Hudson's Bay Company

Chartered on 2 May 1670 by King Charles II, which granted the Company both a trading monopoly over the entire Hudson Bay drainage basin, called Rupert's Land, and formal ownership of that territory, then the largest private land grant in history. Built on the same joint-stock, chartered-monopoly model as the East India Company, it organised the North American fur trade for two centuries through a network of trading posts rather than settlement colonies. It ceded Rupert's Land to the new Dominion of Canada in 1870 and, having converted itself into an ordinary retail corporation, remains the oldest continuously operating commercial corporation in North America.