Among all the debate about the vices and virtues of capitalism there is rarely any serious attempt to define its key characteristics. Whatever they are, they appear to work better than the best known alternative that has so far been tried: centrally planned totalitarian communism. Whether good capitalism or bad, compassionate, predatory or even ‘conscious’, all capitalisms appear to depend on the ownership and control of the established legal entity known in the United States as the corporation, or the public limited company elsewhere. That is the corporate form Chandler described as ‘the most powerful institution in the economy’ on which the affluence and growth of the past century and a half has been based.

The corporation was the legal form which was enabled to issue shares to many dispersed individuals and so accrue sufficient funds to make large scale capital projects possible. Initially its legal creation required a royal charter, then an act of parliament and finally, after 1844, a company could be legally established by a relatively simple process of registration. Limited liability followed a decade later. This was the precious means by which industrialisation was enabled.
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