Economics Commons^™

Employee Opportunism In Two Early Modern British Trading Companies, Robert Franklin Unger

History Theses & Dissertations

The English East India Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company were the most prominent of a score or more of seventeenth and eighteenth century joint stock European trading companies whose merchants conducted their trading activities around the globe. The extraordinary distances and length of time that separated the London directorate committees of both companies from their distant employees was perhaps their greatest managerial challenge. Neither company could directly supervise their employees at their remote trading concessions, whether it was India and the East Indies for the East India Company or sub-arctic North America for the Hudson’s Bay Company.

Because of …