Prior to the Seventeenth Century the corporation had no permanence. It was more a temporary partnership where all assets were liquidated once a particular endeavour had been completed. They had a planned dissolution date and the capital that backed them was essentially impatient and only extended to that date when the corporation was dissolved.
The first two modern corporations were the Dutch and English East India companies. These were constructed on patient capital, had permanent corporate life, they separated ownership from control and legal liability from ownership. More importantly the corporations were able to build capital over time as a corporation.
Prior to, and even after, very few companies needed this type of organisational structure. Most manufacturing endeavours could be handled through what we would call angle investors today; and until the railway's of the mid-eighteenth century few companies organised as corporations with infinite life.
Kenneth Pomeranz and Steven Topik argue that violence was the reason that the Dutch and English East India companies required this organisational innovation. (more)
