Constructing the Company: Governance and Procedures in British and Irish Joint Stock Companies, 1720-1844

The project represents the first comprehensive examination of corporate governance in industrialising Britain. Its working hypothesis is that in enterprises large enough for a space to develop between ownership and management, this space became a political arena in which governing executives confronted their public legislatures, the assemblies of shareholders. The project tests this hypothesis through an analysis of the institutional arrangements for, and the practice of, governance in stock companies in Britain between the Bubble Act of 1720 and the Companies Act of 1844, i.e. during the century or so when the legal status of the stock company in England was most uncertain, and when its status in Scotland was still not entirely resolved. Historians, such as Alborn and Dunlavy, have argued that there was shift from democratic to plutocratic practice in business governance in Britain during the first half of the nineteenth century. The project seeks to establish the existence, timing and reasons for this shift.