a difference in philosophy. For American industrialists, companies were almost an end in themselves. They were to be tended and grown. For British industrialists, they were a means to a higher end: a civilized existence. They were there to be harvested.

By establishing affiliates in Europe, American firms could leap over tariffs, get their goods to market faster, and adapt them to local taste.

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

“Corporations have neither bodies to be punished, nor souls to be condemned, they therefore do as they like.”26 Were they really that bad? Both the South Sea and Mississippi companies bilked thousands of investors of their money. Worse still, chartered companies often found their hands covered in blood. They pioneered slavery

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?

Companies have proved enormously powerful not just because they improve productivity, but also because they possess most of the legal rights of a human being, without the attendant disadvantages of biology: they are not condemned to die of old age and they can create progeny pretty much at will.

The company has been one of the West’s great competitive advantages. Of course, the West’s success owes much to technological prowess and liberal values.

There was an irony in the inventor of the assembly line being himself outorganized. As one historian, Thomas McCraw, puts it, “What Ford did for physical machines, Sloan did for human beings.”

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