Royal Charters, Royal Power, and the Business of Empire

Helen Paul ()
Additional contact information
Helen Paul: University of Southampton

Chapter Chapter 9 in The Bubble Act, 2023, pp 195-219 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract A key feature of the Bubble Act is the importance of royal charters. They were central to the rights of joint-stock companies such as the South Sea Company and the Bank of England. However, the charters themselves have received little attention from scholars. They have been overlooked in favour of discussions of the evolution of the corporate form. The process of issuing royal charters is opaque, perhaps deliberately so. In a political system without a written constitution, royal power is promoted as being merely symbolic and the monarch as a politically neutral figure. On closer inspection, royal charters were used to privilege certain companies and organisations which supported royal power. This is particularly the case with the companies set up to extract resources from colonised land. They reached their heyday after the Bubble Act itself was repealed, demonstrating that charters were not merely part of an older system which had been superseded by new corporate forms. The chartered companies acted on behalf of the state, and even instead of the state in some instances. Royal charters continue to be used into the present day, notably to bolster (and to manage) organisations that support the establishment. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is only one prominent example.

Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:psitcp:978-3-031-31894-8_9

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9783031318948

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-31894-8_9

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Palgrave Studies in the History of Finance from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().