In the latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes traces the line of descent of modern corporate structures from the patent granted to John Cabot to explore (and exploit) a trade route to China:
The replica of John Cabot’s ship Matthew in Bristol harbour, adjacent to the SS Great Britain.
Photo by Chris McKenna via Wikimedia Commons.
I discussed last time [linked here] how the use of patent monopolies came to England in the sixteenth century. Since then, however, I’ve developed a strong hunch that the introduction of patent monopolies may also have played a crucial role in the birth of the business corporation. I happened to be reading Ron Harris’s new book, Going the Distance, in which he stresses the unprecedented constitutions of the Dutch and English East India Companies — both of which began to emerge in the closing years of the sixteenth century. Yet the first joint-stock corporation, albeit experimental, was actually founded decades earlier, in the 1550s. Harris mentions it as a sort of obscure precursor, and it wasn’t terribly successful, but it stood out to me because its founder and first governor was also one of the key introducers of patent monopolies to England: the explorer Sebastian Cabot.
As I mentioned last time, Cabot was named on one of England’s very first patents for invention — though we’d now say it was for “discovery” — in 1496. An Italian who spent much of his career serving Spain, he was coaxed back to England in the late 1540s to pursue new voyages of exploration. Indeed, he reappeared in England at the exact time that patent monopolies for invention began to re-emerge, after a hiatus of about half a century. In 1550, Cabot obtained a certified copy of his original 1496 patent and within a couple of years English policymakers began regularly granting other patents for invention. It started as just a trickle, with one 1552 patent granted to to some enterprising merchant for introducing Norman glass-making techniques, and a 1554 patent to the German alchemist Burchard Kranich, and in the 1560s had developed into a steady stream.
Yet Cabot’s re-certification of his patent is never included in this narrative. It’s a scarcely-noted detail, perhaps because he appears not to have exploited it. Or did he? I think the fact of his re-certification — a bit of trivia that’s usually overlooked — helps explain the origins of the world’s first joint-stock corporation.
Corporations themselves, of course, were nothing new. Corporate organisations had existed for centuries in England, and indeed throughout Europe and the rest of the world: officially-recognised legal “persons” that might outlive each and any member, and which might act as a unit in terms of buying, selling, owning, and contracting. Cities, guilds, charities, universities, and various religious organisations were usually corporations. But they were not joint-stock business corporations, in the sense of their members purchasing shares and delegating commercial decision-making to a centralised management to conduct trade on their behalves. Instead, the vast majority of trade and industry was conducted by partnerships of individuals who pooled their capital without forming any legally distinct corporation. Shares might be bought in a physical ship, or even in particular trading voyages, but not in a legal entity that was both ongoing and intangible. There were many joint-stock associations, but they were not corporations.
And to the extent that some corporations in England were related to trade, such as the Company of Merchant Adventurers of London, or the Company of Merchants of the Staple, they were not joint-stock businesses at all. They were instead regulatory bodies. These corporations were granted monopolies over the trade with certain areas, or in certain commodities, to which their members then bought licenses to trade on their own account. Membership fees went towards supporting regulatory or charitable functions — resolving disputes between members, perhaps supporting members who had fallen on hard times, and representing the interests of members as a lobby group both at home and abroad — but not towards pooling capital for commercial ventures. The regulated companies were thus more akin to guilds, or to modern trade unions or professional associations, rather than firms. Members were not shareholders, but licensees who used their own capital and were subject to their own profits and losses.
Before the 1550s, then, there had been plenty of unincorporated business associations that were joint-stock, and even more unincorporated associations that were not joint-stock. There had also been a few trade-related corporations that were not joint-stock. Sebastian Cabot’s innovation was thus to fill the last quadrant of that matrix: he created a corporation that would be joint-stock, in which a wide range of shareholders could invest, entrusting their capital to managers who would conduct repeated voyages of exploration and trade on their behalves.
