The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea (Modern Library Chronicles Series Book 12)

Companies in Germany and Japan were there to serve “society,” while their Anglo-Saxon competitors chased profits.

Early joint-stock companies were instruments of rampant financial speculation as well as economic imperialism.

Procter & Gamble pioneered disability and retirement pensions (in 1915), the eight-hour day (in 1918) and, most important of all, guaranteed work for at least forty-eight weeks a year (in the 1920s). During the Depression, the company kept layoffs to the minimum and the company’s boss, Red Deupee, cut his own salary in half and stopped his annu

The first businesses to coordinate their activities across borders on a large scale were banks. In the Middle Ages, Italian bankers representing the papacy collected part of the English wool crop in Church taxes, transferred it overseas, and took their cut from the transaction. In the sixteenth century, German bankers, such as the Fuggers and the H

The story of the company in the last quarter of the twentieth century is of a structure being unbundled.

The history of multinationals points to two contradictory conclusions. The first is that multinationals have generally become a force for good—or, at the very least, that they have given up sinning quite so egregiously.

And the debate forged in mid-nineteenth-century Britain has shadowed the institution ever since: Is the company essentially a private association, subject to the laws of the state but with no greater obligation than making money, or a public one which is supposed to act in the public interest?

The second conclusion is that multinationals have never been loved, either at home or abroad.

Right from the beginning, it was a place where ties were optional, and first names compulsory.