Bakan, Joel. The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power. Riverside: Free Press, 2005. https://public.ebookcentral.proquest.com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p=5851023. --- Written by a legal scholar. Its premise is that the corporation is a legal institution. Its "legally defined mandate is to pursue, relentlessly and without exception, its own self-interest, regardless of the harmful consequences it might cause others. As a result, I argue, the corporation is a pathological institution, a dangerous possessor of the great power it wields over people and societies." Corporations were viewed initially with suspicion. It was thought that by separating ownership from management, it would promote corruption and scandal. Even Adam Smith said that managers could not be trusted to steward other people's money. When he wrote Wealth of Nations in 1776, the corporation had already been banned in England for more than 50 years. The English Parliament had outlawed it in 1720, after the South Sea Company collapsed from a bubble. Railways were the big catalyst for the growth of the modern corporation, because they required far more capital than partnerships were equipped to supply. Limited liability was introduced in England in 1856. And in the US in the latter half of the 19th century. Over two decades, beginning in the 1890s, New Jersey and Delaware relaxed corporate laws: - repealed the rules that required business to incorporate only for narrowly defined purposes, to exist only for limited durations, and to operate only in particular locations - Substantially loosened controls on mergers and acquisitions; and - Abolished the rule that one company could not own stock in another The result was that 1800 corporations were consolidated into 157 between 1898 and 1904.