ABSTRACT
This chapter first outlines the histories of how individual private property rights and the common-law legal system coevolved in Britain, especially after the Civil War and the Glorious Revolution, with the triumph of common law courts and statutory law over prerogative courts and the establishment of parliamentary sovereignty – a parliament composed of large landowners and merchants – limiting the power of both the Crown and the executive government. It then focuses on the process of how Britain developed its exceptional fiscal capacity in the 18th century. The chapter discusses the distinctive nature of the liberal state, some aspects of which form a continuity with the 1820s state through to the post-1980s state, although certain aspects are very different. It focuses on organizational forms: the formation of joint stock companies; the role of the corporation, unincorporated companies and other organizational forms such as trusts; and the centrality of the corporation in Britain's equity-based capitalism.
