Excerpt
July 17, 2024, Opinion: "The history of finance is a field fertile with research, papers, books, and conferences. The reason is clear: studies yield insights into past mistakes, cultural implications over time, and policy development going forward. Yet the history of corporate governance is a field in its infancy. A first conference on the topic convened at the Yale School of Management in November 2009, marking the 400th anniversary of the first-known instance of shareholder rebellion at a publicly-traded enterprise, the Dutch East India Company. Two books resulted: Origins of Shareholder Advocacy, edited by Jonathan Koppell, and Shareholder Rights at 400: Commemorating Isaac Le Maire and the First Recorded Expression of Investor Advocacy. But scholarship since then has been sporadic. Even consensus on the birth of the modern corporate governance movement has been elusive—until a recent archival find."