Brandon Taylor

In early modern England, a charter was a legal document that conferred authority upon a collective body, most often a company, guild, or municipality. Charters were issued by the Crown and served as foundational texts that granted rights, privileges, and jurisdictional power to corporate entities.

Unlike modern corporate filings, early charters were rhetorical and symbolic as much as legal. They framed the entity’s purpose in religious or national terms, often linking commercial ventures with civilising or evangelical missions. The Virginia Company’s charter, for example, justified colonization as both economic enterprise and Christian duty.

One clause in the 1606 Virginia Charter describes the aim as “propagating of Christian religion to such people as yet live in darkness and miserable ignorance.” Charters were legal tools, but also declarations of civilizing mission and imperial ambition.

My interest in charters lies in how they function as literary artifacts as well as instruments of governance. They fuse legal form with narrative intent, embedding theology, imperial ambition, and institutional ideology into the architecture of corporate identity. Understanding charters helps us see how the fiction of the corporate body was made legible, persuasive, and durable across early modern culture.

If you’re interested in reading early charters firsthand, several are available online. The Virginia Company of London’s 1606 charter, which authorized English colonization in North America, is hosted by the Avalon Project at Yale Law School. A searchable copy of early East India Company charters can be found in the digitized volume Charters Granted to the East-India Company from 1601 via the Internet Archive. These documents offer insight into how corporate authority was structured and justified in the early modern period.

If you're reading a charter for the first time, look for how it defines the corporation's purpose. Is it economic, religious, or political? What rights does it claim—land, trade, conquest? And how does it describe the people it hopes to govern or convert?

Charters didn’t disappear, they evolved. The logic of incorporation they helped establish still shapes how modern institutions frame authority, ownership, and legitimacy. Reading these early texts helps us understand the ideological blueprints of corporate power today.