In Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States, corporate law has not yet stepped into that field, and its building blocks remain the study of corporate governance and corporate finance.The word "corporation" derives from corpus, the Latin word for body, or a "body of people". Entities which carried on business and were the subjects of legal rights were found in ancient Rome, and the Maurya Empire in ancient India. In medieval Europe, churches became incorporated, as did local governments, such as the Pope and the City of London Corporation. The point was that the incorporation would survive longer than the lives of any particular member, existing in perpetuity. The alleged oldest commercial corporation in the world, the Stora Kopparberg mining community in Falun, Sweden, obtained a charter from King Magnus Eriksson in 1347. Many European nations chartered corporations to lead colonial ventures, such as the Dutch East India Company or the Hudson's Bay Company, and these corporations came to play a large part in the history of corporate colonialism.
During the period of colonial expansion in the seventeenth century, the true progenitors of the modern Corporation emerged as the "chartered company". Acting under a charter sanctioned by the Dutch monarch, the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC), or the Dutch East India Company, defeated Portuguese forces and established itself in the Moluccan Islands in order to profit from the European demand for spices. Investors in the VOC were issued paper certificates as proof of share ownership, and were able to trade their shares on the original Amsterdam stock exchange. Shareholders are also explicitly granted limited liability in the company's royal charter. In the late seventeenth century, Stewart Kyd, the author of the first treatise on corporate law in English, defined a corporation as,
During the period of colonial expansion in the seventeenth century, the true progenitors of the modern Corporation emerged as the "chartered company". Acting under a charter sanctioned by the Dutch monarch, the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC), or the Dutch East India Company, defeated Portuguese forces and established itself in the Moluccan Islands in order to profit from the European demand for spices. Investors in the VOC were issued paper certificates as proof of share ownership, and were able to trade their shares on the original Amsterdam stock exchange. Shareholders are also explicitly granted limited liability in the company's royal charter. In the late seventeenth century, Stewart Kyd, the author of the first treatise on corporate law in English, defined a corporation as,
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