The corporation in the nineteenth-century American imagination by Stefanie Mueller, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2022, 211 pp, £ 85.00 (hardback), ISBN 9781399505000. In The Corporation in the Nineteenth-Century American Imagination, Stefanie Muller undertakes a legal, cultural, and literary perambulation of the United States with the aim of examining how the corporation was reinvented, transformed, and reimagined during the 19th-century. The book is an accurate fresco of the socio-legal developments and controversies surrounding the corporate form in the legal and popular imaginary of the nascent American republic. Owing to the interplay of multiple variables, the corporation underwent what Mueller terms ‘a gradual and by no means linear process’, shifting from an entity based on the logic of the sovereign grant to an economic actor ‘flexible in purpose, capable of owing other corporations, and regulated according to a separate body of private corporation law’ (7). The book investigates how this transformation was understood and represented in terms of politico-legal imagination …
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Matteo Nicolini, Book Review: The corporation in the nineteenth-century American imagination by Stefanie Mueller, Law and Humanities. Published online: 24 April 2024.
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