Chartered company


chartered company, East India House, London [Credit: Thomas Hosmer Shepherd]East India House, LondonThomas Hosmer Shepherdtype of corporation that evolved in the early modern era in Europe. It enjoyed certain rights and privileges and was bound by certain obligations, under a special charter granted to it by the sovereign authority of the state, such charter defining and limiting those rights, privileges, and obligations and the localities in which they were to be exercised. The charter usually conferred a trading monopoly upon the company in a specific geographic area or for a specific type of trade item.

The earliest English chartered companies were the Merchant Adventurers and the Merchant Staplers. Such early companies were regulated companies, deriving the principles of their organization from the medieval merchant guilds. The regulated company was a corporation of merchants, each of whom traded on his own account but was subjected to a rigid set of common rules that regulated his operations within narrow limits.

A great increase in the number and activities of the chartered companies took place during the second half of the 16th century, when the English, French, and Dutch governments were ready to assist trade and encourage overseas exploration. Changes also occurred in the organization of chartered companies. The regulated company, which had been very convenient for trading with countries where conditions were stable, was not so suitable for ventures to remoter lands, where the risks, commercial and political, were greater. To meet the requirements of the new trading conditions, the joint-stock organization, in which the capital was provided by shareholders who then participated in the profits from the joint enterprise, was evolved. In some cases, the companies alternated between one form and the other. In all charters, provisions were inserted to secure the “good government” of the company.

In England two of the earliest and most important of overseas trading companies were the Muscovy Company (1555) and the Turkey Company (1583). They had important effects on international relations, for they maintained English influence and paid the expenses of ambassadors sent to those countries. Other English companies were established in this period for similar trading ventures: the Spanish Company (1577, regulated); the Eastland Company, for trade with the Baltic (1579, regulated); and the French Company (1611, regulated). The first company for African trade was founded in 1585, and others were granted charters in 1588, 1618, and 1631. But it was the chartered companies that were formed during this period for trade with the Indies and the New World which had the most wide-reaching influence. The East India Company was established in 1600 as a joint-stock company with a monopoly of the trade to and from the East Indies. Its political achievements form a large part of the history of the British Empire, and its economic power was enormous, contributing substantially to the national wealth and causing the company to be the centre of most of the economic controversies of the 17th century.

In North America the English chartered companies had a colonizing as well as a trading purpose. Although the Hudson’s Bay Company was almost wholly devoted to trade, most companies—such as the London Company, the Plymouth Company, and the Massachusetts Bay Company—were directly involved in the settlement of colonists. Elsewhere, chartered English companies continued to be formed for the development of new trade—for instance, the short-lived Canary Company in 1665, the Royal African Company in 1672, and the South Sea Company in 1711. There was frantic speculation in the shares of the South Sea Company, resulting in a severe setback to joint-stock enterprise. The Bubble Act of 1720 was designed to make it much more difficult to obtain a charter.

In France and the Netherlands, chartered companies had also been used for similar purposes by the governments. In France, from 1599 to 1789, more than 70 such companies came into existence. Under J.B. Colbert the French East India Company was founded (1664), and the colonial and Indian trade was placed in the hands of chartered companies in which the king himself had large financial interests. The French companies, however, were largely destroyed by the “Mississippi scheme” of John Law, in which trading companies like the Senegal and French East India companies were incorporated in a plan to take over the public debt. The financial crash in 1720 destroyed public confidence, and although a new Company of the Indies existed until 1769, the chartered company was virtually dead. In the Netherlands the Dutch East India and West India companies were the basis of the commercial and maritime supremacy of the Dutch in the 17th century. The success of the East India companies caused the foundation of the Ostend Company, whereby the Holy Roman emperor Charles VI sought unsuccessfully to acquire the trade of England and the Netherlands.

The development of the modern limited-liability company or corporation under successive companies acts led to a decline in the importance of chartered companies. Some of the older ones still exist, however, including the Hudson’s Bay Company.

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