Introduction

The introduction sets out the book’s reading of the corporation as both a real thing and an abstract idea, and demonstrates why this makes the corporation an important part of both business and intellectual history: The abstract nature of a corporation made it an ideal vehicle for the advancement of early modern political thought. Moreover, the shifting and plural nature of corporate membership, and thus corporate ideology, allowed a range of ideas to be generated in and about the corporation, and circulate through literary texts and other cultural productions.