What if you could embark on a journey through time and space, witnessing the birth and evolution of business organizations across civilizations? Barry Hawk’s remarkable new book, Family, Partnerships and Companies: From Assur to Amsterdam, offers precisely such an adventure—a sweeping historical panorama that traces the development of business associations from ancient Mesopotamian merchants to the Dutch trading houses that would eventually reshape global commerce.
Hawk’s achievement is nothing short of extraordinary. Rather than confining himself to the familiar terrain of English common law or European commercial development, he excavates the deep historical roots of business organization across nine distinct societies and cultures. From the Old Assyrian naruqqum of the early second millennium BCE to the joint stock companies of Renaissance Europe, Hawk demonstrates that the human impulse to pool capital, share risk, and organize commerce transcends geographical and temporal boundaries. His methodological approach represents a significant departure from traditional corporate law scholarship, which too often treats business organizations as products of modern legal evolution rather than as institutions with deep historical roots.
The book’s scope is breathtaking. Hawk guides readers through the merchant oligarchy of ancient Assur, where traders developed the naruqqum—what he aptly describes as a “joint stock fund”—to finance their lucrative caravan trade with Anatolia (Pp. 37-41). We witness the pragmatic innovations of Roman law, with its sophisticated societas publicanorum that enabled public contracting on a massive scale (Pp. 76-93). The journey continues through the Islamic world’s partnership traditions, the merchant associations of medieval India, the Tang lineage trusts of China, and ultimately arrives at the bustling commercial centers of medieval and early modern Europe.
What makes this work particularly valuable is Hawk’s careful attention to the economic, political, and social contexts that shaped each society’s approach to business organization. He avoids the teleological trap of viewing ancient forms merely as primitive precursors to modern corporations. Instead, each organizational innovation emerges as a thoughtful response to specific commercial needs and constraints. The Old Assyrian naruqqum, for instance, was not a failed attempt at creating a modern corporation, but rather a naruqqum (P.93). This methodological sophistication distinguishes Hawk’s work from earlier scholarship that often imposed modern analytical frameworks on historical institutions without adequate attention to their specific contexts.
While I have argued elsewhere that Ancient Rome deserves credit for creating the corporate form and establishing the foundations of business corporations (Sergio Alberto Gramitto Ricci, Archeology, Language, and Nature of Business Corporations, 89 Miss. L. J. 43, 74-79 (2019)), Hawk’s work offers an invaluable complement to this perspective. His archaeological approach to business organizations reveals the rich tapestry of experimentation that preceded Roman innovations.
Hawk illustrates how similar economic pressures tend to produce similar organizational solutions across time and space. His insights provide crucial theoretical grounding for modern comparative corporate law scholarship and resonate with my own work on the fundamental importance of asset partitioning and separation of ownership and control in corporate entities (Gramitto Ricci, Archeology, Language, and Nature, Pp. 72-74).
The book masterfully documents diverse historical threads, identifying common patterns while respecting the uniqueness of each society’s contributions. Hawk’s analysis of how legal personality, asset partitioning, and contractual flexibility drive entity choice provides a conceptual framework that illuminates both historical and contemporary business organization. This work represents one of the most sophisticated attempts to date to identify the fundamental drivers of organizational innovation across legal systems and historical periods.
One minor criticism: the book’s focus on successful innovations might benefit from more attention to organizational forms that failed or were abandoned, which could provide important insights into the limits of institutional adaptation. This quibble aside, Family, Partnerships and Companies is a tour de force that will be indispensable for anyone seeking to understand the deep historical foundations of modern business law. Hawk has given us a work of remarkable scholarship that treats business organizations not as dry legal technicalities but as human institutions that reflect the ingenuity, creativity, and adaptability of commercial societies across the ages. The book’s interdisciplinary approach, combining legal analysis with insights from economic history, anthropology, and comparative law, establishes a new standard for historical scholarship in corporate law.
For corporate law scholars, the book offers a fresh perspective on foundational questions about the nature and purpose of business organizations, challenging received wisdom about the origins of key concepts. For historians, it provides a masterful synthesis of commercial development across civilizations that will undoubtedly influence future scholarship on the relationship between law and economic organization. For practitioners, it offers valuable context for understanding why certain organizational forms persist while others fade into historical curiosity, insights that may prove useful in designing new business structures for contemporary challenges.
In an era when corporate purpose and governance face renewed scrutiny, Hawk’s historical lens reminds us that business organizations have always been tools shaped by human needs and social values. As Martin Gelter notes in his epilogue, “Barry Hawk’s successors in centuries to come will look back at a complex landscape of legal forms that may be as strange to them as the Assyrian naruqqum is to us” (P. 245). This book ensures that our understanding of that landscape will be far richer for Hawk’s extraordinary scholarly journey.
