This essay examines the fate of the 100 largest industrial firms in the world in the year 1912 over the period to 1995. Disappearance and decline were the most common outcomes, but a few firms succeeded in growing considerably. There are no significant differences between the performance of...

Around 1900 Britain was exceptionally suited to pioneering large scale enterprises because of the precocious development of its equity markets and London's experimentation with a more eclectic range of corporate governance techniques than the world's smaller and less cosmopolitan financial...

Because ownership was already more divorced from control in the largest stock market of 1911 (London) than in the largest stock market of 1995 (New York), the consequences for the economy, for good or ill, could have been considerable. Using a large sample of quoted companies with capital of £1...

Estimates of the extent of the corporate economy in eightyâ€one countries in 1910, when the number of corporations globally reached about half a million, show that the US and the British Empire alone accounted for threeâ€quarters of these. The aggregate market value of approaching a...