The Invisible Person: The Corporation, a Legal Fiction We Keep Rewriting

August 1602. Amsterdam. A servant named Aeltje Jansdr walks into a notary's office and invests fifty guilders in a company that will change the course of human history. She is not wealthy. She is not powerful. She is about to become a shareholder in the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie—the Dutch East India Company.
This episode traces the corporation from its ancient origins to its modern dominance—the legal fiction that transformed human civilization.
• Roman societates publicanorum: Ancient tax-farming companies that foreshadowed corporate structure two thousand years ago
• Kongo Gumi (578-2006 CE): The world's oldest company, surviving 1,428 years through 50 generations of builders
• The VOC revolution: How Dutch merchants invented permanent capital, transferable shares, and limited liability
• The first shareholders: Servants, widows, and merchants who bought into the world's first public company
• The Amsterdam Beurs: The world's first stock exchange, where shares traded like commodities
• The legal fiction that conquered the world: How an "invisible person" gained rights, obligations, and immortality
• Corporate personhood: From Roman law to Citizens United—the evolution of an idea
• The separation of ownership and control: The innovation that made modern capitalism possible
Aeltje Jansdr's fifty guilders became part of sixty-four tons of gold—the largest initial capital formation in history to that point. She didn't just invest money. She invested in an idea: that strangers could pool resources, share risks, and create something none of them could build alone.
The corporation is humanity's most powerful organizational technology. It has built railroads and hospitals, funded research and art, employed billions and shaped nations. It has also colonized continents, corrupted governments, and concentrated wealth beyond the dreams of ancient kings.
But the experiment isn't over. Today, new organizational forms challenge the corporate model itself: DAOs operating through smart contracts with no managers or headquarters, benefit corporations that legally obligate directors to consider more than profit, platform cooperatives owned by users rather than investors. Patagonia restructured to make "Earth our only shareholder."
We created the invisible person. Now we must decide what kind of person it will be.
This is the story of humanity's most powerful organizational technology—and the open question of what it should become.