280 APPENDIX I age, whose accounts were to be wound up and the cap- ital repaid when the ships came home. The East India Company was a body corporate with an exclusive grant of the India trade from the Crown, and it conducted its business by forming successive groups among its own members for raising joint stock subscriptions for suc- cessive and distinct ventures. At first, indeed, it differed but slightly from the Turkey and other Regulated Companies of mediaeval commerce, except that the right of separate trading passed from the individual freemen to successive groups of freemen— a statement which must be taken subject to the full explanation given in the chapter on the Con- stitution of the Company in the preceding volume. On this basis the Company equipped its first nine voyages. When the system of Separate Voyages proved too weak to cope with its Portuguese and Dutch rivals in the East, it raised a series of Joint Stock subscriptions, each of which supplied the capital for a distinct series of voyages. But the Joint Stock subscription was designed only for a limited number of years, at the end of which it was to be wound up— in short, the original system of Separate Voyages gave place to a system of separate series of voyages. Every new Joint Stock was intended to take over at a valuation the factories of its predecessor in India. In this rudimentary form of Joint Stock the group of members took the place of the individual freeman, as the group of voyages took the place of the individual venture, in a " Eegulated " association like the Turkey Company.
