Transaction costs of early modern multinational enterprise: measuring the transatlantic information lag of the British Royal African Company and its successor, 1680–1818

There is extensive previous research on the early modern chartered multinational corporations, their development and how they dealt with the various challenges they faced. This article attempts to contribute to this field of research by estimating quantitatively the information lag in early modern multinational enterprise, studying the case of the British Royal African Company and its successor the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa. The results show that the transatlantic information lag decreased somewhat during the second half of the eighteenth century. The decrease was however quite modest, and far less striking than has been claimed in some previous research. During the period, this information lag therefore still posed a major constraint on the development of multinational enterprise.