Corporate Space

The incorporated joint-stock company, ancestor of the modern corporation, developed slowly and unevenly in Victorian Britain. Its emergence as a business form and as a legal form was controversial, contested, and not at all inevitable; it was not the product of an emergent liberal–capitalist consensus, nor an urgent economic necessity (Ireland 2010; Loftus 2009; Taylor 2006). In 1844, there were only 947 joint-stock companies in England, and by 1885, after decades of corporate law liberalization, such companies only represented between 5% and 10% of all English business organizations ( Johnson 2006, p. 219). Nonetheless, the incorporated joint-stock company was a persistent source of cultural anxiety. As an impersonal vehicle for transacting business beyond the boundaries of a knowable community, the incorporated joint-stock company collaborated in the incomplete and fitful disentanglement of business from personal relationships, personal character, and personal responsibility.