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The legal and political explanations that underpin the contemporary literature on corporate governance have focused how the prevailing political or legal system determines how large corporations are governed. They imply that in order to facilitate good corporate practices, emerging economies should converge towards governance systems that offer strong legal protection for investors. Distinguishing itself from this approach, this paper adopts a historical account of the major political economy factors that either impeded or facilitated the evolution of the Anglo American Joint Stock Company (JSC). This illustrates how the JSC did note merge by blueprint or design as is implied in the literature. It also describes the implicit costs associated with the JSC including political rent seeking, the expropriation of small investors, market crises and monopolies. Under these circumstances legal and political developments often enhanced corporate power at the expense of the public interest. This account suggests that the JSC is better viewed as an adaptive and innovative organisational form that has thrived in the absence of formal regulations and law, rather than as a nexus of contracts arising from market failure. The evolution of the JSC and its corporate governance structures are therefore best understood within a political economy framework that accounts for market developments, political and legal interventions and the rise of the regulatory state. For developing economies the main lesson is not that they should replicate either the US or UK, but rather they can draw on the factors that allowed both countries to lessen the costs of mobilising finance, and adapt them to suit local market structures.

Creating Order in the Absence of Formal Regulations and Law: A Historical Perspective on Corporate Governance and the Joint Stock Company