Corporate Rule: A Hidden History

Colonial Corporations
Corporations after the American Revolution
The Corporate Return to Power
Corporate Regulation
Corporations and Global Trade

British Crown Corporations began operating in North America with the start of European settlement. These Crown Corporations, also known as colonial corporations, were a tool to export wealth back to the stockholders and the monarch that chartered them. The creation of corporations expanded empire and made the aristocracy wealthy. These early crown corporations were given the right to levy taxes, wage war, and imprison people all while enjoying a monopoly over trade in the regions where they operated. As Thomas Hobbes stated, corporations are “chips off the old block of sovereignty.”

It was clear though that these corporations possessed no rights of their own, but were rather artificial creations of the monarch, that existed for the benefit of the sovereign monarch. At any point the sovereign could revoke a corporation’s charter (the legal document that allows a corporation to exist).

Colonial anger and resentment against corporate power grew as the English Parliament introduced measures that protected trade by Crown corporations over that of local colonial merchants. In direct protest against Parliament's tax protections that subsidized the East India Company, colonists organized an act of civil disobedience that came to be known as the Boston Tea Party. In that one act of property destruction, colonists destroyed the equivalent of one million dollars of the Company's property.

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