Abstract

The beginnings of a joint-stock company structure reach back to the Middle Ages and are linked with innovative solutions worked out by the merchant practice in connection with the expansion of money-goods economy. Only with time joint-stock companies started to be regulated with various legal solutions being adopted, which was an effect of different processes taking place in the countries that were so developed as England and France at the turn of the 18th and 19th century. The number of joint-stock companies (joint-stock societies) was at that time a measure of economic development and an evidence of emergent industrial capitalism. Compared with those processes, in the pre-partition period Poland appeared to be an economically neglected country with archaic agrarian economy. Nevertheless, also in Poland, first prototypes of joint-stock societies came into being in the late 18th century. Alas, the then Polish state as a rule left the regulation of that issue out of its area of interest. The first legal regulations relating to joint-stock companies in Poland were enacted in the early 19th century and since then interest in these forms of conducting business was growing the effect of which was also the increasing number of legal regulations for joint-stock companies. As a result, at the threshold of independence in 1918, four different legal solutions operated in Poland, i.e. the French, German, Austrian and Russian model, which would require unification in later years.