A trading company is a business that works with different kinds of products sold for consumer, business purposes. In contemporary times, trading companies buy a specialized range of products, shopkeeper them, and coordinate delivery of products to customers.
Trading companies may connect buyers and sellers, but not partake in the ownership or storage of goods, earning their revenue through sales commissions.[1] They may also be structured to engage in commerce with foreign countries or territories.[2] During times of colonization, some trading companies were granted a charter, giving them "rights to a specific territory within an area claimed by the authority granting the charter including legal title, a monopoly of trade, and governmental and military jurisdiction".[2]
Trading companies
- Glencore
- Hudson's Bay Company[3]
- Jardine Matheson
- Li & Fung
- Noble Group
- Plus500
- Salt Trading Corporation
- Trading Corporation of Pakistan
By country
Trading systems
- Globex Trading System
- DME Oman Crude Oil Futures Contract
Defunct
- Afghan-German Trading Company
- African & Eastern Trade Corporation
- Apcar and Company
- Augustine Heard & Co.
- Austrian East India Company
- Barbary Company[4]
- Bergen Greenland Company
- British East India Company[5]
- Casa da Índia
See also
- Canton System
- Chartered company
- Commodity traders
- French colonial trading companies
- Fur trade
- Old China Trade
- Sogo shosha
- Spice wars
- Trade
Further reading
- Carlos, Ann M., and Stephen Nicholas. "'Giants of an Earlier Capitalism': The Chartered Trading Companies as Modern Multinationals". Business history review 62.3 (1988): 398–419. in JSTOR
- Ferguson, Niall. The ascent of money: A financial history of the world (2008).
- Jones, Geoffrey. Multinationals and Global Capitalism: From the Nineteenth to the Twenty-first Century (2004)
- Lipson, E. The Economic History of England (1931) pp 184–370 gives capsule histories of 10 major English trading companies: The Merchant Adventurers, the East India Company, the Eastland Company, the Russia Company, the Levant Company, the African Company, the Hudson's Bay Company, the French Company, the Spanish Company, and the South Sea Company.
External links
References
- Trading company (definition) Businessdictionary.com, retrieved 18 September 2014^
- Trading company (definition) Merriam-Webster, retrieved 18 September 2014^
- D. Simmons. Keepers of the Record: The History of the Hudson's Bay Company Archives McGill-Queen's University Press, 2007