“Government by Trading Company?: the corporate legal status of the Company of New France and Colonial Governance”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article takes the Company of New France or CNF (1627-1663) as a case study to consider the legal dimensions of early modern chartered companies – how they established themselves, how they dealt with disputes, and how they exercised the regal powers delegated to them. Drawing on recent literature that challenges the entrenched notion of companies as exclusively economic entities, it considers the Company of New France as an experimentation with new tools of capital formation and governance. The article puts the CNF in comparison with other corporations and commercial associations in France as well as contemporary chartered companies in the Atlantic. While the company shared certain characteristics with other French corporations, notably a separate legal personality, responsibility for internal governance, and a contractual relationship with the king, as an overseas commercial and colonizing enterprise, the nature of its privileges, functions, and obligations were distinct. The paper’s final section considers challenges faced by the CNF in the execution of its mandate, particularly with the establishment of a new, ostensibly subordinate corporation, the Communauté des Habitants in 1645. The frictions between these two bodies underscore the inextricable ties between trade and effective governance in the colony.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".