1671. (French) Bordeaux-Canada Company.
1672. (English) African Company (last).
1673. (French) Senegal Company (last).
1683. (French) Acadia Company.
1684. (French) Louisiana Company.
1684. (French) Guinea Company.
1686. (Danish) East India Company (last).
1697. (French) China Company (last).
1698. (French) Santo Domingo Company.
When the English commercial companies were to be chartered, it was not necessary to invent an entirely new type of organization. A model already existed ready to hand in the Society of Merchants Adventurers, of which the origin goes back certainly to the fifteenth century, perhaps still earlier. [Footnote: Lingelbach, Brief Hist. of the Merchant Adventurers, xxi.-xxv.] The sphere of trade of this body of exporting merchants extended along the coasts of France, the Netherlands, and Germany, opposite England, and some distance into the interior. [Footnote: Ibid,, xxvi.] It is true that the Merchants Adventurers had many mediaeval features which assimilated them more to the old merchant and craft guilds than to the more modern type of chartered commercial companies which were about to come into existence. They had, like the craft guilds, a system of apprenticeship and different degrees of advancement in their membership. [Footnote: Lingelbach, Internal Organization of the Merchant Adventurers, 8-18.]