Organizations

Institutions rather than individuals or states: trading companies and merchant leagues, chivalric and religious orders, banking houses, international bodies, industrial corporations and a state's own national institutions. An organization is placed here because it acted as a durable body with its own charter or rule, distinct from the polity that chartered it or the individual figures who led it. Historical trading concerns and still-operating institutions sit in the same band, split by institutional type rather than by era, because an organization's founding purpose typically outlives any one period.