CIRJE-F-878 | "A Global Census of Corporations in 1910" |
Author Name | Hannah, Leslie |
Date | February 2013 |
Full Paper | PDF file |
Remarks | Subsequently published in the Economic History Review (2014). |
Abstract |
Estimates of the extent of the corporate economy in eighty‐one countries in 1910, when the number
of corporations globally reached about half a million, show that the US and the British Empire alone
accounted for three‐quarters of these. The aggregate market value of approaching a hundred stock
exchanges in the Empire exceeded that of the then similarly numerous US securities markets
analyzed in Moody's Manual. However, American corporations outnumbered British ones, because
the US had many more, small, private (unquoted and often family‐owned) corporations. Continental
Europe collectively lagged the Anglosphere both by number and value of corporations. The capitalist
institution that now dominates global business thus initially prospered less under the French or
German civil law systems ‐ adopted by most world economies ‐ than under English common law and
its derivatives. Within these legal families, the corporate form was preferred to the limited
partnership almost everywhere that offered simple, cheap and flexible registration for public and
private companies. A century later, despite the suppression of the corporation for many decades in
some countries, there were many times more corporations in all countries and patterns of adoption
were converging. We find substantial differences in 1910 between relatively poor enclave
economies with capital‐importing corporate sectors and economies at various income levels with a
vibrant local small private company sector. This new quantitative perspective challenges some
orthodoxies and raises new questions about the relationship between early corporate development |