If you mean 17th century trading companies, their sailing ships had one way journey times of six months to one year to practically anywhere in the world. So it's an interesting example, but interstellar distances are usually many times longer: 5 (light) years or 10 years or much more.

I guess that the reason globe-spanning empires and trading companies appeared from about 1600 on was in fact because sailing ships had reduced the travel time enough to allow a cohesive network with some centralized control. Previously, with slower communications, they tended to lose control of the extremities and devolve to looser associations (because the lag was excessive, on the scale of a human life)