Not sure what I expected but I was somewhat underwhelmed to see the oldest in Australia is Australia Post.
The oldest company in almost every country (that is still in business)
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Re: The oldest company in almost every country (that is still in business)
#52If they're going to include religious companies like the Affligem Brewery, created by Monks, then religious organizations as a whole are fair game. And the Catholic Church, or some form of Orthodox Church, precedes pretty much everything else.
I'd argue that a religion itself doesn't qualify though, it has to be a religious organization that had some level of central control, distinct from the government of nation-states (though potentially intertwined) and had assets & holdings independent of the nations they operated within.
Under that definition, I'm not quite sure when the earliest christian organization would have qualified. I know it became the official Roman religion around 380 A.D., but was it centrally organized then (or was that the advent of its central organization?) Or did that happen earlier/later?
Re: The oldest company in almost every country (that is still in business)
#53I think that the crown of the oldest running business should go to the Roman Catholic Church, which was formally created in 325 AD, but in practice is a couple of centuries older. It is also the first transnational corporation in history.
What leads you to select 325 as the founding year and not 1054?
First Council of Nicaea established church structure and Canon law. Also, we can trace the unbroken line of successive bishops to that date.
The Great Schism of 1054 can be viewed as just a corporate split due to political pressure, which it was. It didn't seriously change anything about the business of the parent company.
Re: The oldest company in almost every country (that is still in business)
#54I'd be interested to see this broken out by state for the US.
Re: The oldest company in almost every country (that is still in business)
#55The "Casa de Moneda de México" year is off by 1 I think (1534), or the Wikipedia entry ( https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casa_de_Moneda_de_M%C3%A9xico#... ) is wrong (1535). Interesting trivia tidbit to know that the oldest company in the Americas is actually in Mexico.
The oldest continuously operating university in the Western Hemisphere is in Peru, established in 1551. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_universities_in... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_University_of_San_Mar... The Royal and Pontifical University of Mexico, in Mexico City, was founded several months later, the same year.
If I were feeling pedantic I'd mention the universities of Oxford, St Andrews, Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Aberdeen... As well as a handful in Spain and Portugal ;)
Re: The oldest company in almost every country (that is still in business)
#56I think that the crown of the oldest running business should go to the Roman Catholic Church, which was formally created in 325 AD, but in practice is a couple of centuries older. It is also the first transnational corporation in history.
At that point why not count the British Empire as a business?
You could probably consider the British royal family a business.
But even if you don’t do that, for a long time the British empire was a corporation — the east India company.
Re: The oldest company in almost every country (that is still in business)
#57It's amusing to consider the common wisdom that restaurants are a tough, low margin business yet make up so many of the eldest companies. Even if you exceed some threshold to make it to maturity, you'd think the statistics on survival would catch up with you eventually.
On the other hand, it’s a business that never becomes obsolete.
Re: The oldest company in almost every country (that is still in business)
#58Why is Alaska a separate color with no company listed?
Re: The oldest company in almost every country (that is still in business)
#59Regardless of whether you believe in them, I think the longevity of religious organizations points the way towards how the human race can plan and advance with projects that cannot be completed in a single lifetime. Projects that require a vision beyond 10 years, much less 20, are exceedingly rare. Very, very few companies last more than a generation or two. This map in the article might make it seem like there are lots, but for context there are roughly 190 million companies on the planet, so to say these long-lived ones are an extreme outlier is still an understatement.
Enter religious institutions: Ballpark estimates in my head indicate that, sure, some come & go quickly, but many have much more staying power than their pure corporate counterparts. Lasting a handful of generations is common: Many major sects of Christianity are hundreds of years old.
I think this is a problem with human ability to truly plan in timescales longer than a generation, much less an entire human life time or longer. The purpose of a corporation is not to last forever, and changing markets often present hard limits on their lifetime, effectively a Great Filter for corporate enterprise. Contrast with the purpose of any religion, which is inherently devoted to beliefs that are not purported to be limited to a discrete period of time (excepting doomsday cults, which are interesting studies, but not in scope for this topic)
I am not particularly religious, but I think this difference in longevity, stemming from inherent differences in purpose, points the way towards the type of mindset necessary for the human race to begin acting and planning from the truly long term, beyond the horizon of a human life time or two. Which is really necessary when you consider issues like climate change (regardless of what you believe is the cause (a separate debate) the effects must be dealt with over time scales that exceed a human life time) and not just that, but other grand projects than cannot be accomplished in a single lifetime.