The Origins of Company Law: Methods and Approaches

Edited by Victoria Barnes, Jonathan Hardman and Sarah Wilson

Forthcoming, Hart, 2024

Blurb

What were the origins of company law? How did it begin? Why did it change? There is no single answer to these questions. Each discipline, and sub discipline, has a different approach and method that brings different facets of study to the fore. These chapters provide histories (in the plural) of company law uniting a variety of approaches from law, business, economics and history. This multidisciplinary endeavour is immensely valuable for debates taking place now among policy-makers in the UK and US about returning to historic modes of company regulation.  This book brings together Anglo-American scholarship that will not only shed greater light on the history of company law but also influence contemporary debates about our ability to return to or learn from past. Historical research has great value here because it not only generates new insights into the evolution of present legal rules, but also corrects misunderstandings and misapprehensions about them. This book shows how this body of law developed to become the rules which we are now familiar with. It showcases antecedents of present debates, reveals regulatory lessons from previous legal regimes, identifies instances of path dependency, unpicks pivotal legal events, and explains drivers for legal change. These essays reevaluate the history of company law and the knowledge gathered here will inform the law-making and policy-making agenda.

Keywords

Company law; Corporate law; Origins of Company Law; Legal History; History of Law; Development of Company Law; Uses of the Past; Lessons from History; Learning form the past; Nature of the Company; Corporate Regulation; Shareholders; Corporate Management

This book is a product of the SLS Annual Seminar 2022 on the Origins of Company Law.

The Global Corporate Law brings together those exploring the company regulation from around the globe. In the present era of de-globalisation, policy-makers have been either slow, reluctant or unwilling to recognise the importance of global exchanges. Following the disruption to supply chains in the wake of Brexit and now the conflict in Ukraine, there is now widespread acknowledgement that commerce is global in nature. Yet, the international commercial exchanges are not themselves new. Companies have long looked to new markets to expand and entrepreneurs have built new customer bases overseas since time immemorial. Traders have often sought finance, agents or intermediaries to facilitate the sale of goods. Law, of course, influences the terms of commercial transactions at all levels.