Abstract
The early United States based much of its financial development on European precedents modified to fit American circumstances and to take advantage of opportunities presenting themselves to a new nation. One area of financial development in which the United States most differed from European precedents was that of the business corporation. In Europe, corporations tended to be privileged monopolies, and there were relatively few of them. The first promoters of U.S. corporations may have had the European model in mind, but increasingly found themselves overwhelmed by democratic political forces that insisted upon the extension of corporate privileges to nearly all white males who desired them. It was in the United States, therefore, starting in the 1790s when about 300 corporations were chartered, that the old European idea of the corporation as privileged monopoly began to be transformed into the modern idea of the corporation as a competitive enterprise.
Robert E. Wright is the Nef Family Chair of Political Economy at Augustana College in South Dakota. Richard Sylla is Henry Kaufman Professor of the History of Financial Institutions and Markets in the Department of Economics at the Stern School of Business, New York University.
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Wright, R.E., Sylla, R. (2011). Corporate Governance and Stockholder/Stakeholder Activism in the United States, 1790–1860: New Data and Perspectives. In: Koppell, J.G.S. (eds) Origins of Shareholder Advocacy. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230116665_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230116665_11
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