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Wells, Harwell --- "Introduction" [2018] ELECD 65; in Wells, Harwell (ed), "Research Handbook on the History of Corporate and Company Law" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2018) 1

Book Title: Research Handbook on the History of Corporate and Company Law

Editor(s): Wells, Harwell

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN: 9781784717650

Section Title: Introduction

Author(s): Wells, Harwell

Number of pages: 14

Extract:

Introduction Harwell Wells
The chapters in this Handbook survey the growth of corporate and, more generally, business organization law from the Medieval era to the present day, addressing developments over time in jurisdictions around the globe. Their authors have taken a range of approaches--some focusing on the evolution of business organizations in a particular nation across a fixed span of time, others providing more fine-grained accounts of the developments of particular business forms or legal-intellectual trends within a nation and period, with still others broadening their scope to ask about developments across national borders and geographic regions. The audience for these chapters will be, this writer hopes, similarly varied; there is much here that should interest legal scholars, historians, and economists, and perhaps especially those working along the fertile borderlands of these fields. What any individual scholar will take away will, of course, depend on her individual interest; what will catch the eye of a business historian of a particular nation may well differ from what will interest a student of comparative law. It is even to be hoped that some of these chapters will speak to scholars far removed from business, economic, and legal history. To give a few examples, historians of modern European politics might be surprised to learn how fascist ideology impacted the corporate law of Germany, Italy, or Spain; students of religion may be interested in the account of how complex power relationships in traditional Islamic regimes hindered the growth of the corporate ...