Ron Harris. Going the Distance: Eurasian Trade and the Rise of the Business Corporation, 1400–1700.

Abstract

Ron Harris’s Going the Distance: Eurasian Trade and the Rise of the Business Corporation, 1400–1700 is an impressive and authoritative work considering the environment in which modern forms of corporations became the dominant vehicles for business around the world. Through twelve chapters divided into four distinct parts, Harris lucidly leads his reader through the formation and evolution of contracts, business partnerships, and family firms from the Mediterranean to central Asia and back again. In doing so, Harris makes a clear and theoretically sound case for the migratory nature of institutions, which was not in and of itself reliant upon colonial imposition or a by-product of European imperialism. Instead, Harris places far more agency upon merchants themselves as vectors and adopters of successful forms of corporate governance when a complementary legal and political system was in place. He similarly foregrounds how the relative poverty of European states, particularly England, informed the need for cooperative measures and organizations that could challenge existing stakeholders, exemplified in the East India Company. Harris sees this as a shift from a personal relationship based upon trust to an impersonal one that was instead built upon information sharing and ultimately shared commercial success. This success was based on the local trust networks built by agents of the European joint-stock companies, which Harris asserts was necessary to integrate with local legal and political frameworks, rather than attempting to cross legal jurisdictions when making transactions.