Since the early twentieth century, the joint-stock company and the state have stood together as exemplars of modern bureaucratic institutions. For at least as long, that co-existence has been comfortable, as companies and states have wound their way through an inconclusive cycle of proposals to regulate, deregulate, or otherwise adjust the boundaries between 'private' and 'public' spheres. Conceiving Companies offers a new perspective on the rise of large-scale companies in Victorian Engalnd, by locating their origins in political and social practice. In the process, it challenges the clear division between the state and the market that has long informed regulatory theory and policy. The study is divided into three sections, each on a different facet of 'joint-stock politics'. The first section surveys the East India Comany and the Bank of England, two expressly political institutions which needed to adjust to new tendencies in the nineteenth century to view companies as more properly part of the market. The second locates England's early joint-stock banks in the voluntarist and regionalist political culture of the 1830's, then traces their departure from these origins through the end of the century. The final section argues that Victorian railways, in shielding themselves from state intervention, neglected their public relations with creditors, customers and workers,and suffered economically as a result. Conceiving Companies offers anew perspective on an issue of great significance, not only for historians, but for political scientists and economists.