1.1 Genesis of Company and Company Law

The company's ancestry: the medieval trading forms (the commenda, the guilds), the great chartered companies (the East India companies — monopoly by royal charter), the joint-stock pooling of the 17th–18th centuries, the bubble-and-crash discipline (the South Sea Bubble's aftermath), and finally the general-incorporation statutes of the 19th century (the UK's Joint Stock Companies Act 1844 and the Limited Liability Act 1855 — names only): incorporation by registration, not royal favour. The capstone case — Salomon v. Salomon (by name only) — the company is a person separate from its members, and the veil protects the small shareholder as fully as the great. From that spine grew the modern corporation: the economy's dominant institution, and the law's most consequential artificial person.