The History of the Corporation, Volume One by Bruce Brown (Introduction)

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The History of the Corporation by Bruce Brown

Introduction

A THOUSAND YEARS from now, our time will be remembered as the Second Dominion of the Corporation.

During the early 20th century, enterprises bearing imprimaturs like Corp., Ltd., AG and S.A. gained control of the vast physical wealth in what used to be called the Free World.

Then with the advent of new economic policies in the Soviet Union and China during the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the corporate conquest neared completion. Virtually the entire planet had become organized and regimented -- in short ruled -- by corporations.

This accomplishment is beyond the power of any individual or any other type of organization in human history. It not only overshadows the authority of the world's social, political and religious forces, it transcends them, so that all people may find utility in its embrace.

Nowhere is the rise of the modern corporation more apparent than in the United States, which possessed only seven chartered business corporations at the time of Independence. The first significant American industrial corporation, the Boston Manufacturing Company, was not established until 1813.

Unfettered by restrictive laws or limited resources, however, American business corporations soon outstripped their European counterparts. In less than a century, advanced corporate forms like J.P. Morgan's U.S. Steel and John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil dominated the vital, productive heart of American industry.

Corporations grew larger in America than ever before on earth, and this gigantism remained a prominent feature of American corporations throughout the 20th century. In 1991, eight of the world's ten leading corporations were American, including the world's largest, General Motors. A decade later, four of the world's five largest corporations were American, including the largest in terms of gross revenue, Wal-Mart.

Mere size, however, can't convey the corporate flowering witnessed in America and the rest of the world over the last 100 years. Equally impressive is their diversity. They weave cloth, fabricate microprocessors, baptize babies, provide insurance, promote frauds, educate philosophers, sell cigarettes, save whales, launder money, make garbage, and finally haul it all away and bury it.

Corporations are, in fact, involved in virtually every type of human activity today, legal and otherwise. The reason is that the corporation is not comprised of an array of job-specific skills, but rather a means of organizing any human activity. While corporations exist as small as one person, (such as most Catholic bishoprics in the U.S., which are corporations sole), the real genius of the entity lies in its ability to employ large numbers of people in complex enterprises.

The History of the Corporation

Astonisher.com is pleased to present The History of the Corporation, Volume One by Bruce Brown.

Here is the Table of Contents for excerpts from the entire book, which covers 1,000 years from the birth of the first modern corporation through the the First Dominion of the corporation.

The History of the Corporation Volume One by Bruce Brown
Introduction
Ch. 1	Ch. 2	Ch. 3
Ch. 4	Ch. 5	Ch. 6
Ch. 7	Ch. 8	Ch. 9
Ch. 10	Ch. 11	Ch. 12
Afterword

About the Author: Bruce Brown is the author of eight books, including Mountain in the Clouds, an environmental classic, and The Windows 95 Bug Collection, which was put on display in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.
He has done investigative reporting for the New York Times (the Karen Silkwood story), foreign correspondence for Atlantic Monthly (baseball in Cuba), and book reviews for the Washington Post Book World, as well as script-writing for PBS-TV (The Miracle Planet).

He is also a successful businessman and CEO, having created BugNet and built it into the world’s largest supplier of PC bug fixes before it was acquired by a Fortune 500 company at the height of the dot com boom.

At times corporations function commercially, at other times governmentally or religiously. Even among farmers, the last American bastion of individualism and family enterprise, the corporation has made great inroads. Many family farms are now structured as corporations for tax purposes, and in the richest portions of the nation's greatest agricultural producer, California, corporate farming has predominated since the 1970s.

Because the most powerful American corporations are of recent origin, it is easy to think of the corporation as a modern phenomenon, but actually they are very ancient -- so ancient that their actual point of origin is lost in legend of Numa Pompilius and beyond. The oldest surviving business corporation in the world is probably Sweden's Stora Kopperberg, which was founded in 1288 and is now known as StoraEnso. The oldest surviving corporation of any sort is the Benedictine Order of the Catholic Church, which was founded around 529 A.D.

Many aspects of modern corporate life are actually artifacts of the ancient past. The first corporate convention on record, for instance, was held by the Cistercian monks in the early 12th century. Even the pants that modern business executives wear -- either figuratively or literally -- are derived from the dress of Venetian corporados who adopted the customs of the Moslem East, scandalizing sixteenth century Europe and giving birth to the comic Venetian businessman, Pantalone, in Italian commedia dell' arte.

Similarly, former U.S. Treasury Secretary William Simon and associates were employing a hoary gambit when they bought the Gibson Greeting Card division of RCA in 1982 with $1 million of their own money, and $79 million borrowed against Gibson Greeting's own assets. Upon selling Gibson Greeting eighteen months later, Simon reportedly pocketed $66 million on an investment of $330,000. For awhile -- before the fall of Drexel Burnham Lambert and the others dragged down by leveraged buyout (LBO) debt - it seemed like LBOs might remake the American financial landscape.

In those heady days, a great deal was written about this marvelous advance in modern corporate practice. Actually, however, there are records of LBOs as far back as the thirteenth century when the Dominican bishop Thomas of Cantimpre complained of the ill effects of borrowing against the assets of a corporation to acquire control of it. "I am ashamed to record what I have seen," he wrote. "The abbot of this house [Anchin], who scarce knew the first elements of spiritual rule, attained to the elevation ... at so great an expense of money that he left his abbey in debt to the extent of more than 10,000 lire."

In addition to LBOs, the merchant guildsmen of Renaissance Italy employed compound interest, double entry bookkeeping, sinking funds, and expense accounts. Even the word company reflects actuarial refinement. It is derived from the French, com panis, meaning "with bread." This referred to a common device employed to dodge medieval usury laws; namely that a passive investor shared the risk of the venture as if he was a member of the family -- i.e., "shared the bread" -- of the people actively involved in the business, and therefore had "earned" his usurious interest or dividend.

While the etymology of company stresses the illicit aspects of the corporation, the word corporation itself stresses the higher aspirations of the entity. Derived from the Latin corparæ, it means to make corporal, or physically embody. For the first half millennia after the fall of Rome, the world's most powerful corporations were all trying to embody the Christian God. The idea took hold so strongly that by 1534 St. Thomas More could speak of Jesus Christ as the ultimate corporation: "He [Jesus] doth...incorporate all christen folke and hys owne bodye together in one corporacyon mistical."

A century later, Roger Williams, Freethinker and founder of Rhode Island, likened the church to a "company of East India or Turkey merchants," while English philosopher Thomas Hobbes saw those same joint stock companies as lesser -- possibly parasitic -- creatures within the larger creature of the state. In Leviathan he wrote, "Corporations... are many lesser commonwealths in the bowels of a greater, like worms in the entrails of a natural man."

God, demon, servant, master, parasite or provider -- what exactly is the corporation? A good starting point is probably...

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Key words from the remainder of the Introduction of
The History of the Corporation, Volume One

Chief Justice John Marshall
1819 Dartmouth College case
St. Benedict
Michael Milken
W. David Kubiak
Roger Manwood
1592
Edward Coke
628 A.D.
franchise
1978
Ronald Reagan
hereditary aristocracy
ancien regime
Black Death
Knights of the Hospital of St. John
French Revolution
Abbey of Cluny
Hotel de Cluny
Walter Rathenau
Allgemeine Elektrizitatsgesellschaft
1916
Pygmalion and Galatea
Totila
St. Francis
Marco Polo,
Savonarola,
Lorenzo de' Medici,
Mynheer Dirckszoon,
John Law,
Jay Cook,
T. Boone Pickens,
Mother Teresa

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