Upvote:1
There are massive bibliographies about the VOC alone (and countless other major companies), about international corporate governance, company law, the history of cooperatives and so on. I'm not aware of any historian who has tried to generalize about all of this for the modern period as a whole. Whether such a task is possible in any meaningful way is not clear to me.
The Legitimacy of the business corporation in the law of the United States, 1780-1970 by James Willard Hurst is already a rather ambitious work, based on a series lectures, but obviously specific to the United States. Name a country and you can probably find other nationally-specific studies of their corporate and or cooperative law, at least of article length. Cooperatives are typically dealt with as an entirely separate topic.