Slavery, colonization and wars enabled a lot of prosperity building too, and also a lot of technological innovation.
I'm interested in this topic - what to do about corporations. Something I think about: if we don't have corporations what replaces them? How do you implement business that require commitments that are larger than family?
For example. Consider a digital social network that was oriented around commercial arrangements. You could form complex contracts in a group, and produce a reputation system formed from sets of people. There would be a deposit system, and an opt-in judiciary for dispute resolution. Could this - a digital upgrade of the icelandic commonwealth - be a more powerful mechanism than The Corporation?
There's a big difficulty in wanting to get rid of corporations, and that is that they emerged from a process of true evolution. The Dutch and then English East-India companies allowed humans to do things that had just not been viable previously. In fact, they were so successful that they could have obsoleted nation states. Certainly the East India company could have, and was reined in only because its shareholders and employees continued to show deference to the crown. Nation-states got scared at that point, and imposed significant political controls - corporations are not allowed to maintain standing armies. So I think it's important to appreciate what powerful tools they are. Any discussion about getting rid of them needs to consider - how do you implement large-scale projects in a hypothetical world without corporations?
The challenge, as I see it, is to have governments with a spine, but governments not so big that they stifle freedom or crowd out opportunities. Governments need to be powerful enough to overrule the biggest corporations so that corporations can exist without the cronyism. Power alone is insufficient though because even a powerful government is peopled by individuals who can sometimes be bought cheaply.
The East India Company is a somewhat terrifying example of what is possible with unbound power for corporations. It's an equally bad and unsubtle endpoint as an all government central economy. Diversity of thought and composition, as in many places, yields better results than homogeneity.
I think corporations are necessary for large-scale, long-term commercial endeavours. Certain classes of services to both individuals and businesses need continuity and corporations are well-suited to providing that kind of continuity.
Where we are today forgives incumbent large corporations too much and (certainly in Canada) makes it far too difficult for entrepreneurs to start small businesses.