Company Governance History

Overview These days we take for granted the fixed role of the Company in society. It's almost seen as a sine qua non by many. However this was not always so and many of the first Chartered Companies either "decorporatised", ie converted back to Guilds, or were abolished and as a business format it came very close to being abolished only decades after its creation. It is an interesting counterfactual as to how a parallel universe developed in which England deleted the Company in 1604 rather than continued to develop it from there for centuries (a legacy naturally imported into

Overview In this article we look at how one of the earliest, and most successful early English far-afield trading enterprises shows us the messy reality of the stuttering start of the creation of the Company form. Entrepreneurs some 400 years ago not only had to contend with changing business formats but businesses in which there was a high chance not just of losing your entire cargo and your life but, in the case of the Levant Company, being enslaved en route. Business can be tough today but it is never that tough! For all the challenges that entrepreneurs in London

All Good Governance Articles Start With Aristotle In Politica Aristotle wrote that setting governance rules is the most important concern of a society. Quite correct - think of the folks who set the rules for your favourite sport and you’ll see how daily life is set by them. When it’s daily business life then the very prosperity of a nation is at stake and you’d think that folks would take care over those rules even more so than say the offside rule in football. However we don’t just fail to learn from the past we don’t even know it... it's

“Frobisher was back in England in September and embraced at Elizabeth's court, where the news was that he had returned with ore to the value of anything between £80,000 and £100,000. Rewards and a knighthood seemed certain. He had pushed through into ‘Meta Incognita'. And in those 'unknown limits' was fantastic wealth waiting to be gathered in. At an audience with the queen herself, Frobisher spoke of the riches he had brought home ‘and so great promises of the infinite treasure of this new land, whereof he would possess her majesty surmounting the treasure of the Indies of the king

“Here in the City of London there are so many richly endowed livery halls to remind us of the long and illustrious histories of so many London guilds that we can be forgiven for forgetting, or perhaps even being unaware, of the vast network of guilds that once existed throughout the country. I have chosen the title “The Rise and Decline of Guilds in Great Britain and Ireland” because those guilds still in existence are mere shadows of their former selves. More significantly, the vast majority of guilds, thousands of them, have disappeared altogether, with little now known about