Pioneering Modern Corporate Governance: A View from London in 1900

Around 1900 Britain was exceptionally suited to pioneering large scale enterprises because of the precocious development of its equity markets and London's experimentation with a more eclectic range of corporate governance techniques than the world's smaller and less cosmopolitan financial centers. Information dissemination, incentives, and reputation—developed by a serendipitous mix of legal compulsions and flexible voluntarism—set the scene for the growth of large, UK-based, national and international corporations in the twentieth century. ''The investment business is not with us as well developed or as well understood as it is in England.'' W. H. Lyon, Capitalization (Boston, 1913), 207.