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Capitalism Before Corporations: The Morality of Business Associations and the Roots of Commercial Equity and Law

Capitalism Before Corporations: The Morality of Business Associations and the Roots of Commercial Equity and Law

Author: Andreas Televantos
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780198870340

Published In: December 2020
Format: Hardback
Jurisdiction: U.K. ? Disclaimer:
Countri(es) stated herein are used as reference only
Paperback Edition ISBN: 9780198933632

List Price: HKD 1,430.00

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Description
Contents

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To what extent did English law facilitate trade before the advent of general incorporation and modern securities law? This is the question at the heart of Capitalism before Corporations. It examines the extent to which legal institutions of the Regency period, especially Lord Eldon's Chancellorship, were sympathetic to the needs of merchants and willing to accommodate their changing practices and demands within established legal doctrinal frameworks and contemporary political economic thought. In so doing, this book probes at the heart of modern debates about equity, trusts, insolvency, and the justifiability of corporate privileges.

Corporations are an integral part of modern life. We bank with corporations, we usually buy our groceries from them, and they provide us with most news and media. We take it for granted too that most large-scale business, and even much small-scale business, is carried out by corporations. Things were not always so. Televantos considers the Bubble Act of 1720, which criminalised the forming of corporations without a Royal Charter or Act of Parliament, its repeal in 1825, and the subsequent impact. Much of the modernisation of Britain's industry therefore took place before general incorporation was allowed. Unaided by statute, traders had to create business organisations using the basic building blocks of private law: trusts, partnership, and agency.

Key Features:

Examines early capitalism and the DNA genesis of modern unincorporated trading entities
Provides compelling analysis of the influential commercial judgments of Lord Eldon
Engages with the roots of modern problems concerning creditors of trusts and partnerships, Quistclose arrangements, Clayton's Case, and ostensible authority

Introduction

Part 1 Regency era business structures

Partnership as organisational law

The use of trusts in business structures

Part 2 Binding business assets

Ostensible authority and the ordinary course of business

Judicial resistance to merchant demands, factors and paternalism in the King's Bench

The authority of trustees and executors

Part 3 Business failure, risk, and insolvency distribution

Trusts and the risk of bankruptcy

Partnership dissolution and bankruptcy

Conclusion