O POCZĄTKACH SPÓŁKI AKCYJNEJ

Justyna Dąbrowska

doi:10.21697/zp.2019.19.4.01

Published: 2020-01-31

Vol. 19 No. 4 (2019)

The Origins of the Joint-Stock Company

Justyna Dąbrowska

Zeszyty Prawnicze

Section: Artykuły

https://doi.org/10.21697/zp.2019.19.4.01

Abstract

The aim of this article is to present and give grounds for my view on the origins of the joint stock company. It is generally believed that the great English and Dutch trading companies were the first joint stock companies. However, the roots of the shareholding company go back much further in time, since already by the 12th century in many parts of Europe there were business companies which had devised the idea of a corporation and were pursuing their activities on this basis. Medieval companies were independent entities in the eyes of the law, and their members held an alienable share in the company business. In a certain sense the kuxe, uchaux, and sortes of those times were counterparts of modern shares. Although neither the concept of the corporation as a legal entity nor of share capital had been formulated as yet, and the shareholders were generally liable for the organisation’s business, nevertheless these companies – unlike other types of trading companies – were founded to pursue a fixed business aim, and any changes in their membership had no eﬀect on the way they operated. Unlike the first great commercial companies which were founded on the grounds of a royal charter, medieval companies implemented a system of representation and management based on a shareholders’ agreement and the principle of majority rule.

The concurrent but to a certain extent independent emergence and evolution of a variety of business entities, such as the pariages de moulins, the gildae mercatoriae (merchant guilds), the miners’ companies and the Italian montes, the Rhedereien (shipping companies), or the Gewerkschafen (crafsmen’s guilds), shows that the arrival of the joint stock company was strictly linked to progress in civilisation and socioeconomic transformation.

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Dąbrowska, J. (2020). The Origins of the Joint-Stock Company. Zeszyty Prawnicze, 19(4), 7–48. https://doi.org/10.21697/zp.2019.19.4.01

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