Talk:History of companies

Explaining the tag
I found this page on new page patrol, and started to rewrite it, both so somebody with a middle school (7th and 8th grade in America) reading comprehension level could understand and so it could comply with NPOV standards. I'm not entirely sure if I succeeded. When I started, the article had phrases like "dazzlingly rich" and "Eventually, state governments began to realize the greater corporate registration revenues available by providing more permissive corporate laws.". I wanted a third opinion, so I put up the tag. --Call me Bubba (talk) 23:24, 1 January 2009 (UTC)

This article is poor and needs improvement. For example a subheading is Mercantilism, although it is on U.S. domestic commercial policy and has nothing to do with Mercantilism. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 138.16.10.68 (talk) 16:14, 3 March 2009 (UTC)

I thought this page was "history of corporations". But it shows that it is a redirect from that to "history of companies". What POV. "Companies" are not synonomous with "corporations". For example, LLC or Limited Liability Companies are not corporations. Companies imply businesses in general. "Corporation", a legal entity, can be a special type of business, a non-profit, or even before it was a legal entity created by sovereigns such as a king or with the US revolution, the people, "corporations" were merely a group of people. "History of corporations" would included these various things and not be reduced to merely "companies" or "businesses". If I had the time and account, I might consider creating such a page. But I did want to share in the discussion. 143.200.137.180 (talk) 19:06, 12 September 2009 (UTC)


 * You are perfecly right. There is a complete confusion between companies and corporations in this article. In a history of companies we shouldn't speak about the non-profit corporations, traditionally religious or public bodies or guilds. This article should only describe the evolution of share-owned enterprises, and the incorporated companies are only the final step of centuries of evolution of non-incorporated or partially incorporated companies and of centuries of company law. Lele giannoni (talk) 20:50, 9 March 2012 (UTC)


 * This sounds interesting Lele, but it doesn't seem somehow to quite square with the the wiki articles on Corporation and Company where the confusion seems perpetuated. Is this a linguistic clash of English-English and American-English?  If so perhaps it could be cleared up by reference to that? LookingGlass (talk) 13:38, 15 June 2013 (UTC)

Limitation, limited status etc
I couldn't find clarity or detail in the articles on wiki about limited company status, and therefore about when/how the transition occured between what nowadays we might call the old QUANGOs and the modern independent limited company. The Dutch East India Company is referred to in many places but not the key differences between its like and modern companies in terms of limitations, obligations, ownership and control. This seems to me the crucial phase change in company history as it marks the beginning of a new/modern era of government. Can anyone shed any light? From the article here on corporations it appears to have been something that happened in the middle of the 17th century LookingGlass (talk) 13:41, 14 June 2013 (UTC)

Merge discussion
In my opinion, and as others have stated above, this article is a bit of a muddle. I think the only answer is to merge it i.e to delete this page, replace it with a link to Company, and transfer any information that would improve other pages (mostly corporation) as appropriate.

There is a problem I see as between British-English and American, but I think this can easily be managed within the existing pages (and by sorting some of those out too). For instance corporation shouldn't refer only to US companies. The term "incorpration" was in use long before McDonalds was imagined and a better illustration could be found for the subject!

As this matter lies at the heart of modern Western society, I feel it is really important to get the basics of it straight.

The bulk of this article concerns corporations (in English these are called "Limited compamnies", or in short "companies") so it duplicates/parallels information on the corporation page. All that would be needed for full overlap would be for this one to have some very minor ammendments to its introduction so as not to try and cover everything the generic term "company" might refer to.

On the whole I can't see that there is a free-standing history of companies in the generic sense of the word as that covers such diverse matters (see company). In general the term company can refer to any group of people at any degree of formality so it doesn't seem to make any sense to me to have this article. IMO it should have a non-notability tag but the tag doesn't quite seem to fit.

LookingGlass (talk) 13:54, 19 October 2013 (UTC)


 * I think there will always need to be a separate page because "corporation" is too big: it'll need a history subsection. I'm sure we can make it better!  Wik idea  13:06, 17 November 2013 (UTC)


 * Corporation is a remarkably small article. The Microsoft article is more than twice as big. — Blue-Haired Lawyer t 14:04, 17 November 2013 (UTC)