The Establishment of English colonies in North America and the West Indies in the seventeenth century opened new opportunities for trade. Conspicuous among the families who used these opportunities to gain mercantile and social importance was the Perry family of Devon, who created Perry and Lane, by the end of the century the most important London firm trading to the Chesapeake and other parts of North America.

Jacob Price traces the family from Devon to Spain, Ireland, Scotland, the Chesapeake, New England, and London. He describes their relationships with Chesapeake society, from the Byrds and Carters to humble planters. In London, the firm’s patronage gave the family high standing among fellow businessmen, a position the founder’s grandson utilized to become a member of Parliament and Lord Mayor of London. In the end, the grandson’s political success as an antiministerialist brought the family the enmity of the prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole, and contributed to the downfall of their firm.

The Perrys’ story reveals the interrelatedness of social, commercial, and political history. It offers an important contribution to our understanding of the nature of the Chesapeake trade and the forces shaping the success and failure of English mercantile enterprise in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

This collection examines the forces, both external and internal, that lead corporations to behave efficiently and to create wealth. Corporations vest control rights in shareholders, the author argues, because they are the constituency that bear business risk and therefore have the appropriate incentives to maximize corporate value. Assigning control to any other group would be tantamount to allowing that group to play poker with someone else's money, and would create inefficiencies. The implicit denial of this proposition is the fallacy of the so-called stakeholder theory of the corporation, which argues that corporations should be run in the interests of all stakeholders. This theory offers no account of how conflicts between different stakeholders are to be resolved, and gives managers no principle on which to base decisions, except to follow their own preferences.

In practice, shareholders delegate their control rights to a board of directors, who hire, fire, and set the compensation of the chief officers of the firm. However, because agents have different incentives than the principals they represent, they can destroy corporate value unless closely monitored. This happened in the 1960s and led to hostile takeovers in the market for corporate control in the 1970s and 1980s. The author argues that the takeover movement generated increases in corporate efficiency that exceeded $1.5 trillion and helped to lay the foundation for the great economic boom of the 1990s.