ABSTRACT
In the nineteenth century, legal historians Otto Gierke, Levin Goldschmidt, Karl Lehman, Max Weber, Heinrich Fick, and Heinrich Sieveking sought to trace the origins of the corporation. They focused on functions of institutions and considered the Dutch and the British East India Companies the first corporations, asking anachronistically whether medieval institutions such as San Giorgio could be regarded as corporations—but not whether the history and model of earlier institutions, such as San Giorgio, could have influenced later corporations. More recently, works on the territorial history of EIC and on the making of the VOC have shown that the VOC and its organizational form, the business corporation, developed their characteristics over time. The chapter focuses on New Institutional Economics (NIE) and Social Ontology, and on the works of Ron Harris, Douglass North, and Avner Greif to show that institutional migration is still considered a history of institutional features. It argues that concentrating on features is reductionist because it overlooks how the dynamics of institution making and of telling stories about those institutions are interwoven.
