The Joint-Stock Company
In 1602 the Dutch East India Company gathered 1,143 investors and 3.76 million guilders under a charter granting twenty-one years of trading monopoly. What made it new was not the pooling of money but that the capital was permanent and the shares could be handed to someone else — so an investor could leave without breaking up the venture. Records show a maidservant on half a guilder a day putting in a hundred. And the other side of the same company is on the record too: in the Banda Islands in 1621, roughly nine in ten of the islanders were killed, enslaved or driven out to secure the monopoly on nutmeg, and the force included about a hundred Japanese mercenaries. This map writes both.
The myth, corrected
The joint-stock company was invented by the Dutch East India Company in 1602
The Bazacle milling company of Toulouse was trading shares around 1250 — three and a half centuries earlier — with 96 shares changing hands. What 1602 did bring for the first time on that scale was the combination of permanent capital, freely transferable shares, and a standing exchange to trade them on.