This conference, financially supportet by the Fritz Thyssen foundation, aims to bring together scholars working on two related, but different sets of issues: first, those whose research can offer new perspective and information on the origins and the transformation of European corporations (joint stock companies); and second, those whose work seeks to revise the very concept of the corporation itself — especially in dialogue with the assumptions of previous prevailing historical schools of thought, most notably late 19th century German legal historians.
In particular, many scholars, including German legal historians of late 19th century, found in the models of the English and Dutch East India Companies (EIC and VOC) prime examples of the origins of the modern corporation, but their findings and interpretations have proven both anachronistic and excessively formalized — approaches which have been challenged by recent works on the European East India Companies, which will be featured in this workshop. Yet, while their conclusions can be interrogated, the questions raised by the German scholars of the late 19th century remain as valid today as they were a century and some ago: How did corporate institutions evolve as they traveled from place to place, and over time? Did new institutions of the Early Modern Age – such as the English and Dutch East India Companies - co-opt elements of medieval and Renaissance institutions, or innovate upon them? Moreover, by thinking about the way corporations have been treated by previous generations of scholars, we can investigate more thoroughly the degree to which newer trends and techniques in history and the social sciences — such as the New Institutional History — have changed or solidified our perception of the origin of medieval and early modern corporate power.