Royal Charters, Royal Power, and the Business of Empire

Abstract

A key feature of the Bubble Act is the importance of royal charters. They were central to the rights of joint-stock companies such as the South Sea Company and the Bank of England. However, the charters themselves have received little attention from scholars. They have been overlooked in favour of discussions of the evolution of the corporate form. The process of issuing royal charters is opaque, perhaps deliberately so. In a political system without a written constitution, royal power is promoted as being merely symbolic and the monarch as a politically neutral figure. On closer inspection, royal charters were used to privilege certain companies and organisations which supported royal power. This is particularly the case with the companies set up to extract resources from colonised land. They reached their heyday after the Bubble Act itself was repealed, demonstrating that charters were not merely part of an older system which had been superseded by new corporate forms. The chartered companies acted on behalf of the state, and even instead of the state in some instances. Royal charters continue to be used into the present day, notably to bolster (and to manage) organisations that support the establishment. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is only one prominent example.