I think it's easy to say this, but I'm not sure the history of corporations bears this out. Technically, the first corporations were colonial expeditionary forces (like the Dutch VOC) that were sent to Africa and the Caribbean to control various types of precious resources and we all know what happened there.
I guess it all depends on who "society" is in your statement, because someone has always has to lose in a corporate structure.
I don’t know the definitive origin, but one of Cæsar’s reforms in the Lex Julia was to require collegia be approved by the Senate (or Emperor) to be considered a legal body. The concept of corporations traces to at least then, almost certainly earlier, since corporate personhood is a logical result of the process of creating a legal system.
The novelty of the English and Dutch trading companies wasn’t their corporate personhood, but their distributed ownership as a joint-stock company.
Sources - Caesar, Life of a Colossus and Augustus, First Emperor of Rome by Adrian Goldsworthy.
They both work in most contexts.
Uhm, who says that? Corporations were always created by people who wanted to cooperate to pursue their common interests.
And to this end, the only reason to create a corporation is to make society better. If they're not, we have the ability to revoke their charters, and we should use that more.
I'm sorry but this is patently false, the reason to create a corporation is to capture profit.
Want to make society better? There are numerous non-profit and government organizations that broadly aim for this goal which do not turn a profit. The goal of a corporation is to sell goods or services, and hopefully those goods or services do in fact better society. However, this is far too often not the case to make the argument that corporations exist to improve society. Look at how much control corporations have over our society today, they're practically invincible and indemnifiable in our current culture because they're so much more insulated legally than individuals.
The fact that corporate charters are never revoked points to the laws being in the corporations favor, not the citizens’
From where I stand, corporations should be afraid of the societies that grant them their charters.
This encourages entrepreneurship. I don't think you'd see as many people trying to build widgets if they had to put their family's home on the line.
In exchange for those protections, we get widgets.
For international finance, early 20th century oil played a special role, not adequately described here.
As far as the parent comment about corporations "killing people" .. this is true but naive.. since the Romans and before, brutality was the norm, not the exception. Every educated person and most others knew about extreme forms of collective abuse, it had happened again and again. The very formation of civilization, including merchant and trade functions, was generally meant to be an improvement on past forms. Rarely, but with serious circumstance, some merchant company would rape and murder their way to fortune for a while. But karma is a bitch as they say, and those things did change. The tame history I cite above, was specifically aimed at making a better economic engine, for profit by ownership, which upon consideration was the chosen path.
Also, their reorganization after each first generation of underhanded practices became recognized, otherwise attention could not have been as well diverted from the ability to leverage greed even more so than leverage the resources of the smaller investors.
Good historical reference sections on Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Stock_Exchange
>During the 17th century, stockbrokers were not allowed in the Royal Exchange due to their rude manners. They had to operate from other establishments in the vicinity, notably Jonathan's Coffee-House.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philadelphia_Stock_Exchange
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tontine_Coffee_House
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Stock_Exchange
NYSE of course is where lots of the money ended up from the international slave trade, and not just from sales in North America.
Seems to me that's what allowed NYC to take the place of London as the world's financial center, since the UK frowned on slavery much eartier than the US.
Also early 20th century oil might have been the only thing with as good or better return than slavery had generated.
Assigned reading will frequently be listed on syllabi. Older versions can be found through the Wayback Machine, if posted online (and from the early 1990s through about a decade ago, many were, unfortunately, integrated school information systems have largely hidden these behind registration walls).
https://www.worldcat.org/title/organizing-america-wealth-pow...
Archive.org don't appear to have this, though ZLibrary / LibGen do.
https://openlibrary.org/works/OL4468926W/Organizing_America
Which links to: https://archive.org/details/organizingameric00perr/
It was a massive public money raising campaign to build war ships, guns and hire mercenaries, all under the guise of "exploring exotic commercial opportunities overseas".
It's not a guise when other countries monopolize trade routes. It's simply a cost of doing business.
EDIT: in "The World's First Stock Exchange" [1], the author outlines this historical context of conflict between Netherlands and Spain, which spurred the VoC and - considered to be - the first stock market.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18847884-the-world-s-fir...
It's more that at one point during the industrial revolution, it became common that someone would make a private venture, incorporate it, and from there the law granted a number of modern considerations that we still live with. I'm thinking of limited liability and its effect on bankruptcy.
I do think both (intellectual property and corporations) can actually be good for society if properly regulated, I just don't think that was the original intention, nor the current status quo and it won't naturally develop in that direction without concerted effort.
A lot of the shifts towards a more humane version of capitalism came through outside forces like organized labor (i.e. the 40 hour workweek, the establishment of child labor law, etc.). These were not things that corporations volunteered, it took lots of people threatening to stop the system in order to achieve many of the benefits we enjoy today. We'd still be working 7 days a week starting as small children if those outside forces didn't establish many of those fundamental changes for us.