The oldest company in almost every country (that is still in business)

What a tacky and misleading move

Plenty of oldest companies in this map predate the countries they're currently in. The The oldest company in Mexico is apparently about 300 years older than Mexico, and the oldest company in Canada is about 200 years older than Canada.

It's distinctly 1996 here:

https://businessfinancing.co.uk/the-oldest-company-in-almost...

> The actual youngest seems to be South Sudan's Ivory Bank, which was only founded in 1994. This is easily explained by the country being relatively new.

South Sudan is only a country since 2011, they include establishments older than the country they operate in.

for example Café M’Rabet – Tunis was created in 1630 and it is still operational till now. But it was not registered as a company at the time.

Also, the pre-colonial population maybe didn't have a culture of setting up long running businesses? Sure there would be family businesses, but they're be informal affairs. Also, in some cases there was no system of writing so no reliable records for determining the age of a business.

For a simple example, here's a map of Africa from just before World War I started: https://i.imgur.com/XZU6R0S.jpg

It would be pretty hard for, say, people in the Congo at the time to have started or continued lasting businesses when they were still getting over the whole "spend eighteen hours a day tapping rubber or they'll cut off the hands of everyone in your family, and even if you do they'll still kidnap your children and put them in schools where half will die of disease" thing that had been officially ended only six years before, and were still subject to wildly oppressive taxes and labor drafts that made getting out from under the weight of the Belgian overlords impossible.

According to the standard established in other cases, that would probably make Takamatsu the oldest company.

Because I'm meant to believe HSBC was started in El Salvador right? The standard in the image does not include having started there.

Such restaurants still usually end up going out of business. For example, a lot of the fried seafood warhorses in Boston are gone at this point.

Still, if you talk about entire countries, there are often going to be some institutions that have at least some sort of vague claim to continuous operation/ownership.

There's another reason for this, too: most of the restaurants that are long-lived are on land that is owned by the restaurant and has been for some time. It is incredibly expensive to operate a restaurant AND pay rent to someone, especially city prices. It's not as bad when you're just paying maintenance costs and property taxes.

But those companies have been bought and resold over time and even possibly moved. Which probably imply mortgage on some buyers. Not sure land owning is such a big deal.

(Being a merger does not exclude a company according to the standards of the map. For instance, Australia Post was at one stage a government department, formed by merging departments from several other governments. It's only by using this extremely contrived definition of "oldest company still in business" that they can reach 1809.)

Now, that's a good "business" :-). I imagined that this is the same situation as the other mints in the other countries.

If I were feeling pedantic I'd mention the universities of Oxford, St Andrews, Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Aberdeen... As well as a handful in Spain and Portugal ;)

Trump gave it back to Russia when Putin asked for it ;-)

What about: "Paddy's Bar" ?

Cool, thanks!

Can you clarify on which orthodox church? Greek, Russian and Ethiopian all come to mind, but I'm not aware of a general middle eastern one (genuinely curious). Perhaps it wasn't called orthodox back then (prior to 300AD)?

First Council of Nicaea established church structure and Canon law. Also, we can trace the unbroken line of successive bishops to that date.

The Great Schism of 1054 can be viewed as just a corporate split due to political pressure, which it was. It didn't seriously change anything about the business of the parent company.

Sort of. I don't think any respective Orthodox church had a distinct recognition prior to the first ecumenical council (year 325), though I may be wrong on that. Plenty of people like to claim "first", but there's no strong consensus on which branch of Orthodoxy was first, though I know there's a lot of cultural pride built up in a few of the churches thinking they were first.

What would you peg as the starting date of that? I think it's not quite that old, although I'm not a historian, so I might be wrong

Because it's a nation, not an asset-holding entity that is nation-agnostic.

You could probably consider the British royal family a business.

But even if you don’t do that, for a long time the British empire was a corporation — the east India company.

It wasn't an Empire until well into the Enlightenment. England was not really important at all for the longest time.

QE2 and House of 'Windsor' (heavy quotes) however, can trace their lineage back to the days pre-Norma invasion, so a little over 1K years by that measure.

I'm not sure it matters if, long ago, many religions were short lived. All that means is that over the millennia religions have evolved into much longer-lived entities, while corporations have not. Meaning they still present a useful case study for institutions capable of outliving a few short human life spans. And even then, looking at many dead religions (Greek, Roman, for example) they still held sway for hundreds of years, much longer than a typical corporation.

I don't think it's survivorship bias because the same would apply to any number of other types of organisations.

Also, there's a simple explanation which almost bothers me to point out because I think anyone with any sense of the greater good would see it immediately even if they were not faithful themselves; 'Religious' folks at least of the common era, tend to have faith in something much greater, and enduring than themselves, and so the 'hard work' they might put into building the Cathedral at Koln which took like 700 years makes easy sense, because it's there for future generations to see, be inspired by, enjoy the fruits of. That's not exactly a 'benefit' to someone who wants to be 'rich now', but it's a benefit to those who believe in the future. Although I guess there's still an ego play whereby some people think they can project their fame well into the future no doubt.

And FYI there really were not that-that many competing religions post-common era.

Note how 'bar' and/or 'brewery' (and eatery) tends to be the other 'longest lived'.

Well, every town needs a pub, the one already there is probably good enough. A pub isn't going to attract the competitive afflictions of the nobility or be destroyed by a conquering dude bent on making sure there's no uprising. They're almost the 'original brand' as well. Finally, some of them were taken on by Monks (thank you Belgium!) which gives them another bit of longevity consistency.

The other entity not mentioned are noble households. Queen Elizabeth is actually a descendant of pre-Norman kings even. I think it's actually direct (though not direct of all precedent kings as there was some bouncing around, but all around the same rough lineage). I don't know off the top of my head the true antiquity of some households, but it's pretty far back in many cases.

To me the map also hints that successful civilisations have a lot of consistency and continuity ....

An excellent point. There's even plenty of room within many religions for some degree of differences in belief. The buffet-style Catholic comes to mind. But I think a fundamental difference between religions & corporations is that religious institutions have fewer incentives to make decisions that favor the short term over the long term. That, combined with the flexibility to change (even if at a glacial place as religions often do) may be the key to their longevity.

I don't have a "convenient" time machine, only an "inconvenient" one. It travels only in one direction, forward, and at much the same pace as everyone else seems to travel. There's always the example of Merlin though, whose time-machine-body traveled only in the opposite direction at roughly the same pace as everyone else's went forward. It has to be awkward for your first meeting with someone to be their last meeting with you. And you can't even warn them about their future when you meet them further in their past: Their future has already happened. A truly frustrating existence. No wonder King Arthur's court collapsed inward upon adulterous scandal and fanatical seeking of religious artifacts.

Short term thinking can occur within the same institution that also fosters long term planning as well. Indeed, the fall the Catholic Church's influence within the developed Western world may be a failure to recognize long term trends that required more multi-generational plans for adaptation. Similarly, their treatment of abuse perpetrated by clergy represents a solution that maximized short term gains (they didn't have to deal with the issue for a while) over longer term massive loss in faith, trust, etc.

I'm not even saying these institutions were even very good at multi-human lifespan planning, I'm saying their longevity at least allowed for that possibility. And in the case of many religious institutions, they did indeed embark on projects that lasted hundred of years (some of the largest cathedrals and other religious buildings took many human lifetimes).

So, whether or not the longest lived organizations on earth have themselves executed multi-lifespan projects, their longevity nonetheless represents one of the necessary conditions for such projects, and in that respect they deserve some consideration for how they achieved their longevity.