Business History has become, over the last three decades, a tremendously vital field of enquiry, with several major scholarly journals, specialist associations and yearly scientific meetings. Under the impulse of Alfred Chandler and his followers, it has set a research agenda which is focused on the modern corporation and which has drawn it away from its original old-fashioned concern with the study of company histories. It has been raised to a higher level of conceptualization and analysis and has been strongly stimulated in this direction by Micro-Economics and Econometrics. <p>Most of this effort has concentrated on two dimensions of corporate history. One is that of management, the other is that of the internal organization of the firm as a productive organization. Much less attention has been paid, on the other hand, to those who owned the firm - the shareowners - and their motivations (profit, value or economic power?). Yet many interesting problems arise in this respect too and are worthy of analysis in the same framework as before, that is combining Micro-Economics and Quantitative Analysis. </p><p>While the contemporary history of the corporate enterprise is well known and studied, obscurity rapidly falls on the subject as we retreat in time, although considerable progress is currently being made in the US and the UK. Little is known about the distribution of ownership and about control of the firm by shareholders, although it is believed that the 19th century was a time of concentrated ownership and management by owners; and by contrast that the 20th century was one of dispersion of ownership and its separation from management. These situations pose very different problems of agency and raise questions of how rules of governance were defined in order to solve them. In the early 19th century America, corporations were largely owned by big shareholders who managed them but tended to adopt internal rules which &quot;protected&quot; small owners, who also existed in large numbers. How and when exactly the transition between the two paradigms occurred is murky ground, however. Likewise, it is unclear, whether the pro-small holder governance of the USA was replicated in Europe, whether it was effective in the USA at achieving its stated aims, and, more important, why small holders were ready to buy shares in companies which appeared to respect their interest so little.</p><p>One the great problems of this field of study is that so little is known about such elementary aspects of company life as the number and distribution of shareholdings, their turnover, and the socio-economic characterization of those who held the shares and so on. Even the rules of company governance in most countries have yet to be compiled in orderly fashion, to enable their use in a full study of these issues. The exceptions are the experiences of the UK and of the early American economy and, not surprisingly, comparative study is therefore scarce and limited. Nevertheless, it seems that although a common corporate form of organization found roots early in all Western countries during the 19th century, its forms of governance varied quite a lot from place to place and over time.&nbsp; A second significant finding is that it was becoming common, by the mid 19th century, if not earlier, for large numbers of small savers in these countries to invest in small and probably not very diversified portfolios of shares in companies in which their interests were weakly &quot;protected&quot;. In other words, the petty and medium bourgeoisie of Europe was rapidly losing its fear of the risks that this option entailed and was becoming &quot;financially educated&quot;. </p><p>This was the basis of the modern capitalist economy and studying it in a country such as Portugal, where economic development was slow in coming, obviously has a certain attraction. If we look at the corporation as a form of &quot;technology&quot;, to be transferred from pioneer countries, with the appropriate social and cultural conditions for modernization of this kind, then we can learn quite a lot from observing how this &quot;technology&quot; adapted in a less friendly environment. This is the logic of this research proposal. We know already from the small scale research already carried out, that the lower and middle Portuguese bourgeoisie was quite enthusiastic about investing in this way. We know also that a certain degree of separation and professionalization of management existed already by the 1860s and 1870s. At the same time, small shareholders appear to have been singularly &quot;unprotected&quot; by corporate statutes, although not uniformly so. Did this affect differentially the attraction of companies' vis-&agrave;-vis the stock market? Were rules of governance shaped with this problem in mind?</p><p>These and other issues show that the proposed study is not only of interest in terms of Portuguese Business History but also that it can make an interesting contribution to the broader field of Euro-American Business History.</p>