文档介绍：Preliminary Draft
Prepared for World Justice Forum, Vienna July 2-5 2008
Law, Finance and the First Corporations
Ron Harris Professor of Law and Legal History, Tel Aviv University (******@).
I would like to acknowledge the research assistance of Kobi Ben-Zvi and Eyal Yaacoby and the financial support of the Cegla Center, Tel Aviv University. I would like to thank Robert Cooter, John Drew, Jesse Fried, Yarida Gonzales de Lara, Avner Greif, Santhi Hejeebu, Ella Jager, Bruce Johnsen, Lynne Kiesling, Naomi Lamoreaux, Walter Licht, Joel Mokyr, Dan Raff, Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, Harry Scheiber, h Sokoloff, Daniel Waldenstrom, Dean Williamson, Bill Whitney, Gavin Wright and participants in seminars at e Mason and UC Berkeley, UCLA, Northwestern University, Stanford University, the Wharton Business School, Tel Aviv University, Harvard Business School, Hebrew University and World Justice Forum for their ments and suggestions on earlier versions of this paper and on the related paper on the formation of the EIC.
The English East pany (EIC) and the Dutch East pany (VOC) were incorporated by State charters two years apart, in 1600 and 1602 respectively. They were involved in similar business activities, oceanic trade in high value goods between Europe and Asia, via the Cape Route. They were anized as joint stock corporations, with huge capital and hundreds of shareholders. In fact they were by an order of magnitude the largest business corporations of their era. The formation of panies was situated in a crucial junction in the history of anizations and stock markets. Yet, while the formation of the VOC led to the appearance of a secondary market in shares in the Dutch Republic, in England a share market emerged only a century after anization of the EIC.
The present article shall focus on a anizational challenge faced by the panies, the facilitation of long-term impersonal cooperation between active entrepreneurs and passive investors. It will study of the