The Virginia Company

2126 Words5 Pages

Companies, in the early centuries, merely existed in the form of organizations. However, the traditional form of company was reshaped during the fifteenth century, by means of a special document referred to as charters. This writing will initially provide a concise depiction on how charters provided different companies with fairly convenient privileges that led to an innovation for business development. This essay will also shed light on the first company that settled in the New World with charter protection – the Virginia Company. Furthermore, the paper will incorporate greater emphasis on this company’s significant influences toward three main aspects, its effect on business development, which started off by means of the tobacco commerce throughout the New World and Europe; the impact on colonization, which was essentially portrayed by the headright system that took shape during the seventeenth century, and its influence towards politics, fundamentally due to the creation of the House of Burgesses that provided some measurement of self-government.

During the fifteenth century in Europe, the emergence of chartered companies have brought forth a distinct new era for trades as well as a strong influence that altered business developments.

Charters were first granted to municipalities and guild of all sorts, whose operations were necessarily limited to particular localities within the State. When communities extended their operations beyond the seas, when they develop commercial relations between their own and foreign countries, these operations in semi-barbarous times become risky, and need the protection both of their own rulers and of the foreign States.

Charters enables municipalities, in other words, companies with special ...

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... E. The First Seventeen Years: Virginia 1607-1624. Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 1957.

5. ushistory.org. U.S. History Online Textbook: The House of Burgesses. 2011, http://www.ushistory.org/us/2f.asp.

6. Neill, Edward Duffield. History of the Virginia Company of London. Albany, NY: J. Munsell, 1869.

7. Croghan, Laura A. The Negroes to Serve Forever: The Evolution of Blacks's Life and Labor in Seventeenth-Century Virginia. College of William and Mary, 1994

8. Morgan, Edmund S. “Headrights and Head Counts: A Review Article,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Bibliography (July 1972): 361-371. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4247736

9. Middleton, Arthur Pierce. Tobacco Coast. Newport News, Virginia: Mariners' Museum, 1953

10. Scharf, John Thomas. History of Maryland: From the Earliest Periods to the Present Day. Hatboro, Pennsylvania: Tradition Press, 1967

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