By 1812 the U.S. already had more business corporations than any other country and possibly more than all other countries combined.
Fortune magazine began publishing annual rankings of U.S. corporations by revenue in 1955. Ever since, scholars and forecasters have analyzed changes in the Fortune 500 to help inform their judgments about industry concentration and the relative importance of different sectors of the economy.
Historians would love to have snapshots of the nation’s largest corporations at earlier dates. Unfortunately, data are scarce, especially before the Civil War. Based on our research, however, it is now possible to create a sort of historical “Fortune 500” ranked by corporate capitalization — the total sum stockholders were supposed to pay for their shares.
Conveniently for us, states regulated corporate equity capital, sometimes by specifying a precise amount of capital but other times indicating an acceptable range. They usually published the figure or range as part of the laws that incorporated each company. We have compiled that data here to provide a snapshot of the U.S. economy in 1812. The full list is in the Appendix to this INET Working Paper and in an Excel file on the INET website.
The larger significance of being able to come up with a Fortune 500 for 1812 demands some reflection. The country’s population then was about 7.5 million, less than that of New York City today, and far less than the populations of leading European nations. Yet international comparisons, to the extent we can make them, indicate that the U.S. already had more business corporations than any other country, and possibly more than all other countries put together.
France had chartered 13 corporations by 1812, and Prussia had chartered eight. An old source indicates that England had only 156 joint-stock companies before 1824, and so the entire U.K. probably had no more than 200 to 300. In contrast, our U.S. data show more than a thousand charters by 1812.
