| The modern multinational corporation is described as having originated when the owner-managers 
 of nineteenth-century British firms carrying on international trade were replaced by teams of 
 salaried managers organized into hierarchies. Increases in the volume of transactions in such firms 
 are commonly believed to have necessitated this structural change. Nineteenth-century inventions 
 like the steamship and the telegraph, by facilitating coordination of managerial activities, are 
 described as key factors. Sixteenth-and seventeenth-century chartered trading companies, despite 
 the international scope of their activities, are usually considered irrelevant to this discussion: the 
 volume of their transactions is assumed to have been too low and the communications and 
 transport of their day too primitive to make comparisons with modern multinationals interesting. 
 In reality, however, early trading companies successfully purchased and outfitted ships, built and 
 operated offices and warehouses, manufactured trade goods for use abroad, maintained trading 
 posts and production facilities overseas, procured goods for import, and sold those goods both at 
 home and in other countries. The large volume of transactions associated with these activities 
 seems to have necessitated hierarchical management structures well before the advent of modern 
 communications and transportation. For example, in the Hudson’s Bay Company, each far-flung |