joint-stock

[Russell Valentino]

I realize the question was specific, but this is a translation studies 
issue that opens a cross-cultural vein...

At 11:24 AM 5/29/2006, Renee Stillings | Alinga wrote:
>  My husband (American), who has been practicing law for the past 30 years 
> in USSR/Russia, has pointed out to me that the whole "joint-stock" term 
> was imported to Russia by the British (I suppose at the time all of these 
> concepts were being developed and the laws written and subsequently 
> translated).

The term and the phenomenon came into being in the late 17th-early 18th 
cc., in what is often called the Financial Revolution (creation of national 
banks, discovery/invention of the concept of national debt., etc.). Its 
relation to the development of the modern (commercial) state is absolutely 
central, particularly in its various small-r republican forms in the 
political history of the north Atlantic -- but not Russia, until relatively 
recently.

>I don't know whether anyone in Britain actually refers to a company in 
>that way, but it sure sounds awkward to the American ear.

It used to be the most common term. Others seem to have taken its place. I 
too don't know when it dropped out of popular usage, but one still finds it 
tossed around in nineteenth century American fiction, e.g., Mark Twain, 
Herman Melville. Indeed for Melville, the phenomenon was important enough 
to anchor a whole book, The Confidence Man, which says as much about 
American culture and its responses to commerce as Gogol's Dead Souls says 
about Russia's.

Russell Valentino 

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