1.1 Origin and Development of Companies in General

The pre-modern ancestry: the medieval trading forms — the commenda (the capital-and- management partnership of the Mediterranean trade), the guilds (the regulated craft bodies), the family societas; then the age of discovery's instruments: the chartered companies (the great monopoly trading corporations created by royal charter — the East India companies the most famous), the state's licence as the company's first birth-certificate. The joint-stock revolution (17th-18th centuries): the pooling of many investors' capital into transferable shares; the speculative manias and crashes (the South Sea Bubble's discipline — the bubble legislation's reaction); the company as the colonial trade's engine. The general-incorporation era (19th century): incorporation by registration, not royal favour — the UK's Joint Stock Companies Act 1844 and the Limited Liability Act 1855 (the names to cite), the Companies Act 1862's consolidation; the investor's limited liability as the grand risk-encouraging invention; the capstone case — Salomon v. Salomon — the company a person separate from its members (Unit 3's full doctrine). The modern corporation: the economy's dominant institution (the industrial- era railways and banks, the 20th-century multinationals, the listed-company capital markets); the separation of ownership and management; the corporate group's rise (holding and subsidiary chains); the modern governance movement (boards, disclosure, regulators) — the company as the law's most consequential artificial person.