This map seems to use a very variable and at times generous definition of both “company” and “still in business”.
Sure, Australia Post is one of Australia’s oldest institutions if you count from the date of the establishment of its oldest predecessor (which this map does, as a Postmaster-General was first appointed for New South Wales in 1809), but a single national postal service wasn’t established until Australia itself was established in 1901 and the colonial postal services were merged, and even then it was a government department until 1975, and wasn’t corporatised until 1989 and remains government-owned to this day.
Reminds me how the restaurant Earl of Sandwich, which was founded in 2004 in Orlando, puts established in 1762 on their website and the front of some of their buildings [1]. Just because the "sandwich" was invented in 1762.
It's similar to how Carlton claim to have been around since 1832 (when in fact they were founded in 1903[1]). The fact is that their subsidiary Cascade has been around since 1832 but were bought out by Carlton much later[2], therefore making the claim that Carlton is the "oldest brewery in Australia".
[2]I can't find a reference to which year they were bought out, but the Wikipedia article above does mention they got bought and they mentioned the year when I took a tour of the Hobart brewery.
Likewise the "oldest" company in El Salvador is HSBC... the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank. I mean that might be the oldest surviving locally registered corporation on the books, but it kinda wastes a chance to learn something interesting about the country.
- The prevalence of drinking and dining establishments amongst oldest-national businesses.
- And banks / mints / financial institutions.
- The relative youth of oldest-national-businesses in Africa. Most notably Equatorial Guinea with Guinea Equatorial Airlines, the country's oldest business corporation, founded in 1996.
This suggests either a data artefact in which older going concerns are not formally reported (or those reports available), or an extreme level of institutional instability.
I suspect the former; that standards applied in various countries differ.
E.g. the oldest "company" in Switzerland is Gasthof Sternen (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasthof_Sternen), built around 1230, and affiliated with a monastery. Quite possibly the inn WAS in continuous operation, but I have doubts as to the continuity of the "company" behind it. It appears to have been started by the adjacent monastery, which ceased to be a going concern in 1841.
I wondered about that - perhaps the map should be "Oldest business registered with a western institution" or some such. Meaning, being known to westerners makes them more real.
But do you seriously reckon all those European businesses from the 800s were registered as a company?
This map is nothing but a racist pissing match created by enlightened Europeans who've worked out some novel way of considering them better than the civilisations they trashed. It's an embarrassment.
Not the person you are replying to, but: I don't think anyone set out to create an intentionally racist map. But the effect can still be racist. If it's based on data-sources and concepts that have a Europe and Europe descendent focus, and then presents them as facts about the world, without acknowledging the perspective, that is problematic. If further the tenuous continuity claims in some European countries, that are little more than advertisement, are put side to side with much stricter formal registration data from other countries this starts being quite deliberate.
> Guinea Equatorial Airlines, the country's oldest business corporation, founded in 1996.
The number looks more like 1962 to me (maybe they changed it).
The actual youngest seems to be South Sudan's Ivory Bank, which was only founded in 1994. This is easily explained by the country being relatively new.
Plenty of oldest companies in this map predate the countries they're currently in. The The oldest company in Mexico is apparently about 300 years older than Mexico, and the oldest company in Canada is about 200 years older than Canada.
> The actual youngest seems to be South Sudan's Ivory Bank, which was only founded in 1994. This is easily explained by the country being relatively new.
South Sudan is only a country since 2011, they include establishments older than the country they operate in.
I have a feeling that the authors of this map is biased an uninformed. I'm sure you gathered up the expert historians from each of these countries to identify the oldest business, then this map will look very different.
It would be pretty hard for, say, people in the Congo at the time to have started or continued lasting businesses when they were still getting over the whole "spend eighteen hours a day tapping rubber or they'll cut off the hands of everyone in your family, and even if you do they'll still kidnap your children and put them in schools where half will die of disease" thing that had been officially ended only six years before, and were still subject to wildly oppressive taxes and labor drafts that made getting out from under the weight of the Belgian overlords impossible.
Also, the pre-colonial population maybe didn't have a culture of setting up long running businesses? Sure there would be family businesses, but they're be informal affairs. Also, in some cases there was no system of writing so no reliable records for determining the age of a business.
> Sure there would be family businesses, but they're be informal affairs.
But a lot of the other examples were informal business at some point, or activities conducted by governments with no formal independent existence till centuries later. It's just a double standard. Facts were not important to the creators of this graph.
I don't think the above commenter wrote that all of precolonial Africa had a single culture, only that precolonial cultures evidently did not have cultures with long standing businesses - at least as we understand businesses them today.
There's no evidence of this, in large part because the African empires for the most part were wiped out under colonial rule, not just subjugated.
Often with extreme prejudice, such as when the British destroyed and burned Benin City to the ground, destroyed large parts of its walls, which were once a single fortification threading through the city measuring four times the length of the Great Wall of China, looted it's art, which then for a long time was "explained away" because the bronze sculptures were a lot more advanced than Europeans liked to think Africans were capable of, ignoring the descriptions of Benin City from those who'd been there.
The result was that for a long time the idea of what pre-colonial Africa was like was based on ignoring the things the colonial powers had stolen (the Benin Bronzes were sometimes assumed to have been brought by Portuguese traders, for example; a more comfortable idea than Africans making bronze statues), and looking at the aftermath of colonial destruction as evidence of lack of large structures and cities.
That's still attributing a single negative cultural trait to an entire continent, and using it to shallowly dismiss the effects of centuries of one-sided exploitation, enslavement, massacres, genocides, mass limb removal, debt slavery, literal slavery, etc etc. with "but what if it was their own fault?".
Is not having long lasting business entities really a negative cultural trait? While it's neat that there are businesses that have survived for over a millennia, it's more of a curiosity than evidence of superiority of a culture.
Don't act like Africans had great culture and civilisation before being colonized. Be used they didn't. Most of it is documented and can be observed in museums all over Europe, Africans where barely past the stone age.
Are there any pre-colonial African nations you would like to name as a counter-example? One that had a tradition of setting up and documenting long running businesses?
The big problem with finding evidence either way with respect to this is that sheer amount of destruction by colonial powers.
E.g. after the third Anglo-Ashanti war, the conquering British noted how impressive the palace was, and called out the number of books in different languages, and then they promptly burned it... So vast amounts of information about the operation of the Ashanti just went up in smoke.
Similarly they burned the entire capital city of the Benin empire to the ground.
It was not just that these empires ended; they were in many cases close to being erased from history.
If they're going to include religious companies like the Affligem Brewery, created by Monks, then religious organizations as a whole are fair game. And the Catholic Church, or some form of Orthodox Church, precedes pretty much everything else.
I'd argue that a religion itself doesn't qualify though, it has to be a religious organization that had some level of central control, distinct from the government of nation-states (though potentially intertwined) and had assets & holdings independent of the nations they operated within.
Under that definition, I'm not quite sure when the earliest christian organization would have qualified. I know it became the official Roman religion around 380 A.D., but was it centrally organized then (or was that the advent of its central organization?) Or did that happen earlier/later?
I guess it depends on the primary purpose of the entity. It doesn't matter if Affligem (or any other business) was created by monks, atheists or space aliens. It's still a brewery. Of course, you could argue that all religious organizations are businesses, but for all intents and purposes we do not include them in these kinds of analyses, lest everything becomes a business and the analyses become meaningless.
According to wikipedia, it was bought by Takamatsu and operates as a wholly owned subsidiary, though admittedly I don't think that counts anymore for this title: https://www.kongogumi.co.jp/.
From the linked article: “With mounting debts, the company was absorbed into a bigger construction conglomerate in 2006 – but continues to pair traditional temple building techniques with the latest technology.”
I was expecting to see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avedis_Zildjian_Company for USA. I suspect there is always some wiggle room in the definitions of "oldest", but wikipedia dates it as earlier than Shirley Plantation (and it is also older than the company given for Armenia).
That's presumably the local legal entity for HSBC - most large companies operate by having at least one local legal entity in each country they operate in which are usually wholly owned subsidiaries of some other company in the group.
FWIW there are some older universities in Hungary, for example the teachers' college in Eger has been continuously under one seal since 1774. There are some much older ones but they have periods of discontinuity which appears to be another flaw of this list.
It's amusing to consider the common wisdom that restaurants are a tough, low margin business yet make up so many of the eldest companies. Even if you exceed some threshold to make it to maturity, you'd think the statistics on survival would catch up with you eventually.
It seems like restaurants/bars make it to a certain age where they become part of the fabric of a city/town. They turn into those places where "you just gotta go once or twice a year" and anytime someone comes in from out of town you take them or tell them to go. If I had to guess it's around 25 years. If my parents took me there when I was a kid, the restaurant makes it on that list. If my grandparents took my parents there, so much the better.
Such restaurants still usually end up going out of business. For example, a lot of the fried seafood warhorses in Boston are gone at this point.
Still, if you talk about entire countries, there are often going to be some institutions that have at least some sort of vague claim to continuous operation/ownership.
I wonder if that correlates to the local and affordable seafood also having disappeared. There's a limit to the number of customers you can attract with calamari and other things formerly considered bait.
Possibly. Certainly any traditional deep-fried seafood platter is no cheaper than it was.
But tastes have also changed. Although I'm sure they had other things, the traditional Boston seafood restaurants tended to be built around a lot of deep-fried fish (or boiled lobster). There's also been a lot of development in the area where most of them were.
Legal's is certainly still around with a generally less heavy hand in terms of prep. And, in general, there are tons of newer seafood restaurants that are mostly in a somewhat different vein than the traditional ones.
There's another reason for this, too: most of the restaurants that are long-lived are on land that is owned by the restaurant and has been for some time. It is incredibly expensive to operate a restaurant AND pay rent to someone, especially city prices. It's not as bad when you're just paying maintenance costs and property taxes.
But also: Chip fabs and aircraft manufacturing plants were uncommon circa 10th century. Of any given establishment, odds were good it had something to do with food or hospitality. Survivorship bias, as foodservice is a viable business now as then.
Other options: carpentry (highly skills dependent), blacksmithing, textiles. After 1436, printers. Possibly general merchants. Lists of preindustrial / early industrial occupations are interesting, see:
I imagine there's some advantage to fully owning the land the establishment sits on. It's probably much easier to outlast the local competition when a lease isn't eating your margins.
That is only common today when you have high rent. Most of the older business tends own the property ( Like early days McDonald ) and it will remain a competitive advantage.
But those companies have been bought and resold over time and even possibly moved. Which probably imply mortgage on some buyers. Not sure land owning is such a big deal.
It depends if it was sold with the property or not. Rent is anywhere between 20-35% of your running cost depending on region. And you tend to get higher quality food in places where Rent isn't ridiculously high as restaurant can afford to move those cost to the plate.
Maybe I misunderstand you then, to me you made it sound that was a given. Those companies have undoubtly different history and, to me, rent is a relatively recent issue and over hundreds of years it might not be a factor. I pretty sure national mints have been moving around for instance. They are not location dependant.
That said, I might be wrong, it would made an interesting study to try to acertain what are the common factor to those companies. If any.
A necessary condition for this ranking is that the business' offering was valued from the time it started to the present. Good food and a nice experience is apparently a timeless product category -- although that's far from a sufficient condition to have a long-running and profitable business.
If you didn't care about the "still in business" part—implying the same line of business—Stora Enso of Finland would date back to 1288: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stora_Enso
Stora Enso is actually a merger of two companies; Swedish Stora and Finnish Enso.
It’s Stora that was founded in 1288 with the copper mine in Falun (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falun_Mine), which produced 2/3 of Europe’s copper needs at one point in time.
It was also the world’s first stock company apparently, and it’s still in business.
(Being a merger does not exclude a company according to the standards of the map. For instance, Australia Post was at one stage a government department, formed by merging departments from several other governments. It's only by using this extremely contrived definition of "oldest company still in business" that they can reach 1809.)
That's a good question, because "Casa da moeda do Brasil" is the "company" that actually prints the real money in Brazil. It's controlled by the state since forever (although the definition of 'state' changed wildly in the last 500 years, between colony, empire, dictatorship, republic, etc).
If I were feeling pedantic I'd mention the universities of Oxford, St Andrews, Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Aberdeen... As well as a handful in Spain and Portugal ;)
Mostly the preservation of brand name, which is never the same as the company.
Especially true for different public facing things like restaurants and breweries, which is almost always a retrobranding trick.
The article claims that the oldest company in Kosovo was founded in 1999. I assume this is related to when it gained statehood, because it seems patently implausible that there are no institutions more than twenty years old.
The trouble is, all sorts of entries on this list predate the formation of the modern states in which they reside. Serbia's Apatin Brewery (1756) clearly predates its time as a part of Yugoslavia. What's the requirement for inclusion here?
I'm not sure how they got the data. I was able to find one company older than the one mentioned in the article which is still running. I'm referring to Birra e Pejes (Beer Peja) which was founded in 1968 [0].
There might be some discrepancies in this article because the information could have been obtained from English written sources, whereas, more accurate information is available in sources written in the native languages of each country.
Fiskars, Finland (1649) has grown by buying bunch of other old companies and brands, including Waterford Crystal, Ireland (1783), Royal Copenhagen, Denmark (1775), Rörstrand (1726). Fiskars also owns Gerber Legendary Blades, USA (1939) but that's only 80 years old company :)
Brand brewery for the Netherlands is incorrect, they use 1340 because its good for marketing I guess but there is no real evidence the actual company was started around that time.
Gonna be that guy and say that this map almost certainly has inaccuracies at least in southeast and south asia. If individual owner/operator businesses count I'm sure you can find some hole in the wall restaurant in Thailand dating before 1878. Also the fact that still operating is a requirement obviously imposes a massive colonialism penalty.
The top ten list at the end only includes the companies shown on the maps. Wikipedia has a full list of the oldest companies in the world (both active and inactive): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies
It makes sense that an inn can be very old. Even if they were to destroy a town, soldiers would still need somewhere to drink.
In an era of blanket bombing etc this might no longer be the case. I'm sure some pretty ancient businesses were destroyed in WW2
The last list seems to be "list of countries with oldest running company" not "top 10 oldest companies in the world". I find it hard to believe none of the first 9 countries has a company older than China's oldest.
I was hoping my ancestors went to Sean's bar but it's in Athlone Co. Westmeath, Leinster. My mom's ancestors were from Co. Monaghan and dad's one of the counties somewhere in Ulster province.
Only by the most contrived and tortured definition. The company only really dates to 1989, 1975 at the outside. Before that, it was a government department. If you can count a government department just because it later became a company, what kind of definition is that?
I think that the crown of the oldest running business should go to the Roman Catholic Church, which was formally created in 325 AD, but in practice is a couple of centuries older. It is also the first transnational corporation in history.
Sort of. I don't think any respective Orthodox church had a distinct recognition prior to the first ecumenical council (year 325), though I may be wrong on that. Plenty of people like to claim "first", but there's no strong consensus on which branch of Orthodoxy was first, though I know there's a lot of cultural pride built up in a few of the churches thinking they were first.
Nitpicking here, but Rome was a backwater for a long time. That business evidently bootstrapped in the Middle East and is continued today as the Orthodox Church.
Can you clarify on which orthodox church? Greek, Russian and Ethiopian all come to mind, but I'm not aware of a general middle eastern one (genuinely curious). Perhaps it wasn't called orthodox back then (prior to 300AD)?
Are probably the most "Middle Eastern", but apparently they, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Catholicism were all the same church until various splits happened, so I'm not sure if you can say any of them are "older".
The Orthodox churches really just get to trace their lineage to their respective founding apostle. If we do assume that the apostles that had to travel the least from Jerusalem were the ones whose churches started first, then Syria and Egypt (Coptic) were probably the first. Granted, we're making a big assumption.
First Council of Nicaea established church structure and Canon law. Also, we can trace the unbroken line of successive bishops to that date.
The Great Schism of 1054 can be viewed as just a corporate split due to political pressure, which it was. It didn't seriously change anything about the business of the parent company.
> It didn't seriously change anything about the business of the parent company.
It sort of did, though. Easier to define your own standards when you don't need consensus from peers, no?
In either case, I think it's funny to consider the Roman Catholic Church as "the parent company". It's a little dismissive of all other Apostolic Sees and sort of rewrites history a bit to imply that Roman Catholicism was the root of Christianity. Technically, you'd want to use the pre-ecumenical council of Jerusalem (year 50) and that nearly all modern Orthodox churches and the Catholic church share a starting date.
The Bishop of Rome was considered the preeminent by all the other major sees. Its just whether he was first among equals or outright leader that was the controversy. So the RCC has a bit of a claim as the parent..
Any material you can recommend I can read more on that? As I understand it, the writings of Irenaeus get cited here to make that point except they're often taken out of context.
1707 when Britain became politically united and ceased to be England and Scotland.
The English colonies preceded that, but it was not British. Cromwell's invasion of Ireland was the start of the plantation system, i.e. settler colonies.
Before that there was the brief Anglo-French dual monarchy during the reign of Henry VI.
And before that there was the larger Angevin Empire which included Britain, Ireland, and the western half of France. However I would consider that Norman rather than English as the rulers spoke French.
It wasn't an Empire until well into the Enlightenment. England was not really important at all for the longest time.
QE2 and House of 'Windsor' (heavy quotes) however, can trace their lineage back to the days pre-Norma invasion, so a little over 1K years by that measure.
It is, nominally, a nation in name, done for political reasons to remedy the Italian government's exertion of power over the institution. Idiosyncrasies of naming aside, it serves much the same purpose as a corporate headquarters. And regardless of all of that, it's nationhood is new, under 100 years old. Imagine we suddenly granted Apple headquarters nationhood: it would not change the material reality that it is functionally a corporation.
Regardless of whether you believe in them, I think the longevity of religious organizations points the way towards how the human race can plan and advance with projects that cannot be completed in a single lifetime. Projects that require a vision beyond 10 years, much less 20, are exceedingly rare. Very, very few companies last more than a generation or two. This map in the article might make it seem like there are lots, but for context there are roughly 190 million companies on the planet, so to say these long-lived ones are an extreme outlier is still an understatement.
Enter religious institutions: Ballpark estimates in my head indicate that, sure, some come & go quickly, but many have much more staying power than their pure corporate counterparts. Lasting a handful of generations is common: Many major sects of Christianity are hundreds of years old.
I think this is a problem with human ability to truly plan in timescales longer than a generation, much less an entire human life time or longer. The purpose of a corporation is not to last forever, and changing markets often present hard limits on their lifetime, effectively a Great Filter for corporate enterprise. Contrast with the purpose of any religion, which is inherently devoted to beliefs that are not purported to be limited to a discrete period of time (excepting doomsday cults, which are interesting studies, but not in scope for this topic)
I am not particularly religious, but I think this difference in longevity, stemming from inherent differences in purpose, points the way towards the type of mindset necessary for the human race to begin acting and planning from the truly long term, beyond the horizon of a human life time or two. Which is really necessary when you consider issues like climate change (regardless of what you believe is the cause (a separate debate) the effects must be dealt with over time scales that exceed a human life time) and not just that, but other grand projects than cannot be accomplished in a single lifetime.
If you had a convenient time machine and gathered up say, a group Catholics from today, a group from 100 years ago, and a group from 1000 years ago, you'd have three groups of people with radically different beliefs. They might even disagree with the idea they followed the same religion.
Part of what makes religions last is bending to the changing times. A lot of the ones that didn't have faded away.
I don't have a "convenient" time machine, only an "inconvenient" one. It travels only in one direction, forward, and at much the same pace as everyone else seems to travel. There's always the example of Merlin though, whose time-machine-body traveled only in the opposite direction at roughly the same pace as everyone else's went forward. It has to be awkward for your first meeting with someone to be their last meeting with you. And you can't even warn them about their future when you meet them further in their past: Their future has already happened. A truly frustrating existence. No wonder King Arthur's court collapsed inward upon adulterous scandal and fanatical seeking of religious artifacts.
An excellent point. There's even plenty of room within many religions for some degree of differences in belief. The buffet-style Catholic comes to mind. But I think a fundamental difference between religions & corporations is that religious institutions have fewer incentives to make decisions that favor the short term over the long term. That, combined with the flexibility to change (even if at a glacial place as religions often do) may be the key to their longevity.
> I think the longevity of religious organizations points the way towards how the human race can plan and advance with projects that cannot be completed in a single lifetime.
But there is no indication of a continuity of aims among those organizations - they just continue to exist over long periods of time. There was a silly meme going around a while back about how the Catholic church "thinks in centuries, not decades". But that is clearly not the case, considering the Catholic church contradicts or overrides its own stances, even ones it viewed as very important at the time, from centuries ago.
What good is having an ultra long lasting organization for long term projects, if someone who comes into power 100 years later may have exactly the opposite viewpoint on the project as the initiator?
Short term thinking can occur within the same institution that also fosters long term planning as well. Indeed, the fall the Catholic Church's influence within the developed Western world may be a failure to recognize long term trends that required more multi-generational plans for adaptation. Similarly, their treatment of abuse perpetrated by clergy represents a solution that maximized short term gains (they didn't have to deal with the issue for a while) over longer term massive loss in faith, trust, etc.
I'm not even saying these institutions were even very good at multi-human lifespan planning, I'm saying their longevity at least allowed for that possibility. And in the case of many religious institutions, they did indeed embark on projects that lasted hundred of years (some of the largest cathedrals and other religious buildings took many human lifetimes).
So, whether or not the longest lived organizations on earth have themselves executed multi-lifespan projects, their longevity nonetheless represents one of the necessary conditions for such projects, and in that respect they deserve some consideration for how they achieved their longevity.
>Enter religious institutions: Ballpark estimates in my head indicate that, sure, some come & go quickly, but many have much more staying power than their pure corporate counterparts.
Sounds like survivor-ship bias. How many now-dead religions were contemporary with Christianity?
I'm not sure it matters if, long ago, many religions were short lived. All that means is that over the millennia religions have evolved into much longer-lived entities, while corporations have not. Meaning they still present a useful case study for institutions capable of outliving a few short human life spans. And even then, looking at many dead religions (Greek, Roman, for example) they still held sway for hundreds of years, much longer than a typical corporation.
Isn't this just survivorship bias? There are many churches, many splits and many died out along the way and your only looking at the few that survived and became dominant. There aren't a lot (if any) of roman, Greek, Norse institutions still around and even within Christianity I don't think there are any Lollard or Cathar ones.
I don't think it's survivorship bias because the same would apply to any number of other types of organisations.
Also, there's a simple explanation which almost bothers me to point out because I think anyone with any sense of the greater good would see it immediately even if they were not faithful themselves; 'Religious' folks at least of the common era, tend to have faith in something much greater, and enduring than themselves, and so the 'hard work' they might put into building the Cathedral at Koln which took like 700 years makes easy sense, because it's there for future generations to see, be inspired by, enjoy the fruits of. That's not exactly a 'benefit' to someone who wants to be 'rich now', but it's a benefit to those who believe in the future. Although I guess there's still an ego play whereby some people think they can project their fame well into the future no doubt.
And FYI there really were not that-that many competing religions post-common era.
Note how 'bar' and/or 'brewery' (and eatery) tends to be the other 'longest lived'.
Well, every town needs a pub, the one already there is probably good enough. A pub isn't going to attract the competitive afflictions of the nobility or be destroyed by a conquering dude bent on making sure there's no uprising. They're almost the 'original brand' as well. Finally, some of them were taken on by Monks (thank you Belgium!) which gives them another bit of longevity consistency.
The other entity not mentioned are noble households. Queen Elizabeth is actually a descendant of pre-Norman kings even. I think it's actually direct (though not direct of all precedent kings as there was some bouncing around, but all around the same rough lineage). I don't know off the top of my head the true antiquity of some households, but it's pretty far back in many cases.
To me the map also hints that successful civilisations have a lot of consistency and continuity ....
Sure, Australia Post is one of Australia’s oldest institutions if you count from the date of the establishment of its oldest predecessor (which this map does, as a Postmaster-General was first appointed for New South Wales in 1809), but a single national postal service wasn’t established until Australia itself was established in 1901 and the colonial postal services were merged, and even then it was a government department until 1975, and wasn’t corporatised until 1989 and remains government-owned to this day.