From Magna Carta to Empire: Charters, Companies and Crashes

Sealed at Runnymede in 1215, the charter that first put in writing that even the monarch answers to the law.

The king who sealed it under baronial pressure, then repudiated it within weeks.

A medieval banking house, founded 1397, whose fortune underwrote a dynasty before its own 1494 collapse.

Founded 1526: an empire already old by the time the chartered companies below set sail.

1543 to 1687: the era that gave the chartered companies below a new, empirical way of assessing the world they were mapping.

Declared independence in 1581, and chartered the era's boldest trading company.

Chartered in 1600, the earliest of the great European trading companies, ruling large parts of India before its 1858 Crown takeover.

Chartered 1602, the Dutch counterpart, dissolved in 1799 under the weight of its own debts.

1637: a Dutch speculative frenzy in tulip bulbs, one of history's earliest documented market bubbles.

Grew from chartered trading posts into the empire the East India Company answered to.

Founded 1644, the dynasty the East India Company traded with and eventually eclipsed.

Chartered 1670, the fur-trading company that became a founding institution of the Dominion below.

1720: a British joint-stock collapse, contemporaneous with France's own Mississippi Company bubble.

Founded 1811, the industrial arms manufacturer whose record includes real war-profiteering and forced-labor findings.

Confederated 1867, built in part on the Hudsons Bay Company's own charter territory.