate Law and Governance
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
Year: 2018
Language: English
Pages: x+642
Front Matter
Copyright
Contents
Figures and tables
Contributors
Introduction
PART I TAKING SHAPE
1. Islamic law and economic development
2. Business organizations in India prior to the British East India Company
3. Business organization and organizational innovation in late Medieval Italy
4. Trading with strangers: the corporate form in the move from municipal governance to overseas trade
PART II MODERN EUROPE
5. The development of English company law before 1900
6. Shareholder primacy, labour and the historic ambivalence of UK company law
7. German company law 1794–1897
8. German corporate law in the 20th century
9. Change for continuity: the making of the société anonyme in nineteenth century France
10. Classes of shares and voting rights in the history of Italian corporate law
11. A history of the corporation in Spain in the twentieth century: towards Europe
12. EU company law harmonization between convergence and varieties of capitalism
PART III ASIA
13. Corporation law in late Imperial China
14. The stakeholder approach to corporate law: a historical perspective from India
15. Japanese corporate law and corporate governance in historical perspective
PART IV NORTH AMERICA
16. The evolution of Mexican mercantile and corporate laws
17. A history of Canadian corporate law: a divergent path from the American model?
18. For- and non-profit special corporations in America, 1608–1860
19. Legitimating power: a brief history of modern U.S. corporate law
20. Adolf Berle, E. Merrick Dodd and the new American corporatism of 1932
21. Corporate law and the history of corporate social responsibility
22. Evolutionary models of corporate law
Index
