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.
By:
Prof Andreas Televantos (Associate Professor Associate Professor Oxford University)
Imprint: Oxford University Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions:
Height: 233mm,
Width: 155mm,
Spine: 13mm
Weight: 346g
ISBN: 9780198933632
ISBN 10: 0198933630
Pages: 224
Publication Date: 19 January 2025
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Introduction Part 1: Regency era business structures 1: Partnership as organisational law 2: The use of trusts in business structures Part 2: Binding business assets 3: Ostensible authority and the ordinary course of business 4: Judicial resistance to merchant demands, factors and paternalism in the King's Bench 5: The authority of trustees and executors Part 3: Business failure, risk, and insolvency distribution 6: Trusts and the risk of bankruptcy 7: Partnership dissolution and bankruptcy Conclusion Appendix Glossary
Andreas Televantos is an Associate Professor at the University of Oxford Law Faculty, and the Hanbury Fellow and Tutor in Law at Lincoln College. His research focusses on trusts, fiduciaries, equitable remedies, and legal history.
Reviews for Capitalism Before Corporations
Winner of the Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Early Career Scholarship 2021, Society of Legal Scholars The modern lawyer will find much else to think about in the pages of Capitalism Before Corporations. Televantos is to be congratulated on producing an eminently readable book which should be of interest to anyone interested in companies, trusts, agency and partnership. * Rachel Leow, The Cambridge Law Journal * [A] thought-provoking text which will be of interest to academics and postgraduate students in partnership law, the law of trusts, or the history of commercial and company law in England. * Elspeth Berry, Reader in Law, Nottingham Trent University, The Partnership, LLP and LLC Law Forum *
- Winner of Winner of 2021 Society of Legal Scholars Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship.
