IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/palchp/978-0-230-11666-5_11.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Corporate Governance and Stockholder/Stakeholder Activism in the United States, 1790–1860: New Data and Perspectives

In: Origins of Shareholder Advocacy

Author

Listed:
  • Robert E. Wright
  • Richard Sylla

Abstract

The early United States based much of its financial development on European precedents modified to fit American circumstances and to take advantage of opportunities presenting themselves to a new nation. One area of financial development in which the United States most differed from European precedents was that of the business corporation. In Europe, corporations tended to be privileged monopolies, and there were relatively few of them. The first promoters of U.S. corporations may have had the European model in mind, but increasingly found themselves overwhelmed by democratic political forces that insisted upon the extension of corporate privileges to nearly all white males who desired them. It was in the United States, therefore, starting in the 1790s when about 300 corporations were chartered, that the old European idea of the corporation as privileged monopoly began to be transformed into the modern idea of the corporation as a competitive enterprise.

Suggested Citation

  • Robert E. Wright & Richard Sylla, 2011. "Corporate Governance and Stockholder/Stakeholder Activism in the United States, 1790–1860: New Data and Perspectives," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: Jonathan G S Koppell (ed.), Origins of Shareholder Advocacy, chapter 0, pages 231-251, Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-11666-5_11
    DOI: 10.1057/9780230116665_11
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. B. Zorina Khan, 2017. "Related Investing: Corporate Ownership and Capital Mobilization during Early Industrialization," NBER Working Papers 23052, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-11666-5_11. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.